Gustav Klimt (July 14, 1862 – February 6, 1918) was a renowned Austrian symbolist painter. He was noted for his sketches, paintings, murals, and other objects d’art. Klimt’s primary subject was the female body, and a frank eroticism marks his works.
Amongst his figurative works, which include allegories and portraits, he painted landscapes. He was highly influenced by Japanese art and its methods.
Klimt is best known for his opulently gilded, Byzantine-inspired art nouveau portraits of women. His father was a gold and silver engraver. This probably influenced him to use a great deal of gold and silver leaf in his paintings of human figures. His paintings often featured a lady by the name of Adele Bloch-Bauer.
One of these paintings shows a woman dressed in a golden robe with part of her breast exposed and holding a head with her left hand (only half can be seen). Painted in 1901, it featured Judith holding the head of Holofernes after beheading him, as told in an episode from the apocryphal Book of Judith in the Old Testament of the Hebrew Bible, which recounts the assassination of the drunken Assyrian general Holofernes by the Israelite heroine Judith who saved her city.
In 2016, the billionaire talk show host Oprah Winfrey sold the Gustav Klimt painting of Adele II (1912) in her collection to a Chinese buyer for $150 million. As Bloomberg first reported, the deal was one of the most significant private sales and represented a near-doubling of the work’s price, just ten years after she bought it for $87.9 million. A year earlier, the Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev sold Water Serpents ll (1904–07) for $170 million to an unknown Asian buyer.
During his lifetime, Klimt created less than 300 paintings. In 2018, Sotheby’s auctioned the artist’s vibrant landscape painting, Bauerngarten (1907), with an estimate over $45 million. The painting last sold in 1994 for $5.8 million. Several photos of Klimt’s landscape paintings are now attached.
Tan It Koon
Before retirement, Dr Tan It Koon was, among many appointments, Head of Clinical Biochemistry at SGH’s Dept of Pathology. He was the Deputy Chairman of the National Theatre Trust and Chairman for Grants and Scholarships of the Spore Cultural Foundation. He received the National Day Awards, PBM, and PPA, for his contribution to cultural and community development and excellence in Public Administration.
