More Klimt paintings could be sold after record set

LOS ANGELES, June 20 (Reuters) It is the art world's version of getting the last laugh.

The Jewish family that waged a titanic battle to force Austria to return five paintings by modernist painter Gustav Klimt that were stolen from it by the Nazis have sold one for a world record price of 135 million dollars and now must determine whether they want to sell the other four.

Art experts said a bidding war could now develop between major museums and collectors for the remaining works by Klimt, which could together fetch between 100 million dollars and 150 million dollars.

A family spokesman said the heirs did not want to keep the paintings.

Billionaire cosmetics fortune heir Ronald Lauder bought the gem of the collection -- a gold flecked portrait of a sensuously red-lipped Adele Bloch-Bauer, the wife of an industrialist whose company and possessions were seized by the Nazis in 1938 as he fled after Germany's annexation of Austria.

The painting is considered one of the iconic images of 20th-century art and Lauder paid 135 million dollars, easily surpassing the previous record of 104.1 million dollars paid for Picasso's 1905 masterpiece ''Boy With a Pipe'' at auction in 2004. It will hang in the Neue Galerie, a small Fifth Avenue museum Lauder built to showcase German and Austrian art.

''It is a great price for a great painting,'' one art expert said, adding that it could have an effect on the market which already this year is seeing strong prices for works by major artists, including 95 million dollars paid for a portrait by Picasso of his mistress.

After World War Two, Austria held on to the Klimt paintings that the Nazis took from the family, saying that Mrs. Bloch-Bauer had wanted the country to have them when she died in 1925 at age 43.

But her husband Ferdinand willed the works to his survivors when he died in Switzerland in 1945.

In 2000, a niece of Mrs. Bloch-Bauer, Maria Altmann, now aged 90, launched a legal battle in the United States to have the paintings returned. In January, after several U.S. court rulings against Austria, an Austrian arbitration tribunal ruled in Altmann's favor and the paintings were given to the family.

Los Angeles attorney E. Randol Schoenberg, who represented the heirs, said the surviving family members never thought of what they would do with the paintings if they won them back.

But as soon as the arbitration panel rendered its decision, the family was flooded with offers. The Neue Galerie was chosen because it was important to the family that the paintings be on public view forever and not wind up in someone's private collection, Schoenberg told Reuters.

''Mrs. Altmann is very happy to have found a solution for this painting,'' he said.

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