Christie’s Art Auction of Impressionist and Modern Works, held in the third week of June, was notable for many things. Firstly, it brought in four times as much as Christie’s 2009 summer sale. In 2009, the sale quoted as ‘anaemic’ had brought in only $60.4 million, while this year, the sale raked in a cool £153 million ($ 227 million) for the sale of 46 works of art. It was at this exhibition that Picasso’s portrait of Fernandes de Soto was sold to an anonymous telephone bidder for £34,761,250 — the second highest price for a work of art sold by the auction house in London. But it is not about Picasso’s painting that I plan to write about today, but that of another remarkable portrait that was sold at the same auction.

This was a portrait by Gustav Klimt, an Austrian artist famous for his interesting Art Noveau style of painting. Klimt was among the most sought-after portrait painters at the turn of the 20th century. His portraits were never true lifelike depictions of his models but rather mood studies of personalities, full of colour and decorative elements that made each work glow and attract. This particular painting, Frauenbildnis (Portrait of Ria Munk III) was painted by the artist around 1917-18 and is said to be the third and final painting, in a series of three portraits commissioned by the Munk family of their daughter Ria. It is considered one of the last and most modern of Klimt’s full-length female portraits.

The story of the painting is also worth telling. Aranka Munk, Ria’s mother, was the sister of Serena Lederer, Klimt’s most important patron. When Ria, committed suicide in 1911, with a shot in her chest (after a quarrel with her lover the writer Hans Heinz Ewers), Aranka commissioned Klimt to paint a death-bed portrait of her daughter. The artist’s first two attempts were not acceptable and it is widely believed that he painted over these two works. The third and last attempt remained with Klimt and it was only after he died in 1918, that the painting was acquired by Aranka Munk. It remained in her lakeside villa in Bad Aussee until 1941 when the villa and its contents were seized by the National Socialists and the portrait passed into the hands of art dealer William Gurlitt.

In 1953, Ria’s portrait was among a number of important paintings that Gurlitt donated to the Neue Gallerie der Stadt in Linz, later known as Lentos Museum. Some may remember that the Austrian Embassy had sponsored a promotion of the artist’s work as well as a talk about him at the Lalit Kala Academy in Delhi in early 2009. The Kiss is possibly Klimt’s most famous work and may be considered a true representation of his unique style, where strangely entwined bodies are seen against a backdrop of decorative elements.