Entrepreneur and former TV host Oprah Winfrey added more than $60 million to her bank account by offloading a Gustav Klimt work dubbed ‘Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II’ for $150 million in one of the largest private art deals of 2016.
Winfrey picked up the Klimt from a Christie’s auction in New York in 2006 for $87.9 million–still an auction-price record for a piece from the famed Austrian abstract expressionist.
Winfrey lent the piece to the Neue Galerie in New York for its special “Klimt and the Women of Vienna’s Golden Age, 1900-1918” exhibit, which ran from September 22 to January 16, before she sold the piece to an unnamed Asian buyer.
The former Winfrey Klimt is set to feature along with its predecessor, ‘Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I,’ at the Neue Galerie through July. The museum’s owner, Ronald Lauder, paid $135 million for the first painting of Lady Bloch-Bauer in 2006, and made it the centerpiece of his New York museum.
The two works being side-by-side will be a reunion of sorts; they will be reunited after they were last displayed together as a pair, at the LACMA in 2006.