Gustav Klimt’s Final Masterpiece, Dame mit Fächer (Lady with a Fan), Comes to Auction at Sotheby’s in London this June.
“Dame mit Fächer (Lady with a Fan) is the last portrait Gustav Klimt created before his untimely death, when still in his artistic prime and producing some of his most accomplished and experimental works. Many of those works, certainly the portraits for which he is best known, were commissions. This, though, is something completely different – a technical tour de force, full of boundary-pushing experimentation, as well as a heartfelt ode to absolute beauty.”
The last portrait Klimt painted, Dame mit Fächer is also among his finest works, created when he was still in his artistic prime, and at a moment when the ‘formality’ of his earlier commissioned work gives way to a new expressivity – an ever-deeper, ever-more joyful immersion in pattern, colour and form, which – while clearly influenced by his contemporaries Van Gogh, Matisse and Gauguin – became something entirely different in his hands.
Similarly, while the slightly earlier works of Klimt’s famous ‘golden period’ – led by the iconic portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I of 1907 – see their sitter presented icon-like, amid a tapestry of golden shapes, here the sitter almost dissolves into the background, the soft patterning of the woman’s skin repeated in the pale-yellow background.
Klimt first started work on Lady with a Fan in 1917, by which time he was among the most celebrated portraitists in Europe: commissions came thick and fast, for which he was able to command prices far higher than any of his contemporaries. But this was a rare work painted entirely in the pursuit of his own interests.
Full of freedom and spontaneity, it reflects Klimt’s joy in painting it and in celebrating beauty in its purest form. It also reveals his innovative approach. Traditionally, portraits were – and still are – painted in the eponymous ‘portrait (or vertical) form’. Here, Klimt returns to the square format that he used for his avantgarde landscapes earlier in the century, giving this painting a uniquely ‘modern’ edge.
Source: Sotheby’s, June 24 and June 27, 2023
https://www.sothebys.com/