Eight Schiele Drawings To Be Sold at Christie's

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed)
Jan 14th 2008 at 9:03AM

How do you pay for a $135 million painting? Perhaps by selling off a few of your other treasures. On February 4, Christie's London will offer eight works on paper by the Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele. The proceeds from the paintings, which have a low estimate of $14.9 million, will go to the Neue Galerie, New York, which was created by cosmetics billionaire Ronald Lauder and the late Serge Sabarsky to showcase early-20th-century German and Austrian art. The sales of the paintings will go toward Lauder's $135 million purchase of Gustav Klimt's ``Adele Bloch-Bauer I." The drawings are from the the Serge Sabarksy estate. A Bloomberg article quotes Richard Nagy, a London art dealer, who says that Lauder owns the world's largest private collection of German and Austrian modern art. The Neue Galerie also isn't hurting for Schieles; the deputy director of the Neue Galerie says that the gallery has more than 140 addition Schiele works on paper.

Tags: art, auction, christies, drawings, egon schiele, klimt, lauder