Gustav Klimt's Houses at Unterach on the Attersee

The painting shown above is Häuser in Unterach am Attersee (Houses at Unterach on the Attersee) painted around 1916 by Gustav Klimt (1862-1918). He often summered in the Austrian lake district even while the Great War was raging  It has been theorized that Klimt used a telescope for this view; the perspective certainly is flattened in the manner of a telephoto lens image. Biographical information on Klimt can be found here.

The approximately meter-square painting was auctioned at Christies in New York City on 8 November 2006. The pre-auction estimate was $18-25 million, but it sold for $31,376,000.

It was one of a group of Klimt paintings owned by the Bloch-Bauer family that were confiscated by the Nazis following the 1938 Anschluss. After the war they were in the hands of the Austrian government and displayed in Vienna's Belvedere where I saw some in the late 1990s. A descendent of the family sued for their return, and eventually succeeded. Thereafter, they were sold, as mentioned here (scroll down).

The last time we were in Vienna, my wife and I stopped by the Österreichische Werkstätten (Austrian Workshops), Kärntner Strasse 6, 1010 Wien, Österreich and spotted serigraphs of the painting. We decided to buy one the next day, but by then the rolled-up version had been sold and what remained was the serigraph attached to a stretcher. The cost of shipping it to Seattle was about the same as that of the serigraph itself, so I later wrapped it and it managed to survive the air trip home. It was properly framed and now hangs over our fireplace.

Auction Results: Christie's, NYC, 9 Nov 2011

I find it tricky to glean meanings from art auctions.

For one thing, most of the best and most famous works eventually gravitate to museums, leaving collectors and speculators to paw over what remains. Then there is the problem of separating purchases by those who buy because they love the particular work from those who buy with the intent of flipping it once the price is likely to have increased to their satisfaction. And there are buyers who collect what they like but are prepared to sell later if prices become tempting and then use the spoils to buy more art they like.

I tend to pay attention to sales results for representational painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a gauge for assessing how strong a comeback such art might currently be making (for instance Alma-Tadema going from near-worthless to tens of millions of dollars over the last 60 years).

Then there are modernist paintings that I wouldn't dream of putting on one of my walls that auction for huge sums. Consider a few results from the Christie's "Post-War and Contemporary" auction that took place 9 November in New York:

$1,034,500: Untitled, by Richard Diebenkorn (1822-93)

$938,500: Untitled, by Agnes Martin (1912-2004)

$734,500: Lone Star, by Yashimoto Nara (b. 1959)

$362,500: Portrait of Robert Graham, by Alice Neel (1900-84)

$182,500: Slice of Pie, by Wayne Thiebaud (b. 1920)

$782,500: Dollar Sign, by Andy Warhol (1928-87)