持扇的女子

Klimt painted this in 1917, and it was still on the easel in his studio in early 1918 when a stroke and then the influenza sweeping Europe killed him at 55. It is his last portrait, and nobody knows for certain who the woman is. She looks out with one shoulder bare, wrapped in fabric crowded with Chinese motifs, phoenixes and lotus flowers he had been collecting in his late work. The brightness and looseness feel like a man opening up rather than winding down. For decades it was a quiet picture. Then in 2023 it sold in London for about 108 million dollars, the most ever paid for any artwork at auction in Europe. The face at the centre of that record was never given a name.