Barbra Streisand, never short on candour, has admitted she still winces at one particular decision from her early collecting days: letting a Gustav Klimt slip through her hands for what now feels like pocket change.
Seventeen thousand dollars in 1969 wasn’t nothing — especially for a young rising star whose life had just started to tilt into the stratosphere — but even so, she says it stings. And you can see why. Klimt’s market has since ballooned into an alternate stratosphere, and the painting she once lived with now sits in that foggy territory between legend, loss, and “dear God, what was I thinking?” Streisand sold her Gustav Klimt painting, Ria Munk On Her Deathbed, for a reported $650,000 in the 1990s.
Klimt’s haunting 1912 portrayal of a young woman undone by heartbreak. The story is cruel: Maria “Ria” Munk shot herself after her fiancé, the theatre-world libertine Hans Ewers, abruptly dumped her and dismissed her as a romantic fantasist. Her devastated mother, Aranka Munk, commissioned Klimt to memorialise her daughter three times — two portraits in life, one in death. Streisand owned the last of these, the one with the heavy gravity of an ending.
Streisand bought the painting the same year she clutched her first Oscar for Funny Girl, the film that made her a household name. Money wasn’t exactly cascading in yet, but she had taste, instinct, and, clearly, nerve. The painting hung with her for decades before she parted with it in 1998 — a decision that, in hindsight, reads like one of those fork-in-the-road moments you don’t recognise until the smoke has cleared and someone else’s auction paddle has rewritten the object’s destiny.
The regret came tumbling out on Instagram, alongside a grainy black-and-white photo of a young Streisand surrounded by the art that once shaped her walls. “My longtime assistant made me a book of art that I’ve loved and sold,” she wrote. “One of them was this painting of Miss Ria Munk on her Deathbed… which seemed like a lot of money at the time.” It’s the kind of confession that lands with the sting of experience — not tortured, not self-flagellating, just honest.
The more expansive Klimts continue their relentless climb. The artist’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer — another story glazed in tragedy — fetched $236 million at Sotheby’s this week. That painting has its own war-torn biography: commissioned by the Lederers, a prominent Jewish patron of Klimt; seized by the Gestapo; shuttled through the wreckage of Austria’s collapsing Third Reich. Most of the collection went up in flames when the Germans torched Immendorf Castle in 1945. But Elisabeth survived, spared only because the Nazis considered portraits of Jews beneath their collecting standards and dumped them into a Viennese auction house instead.
Elisabeth herself endured a parallel nightmare. Trapped in Vienna, she survived the Holocaust by assuming a false identity — the supposed daughter of Klimt — thanks to help from an ex-brother-in-law nestled high in the Nazi hierarchy. She died in 1944, months before liberation, at the age of 50. The painting eventually returned to her family, later passing into the hands of an Estée Lauder heir who kept it for forty years until his death this summer, prompting the blockbuster sale now plastered across headlines.
Top Photo Via Wiki Media Commons Barbra Streisand La Quinta, California https://www.flickr.com/photos/35560790@N03/8411166353/ Author Lifescript