Previous Klimt paintings have fetched high prices at auction, including "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II" (above) for $87.9 million in 2006 and "Birch Forest" for $104.6 million last year (as Gustav Klimt, The Kiss (detail), ca. 1908-09, oil on canvas. Courtesy of Belvedere Museum. Gustav Klimt (July 14, 1862 – February 6, 1918) is best-known as a founder of the Vienna Secession and a leading light of the worldwide Art Nouveau movement. The primary subject of his work is the female body, and his subject matter is strikingly erotic Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) cost Ronald S. Lauder $135 million, making it the world’s priciest painting. Many people, dumbfounded by that figure, will now visit the Neue Galerie to see what this Gustav Klimt (14 July 1862 – 6 February 1918) was an Austrian symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Secession movement. Klimt is noted for his paintings, murals, sketches, and other objets d'art. Klimt's primary subject was the female body, [1] and his works are marked by a frank eroticism. [2] Here are 10 of Gustav Klimt’s most notable artworks. 1. Gustav Klimt, The Kiss, 1908. The Kiss by Gustav Klimt, 1908, via Belvedere Musem, Vienna. The Kiss is one of the most beloved of Gustav Klimt’s artworks, finding itself reproduced on nearly every conceivable product sold to humans in the 21st century. The Klimt has an estimated value of at least €60m ($66m; £51m). Why the painting was left in the wall at the Ricci Oddi Gallery of Modern Art is still a mystery. The mystery of the stolen Klimt 9. Many of Klimt’s most brilliant paintings were burned. As many as 14 of Klimt’s works were destroyed on May 8, 1945, when the Schloss Immendorf, a castle in a the small Austrian village of Immendorf that had been used as a safe storage space for looted and stolen art during the war, was burnt down by an SS unit. Should the artwork prove to be an original Klimt, the decades-long mystery surrounding the whereabouts of Portrait of a Lady will finally come to a close, and a painting worth some $66 million Los Angeles County Museum of Art and New York, Neue Galerie, Gustav Klimt: Five Paintings from the Collection of Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, April-October 2006 (illustrated in color). Belvedere Wien, Gustav Klimt und Die Kunstschau 1908, October 2008-January 2009, p. 290 (illustrated in color; dated 1904). Oregon, Portland Art Museum; Washington, D.C., In 2016, Oprah Winfrey sold it to a Chinese bidder for $150 million. Later, both versions were stolen by Nazis. Gustav Klimt’s paintings are full of mysteries, which contributes to their being the most expensive paintings in the world. lelS.