Barbra Streisand recently expressed her “regret” over selling a painting by the renowned Austrian artist Gustav Klimt, which she had purchased in 1969 for a mere $17,000.
This sentiment comes as another Klimt masterpiece, the “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer,” fetched a staggering $236 million at a Sotheby’s auction on Tuesday. This sale marked it as the second most expensive painting ever auctioned, surpassed only by Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi.”
Following the buzz surrounding this record-breaking sale, Streisand nostalgically recounted her own experience with a Klimt painting she once owned but eventually parted with.
The 83-year-old icon once held Klimt’s 1912 work, “Ria Munk on her Deathbed,” which depicts a woman who tragically ended her life after being abandoned by her unfaithful fiancé.
Streisand purchased this significant piece the same year she earned her first Oscar for her cinematic debut in 1968’s “Funny Girl,” a role that launched her career following its success on Broadway.
However, in 1998, she decided to sell the painting, two decades before Klimt’s portrait of Elisabeth Lederer—Ria Munk’s cousin—would realize an astronomical price at auction.
Barbra Streisand has shared her ‘regret’ at selling off a painting by the legendary Austrian artist Gustav Klimt, one she bought in 1969 for just $17,000; pictured 2019
Streisand told her story on Instagram, alongside a throwback black-and-white photo of herself surrounded by some paintings she owned including her Klimt.
‘My longtime assistant made me a book of art that I’ve loved and sold. One of them was this painting of Miss Ria Munk on her Deathbed by Gustav Klimt that I bought in 1969 for $17,000, which seemed like a lot of money at the time,’ she said.
‘I sold it in 1998 because I became interested in Frank Lloyd Wright and the Arts & Crafts movement. Oh how I regret selling her. As the title of the book says, “You should never sell art you love,”‘ added the People hitmaker.
Klimt was one of the reigning art world figures during the decline of the Habsburg Empire and remains celebrated to this day for his role in spearheading the Vienna Secession, a local offshoot of the groundbreaking Art Nouveau movement.
Maria ‘Ria’ Munk was a Viennese girl from a prominent Jewish family – her great-granduncle was Joseph Pulitzer, for whom the prize is named.
In her 20s, she fell for the much older German horror novelist Hanns Heinz Ewers, and in spite of his widespread reputation as a womanizer she got engaged to him.
Streisand acquired the artwork the year she won her first Oscar for her 1968 movie debut Funny Girl; she is pictured with her trophy at the 1969 Academy Awards
The 83-year-old once owned Klimt’s 1912 painting Ria Munk on her Deathbed, a rendering of a woman who killed herself after being jilted by her playboy fiancé
Ewers broke the engagement – calling Munk ‘a hopeless romantic and out of touch with reality,’ according to Klimt’s biographers Jane Rogoyska and Patrick Bade – and left her so crushed that she shot herself.
Her heartbroken mother Aranka commissioned three paintings of her late daughter from Klimt, the one of her in death that Streisand owned plus two of her in life.
Meanwhile the Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer was commissioned at the dawn of World War I by the subject’s parents, the Viennese Jewish industrialist August Lederer and his wife Serena – Aranka Munk’s sister – who were Klimt’s leading patrons.
When the Third Reich swallowed up Austria in the Anschluss, the Lederer collection was plundered by the Gestapo and stored at Immendorf Castle in Lower Austria.
On the last day of the European Theater of World War II, the retreating Germans burned the castle with the art inside to prevent their seizure by the Red Army.
However the Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer survived the war, having been sloughed off into a Viennese auction house rather than kept at Immendorf Castle because the Nazis had regarded portraits of Jews as unworthy of preservation for themselves.
A different painting by Klimt – Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, which – was sold by Sotheby’s this Tuesday for $236 million; pictured at a press preview at Sotheby’s on November 7
The real Elisabeth was stuck in Vienna during the war, but managed to avoid being murdered in the Holocaust because she had an ex-brother-in-law high up in Nazi officialdom who helped her pretend to be the daughter of the late Klimt, a Gentile.
However she succumbed to an illness at the age of 50 in October 1944, six months before Vienna was liberated by the advancing Soviets.
In the postwar period, Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer was restored to her brother and later wound up in the hands of one of Estée Lauder’s sons for 40 years until he died this June, prompting the painting to be sold by Sotheby’s at auction this week.
