Nobody can say exactly, because Klimt's Woman in Gold has not changed hands since June 2006. The last known price is 135 million dollars, reportedly paid by Ronald Lauder in a private sale for the Neue Galerie in New York, where the painting has hung ever since.
The figure was never officially announced. It came from unnamed sources quoted in The New York Times, and the family's lawyer, Steven Thomas, would say only that the portrait was "believed to be the most valuable painting ever sold." It had just passed Picasso's Boy with a Pipe, which fetched 104.2 million dollars at auction in 2004.
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A price like that usually ends a story. This one began another. For decades before the sale the portrait had belonged to Austria, which kept it on the strength of a single document, and that document was the will of the woman in the picture. Her niece, Maria Altmann, won it back only in January 2006, together with four other Klimts, five months before Lauder paid for it.
Austria's national gallery read that will as a gift. Maria Altmann read the same lines as a wish that nobody had to honor. She carried the argument to an American courtroom, then to a panel of Austrian legal experts, and their answer is the only reason a price exists at all.
Who actually bought Woman in Gold, and what is it worth now?
The Neue Galerie bought it, not Ronald Lauder personally, though Lauder is the museum's cofounder and president…
What You'll Discover
What the other four paintings fetched.
What Adele's will really said.
Why she lost her name.
What the gold is made of.