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Cosmetics mogul pays record 135 mln dollars for Klimt portrait

Updated: 19/Jun/2006 19:40

The 1907 portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer by Gustav Klimt

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WASHINGTON (AFP)--- Makeup magnate and fine art enthusiast Ronald Lauder has paid 135 million dollars, the highest known price ever paid for a painting, for a 1907 Gustav Klimt portrait, US media reported Monday.

Ronald Lauder has paid 135 million dollars, the highest known price ever paid for a painting, for a Gustav Klimt portrait, US media reported Monday.

The portrait, "Adele Bloch-Bauer 1", a gold-encrusted image of the wife of a Jewish sugar industrialist, is considered a masterpiece of the Austrian Art Nouveau painter.

"This is our Mona Lisa," The New York Times quoted Lauder as saying. "It is a once-in-a-lifetime acquisition."

The painting was long the subject of a restitution battle between the Austrian government and a niece of Mrs. Bloch-Bauer who argued that it was seized along with four other Klimt paintings by the Nazis in World War II.

In January the five paintings were awarded to the niece, Maria Altmann, 90, of Los Angeles, and other relatives, the New York Times noted.

Lauder purchased the work for a New York gallery he founded five years ago, Neue Galerie, focused on German and Austrian decorative arts.

Christie's reportedly helped broker the sale to Lauder. It is not known if any collector has paid more for a work on the private market.

The previous record price for a painting was 104.1 million dollars for Picasso's 1905 "Boy with a pipe" at a Sotheby's auction in 2004.

The Los Angeles Times lamented the pending loss of the work now on view in California.

The sale "is hugely disappointing for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and its audience. The celebrated golden portrait of the Viennese artist's great patron (and likely lover) has been attracting steady crowds since it went on view in early April," the Los Angeles daily said.

The price Lauder paid is "believed to be what LACMA had on the table for all five Klimt paintings in its show," it added.

"LACMA's monetary offer came with an intangible of enormous cultural value -- the possibility of keeping the paintings together, in public and with the story intact. The paintings, confiscated by the Nazis, were returned to the rightful heirs more than six decades later, after dramatic trials and arbitration in American and Austrian courts," the Los Angeles Times said.

"The epic narrative is lost now because of the family's decision to break up the set, and it's a shame."

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1945: Germany

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