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# Oprah Winfrey Sold Klimt Painting for $150M
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/oprah-winfrey-sold-klimt-painting-for-150m/
- Published: 2017-02-08T22:20:37.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:13:03.000Z
- Description: Winfrey bought "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II" (1912) at Christie's in 2006 for $87.9 million, which remains the auction record for a Klimt.
- Author: Benjamin Sutton
- Tags: In Brief, Gustav Klimt, Larry Gagosian, Neue Galerie, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:23 (2016, 2017, part 2)

![Gustav Klimt, "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II" (courtesy the Neue Galerie)](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2016/09/7--klimt-portrait-of-abbii-1912.jpg)

Gustav Klimt, “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II” (1912), oil on canvas, private collection (courtesy Neue Galerie, New York)

The seller of Gustav Klimt’s strikingly colorful portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, which traded hands last summer for $150 million, is billionaire entertainment mogul Oprah Winfrey, according to [a report by Bloomberg’s Katya Kazakina](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-08/oprah-said-to-snag-150-million-selling-klimt-to-chinese-buyer?ref=hyperallergic.com). The private sale, to a Chinese collector, was brokered by dealer Larry Gagosian and businessman David Geffen.

Winfrey bought “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II” (1912) at Christie’s landmark November 8, 2006 sale [for $87.9 million](http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/09/arts/design/09christies.html?ref=hyperallergic.com) (an auction record for the Vienna Secession artist that still stands). She recently (anonymously) loaned it to the Neue Galerie for the exhibition [*Klimt and the Women of Vienna’s Golden Age, 1900–1918*](https://hyperallergic.com/klimt-and-the-women-of-viennas-golden-age-neue-galerie/), where it hung alongside Klimt’s other portrait of Bloch-Bauer, the iconic, gold-hued “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” from 1907, which the museum’s founder, Ronald Lauder, bought in 2006 for [a reported $135 million](http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/19/arts/design/19klim.html?ref=hyperallergic.com) — at the time, the highest price ever paid for an artwork. Both works were part of a set of Nazi-looted paintings that were [restituted](http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/06/arts/design/a-homecoming-in-los-angeles-for-five-klimts-looted-by-nazis.html?ref=hyperallergic.com) to Bloch-Bauer’s heirs in 2006\. The legal battle to secure the works’ return from the Austrian government was the subject of the 2015 film starring Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds titled [*Woman in Gold*](https://youtu.be/wu9JeTX6Sdw?ref=hyperallergic.com).

The painting recently sold by Winfrey will remain on view at the Neue Galerie, as part of the exhibition [*Austrian Masterworks from the Neue Galerie New York*](http://neuegalerie.org/content/austrian-masterworks-neue-galerie-new-york?ref=hyperallergic.com#3348), through September 25\. After that, it may not go on public view again until the day it turns up in the anonymous buyer’s private museum.