Klimt's unfinished canvas "Lady with a Fan" went under the hammer at Sotheby's in June 2023, fetching a cool £85.3 million. This was the highest price ever achieved for a work of art in Europe. Back in 2016, Oprah Winfrey sold the slightly larger Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II to a private collector for $150 million (she had bought it ten years earlier for $88 million). In 2006, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I sold for the equivalent of $204 million when adjusted for inflation. There's a pattern emerging here. Klimt's work is among the most highly sought-after in the entire art market. Opportunities to acquire imagery with a meaningful connection to the artist are few and far between.
With this in mind, the collotypes of his drawings represent fabulous value. Through these works, collectors can acquire something with direct proximity to the artist's life, produced in a medium to which he had given his approval, to a standard that had already been established. While the prospect of a lottery win is always worth holding onto, we feel that these prints offer great beauty and integrity at a price that doesn't invite comparisons to the GDP of a small country.
