Klimt's Lady with a Fan: The painting that sold for £85.3m

Klimt's Lady with a Fan: The painting that sold for £85.3m Alamy Left on Gustav Klimt's easel when the artist died in 1918, Lady with a Fan is the most expensive painting auctioned in Europe, selling for £85.3m – but what makes it a masterpiece? But it is a rather less famous work – one that was still sitting on the artist's easel when Klimt died from pneumonia as a result of the flu in February 1918, a month after suffering a devastating stroke that had left him partially paralysed and unable to paint – that has become the most valuable work of art ever sold at auction in Europe, selling for £85.3m. Alamy Eschewing the traditional vertical format for portraits in Lady with a Fan, Klimt used a square, giving the painting a modern edge What holds us entranced by the woman's entrancement is the carefully choreographed clash of pattern, pigment and texture that fix her in this alluringly stylised elsewhere. Almost 30 years later, Klimt's final painting soared past René Magritte's L'empire des Lumières, which sold for £59.4m in 2022; Alberto Giacometti's Walking Man I, which set the record for any work of art sold at auction in Europe when it went in 2010 for £65m ; and Claude Monet's Le Bassin aux Nymphéas, which sold for £40.9m in 2008.