Now, that bar has lowered. In 2023, the landscape changed once again, the prices of the most expensive works sold at auction having dropped significantly from last year.

Compare this year’s 10th most expensive work to that of 2022. Henri Rousseau’s Les Flamants (1910) sold this past May for $43.5 million, setting a new auction record for him. That’s a little more than half the price of the Magritte sold in 2022.

Signs of a downturn are evident in other ways too. This year, four of the works that generated the year’s top 10 prices overall went for under $50 million—many fewer than last year. Consider the most expensive work sold at auction too. This year’s most expensive work, a Picasso painting, sold for $139 million. Last year’s, a Warhol painting of Marilyn Monroe, sold for $195 million. That’s a 29 percent difference between the two.

The total figures for the top 10 lots exhibit a similar loss—$660 million in 2023 versus $1.1 billion in 2022.

Below, a look at the most valuable lots sold at auction in 2023.

The total across both the “Now” sale and a second auction devoted to modern art was up more than 30 percent from the equivalent sales held in June last year, exceeding a pre-sale low estimate of £160.7 million ($203 million).

May’s slow New York auctions seemed to show signs of a market correction in action. Energy around emerging artists had subsided, even as blue-chip lots continued to perform well, and the trend was expected to continue in London this month. Yet the Sotheby’s auctions on Tuesday seemed to suggest some positives for the market.

Records were set for six artists: Arthur Jafa and Michel Majerus in the “Now” sale, devoted largely to art of the past few decades, and Frank Auerbach, Gustav Klimt, Saloua Raouda Choucair, and Magdalene Odundo in the modern art auction.

Klimt’s Lady With a Fan (1917–18) sold for a final price of £85.3 million pounds with buyer’s fees ($108.4 million). Backed by a third-party guarantee, it was sold from an anonymous family that had held it privately since 1994.

The work hammered after a ten-minute-long  bidding spar between three clients, going to Patti Wong, an art advisor who was bidding on behalf of a Hong Kong collector, as the New York Times reported. The result was the highest auction price ever achieved for the Austrian artist, and also the highest ever recorded for a public sale in Europe. Not since 2010, when Alberto Giacometti’s Walking Man I sold for $104.3 million at Sotheby’s London location, has a work sold at public auction for an amount that high in the city.

Klimt’s previous record was $104.6 million, set in November of last year by a 1903 landscape scene, titled Birch Forest, at Christie’s in New York.

Another major lot that attracted attention was Night Interior, a 1968 canvas by the auction regular Lucian Freud. It sold for $12.2 million. Three works by British modernist sculptor Frank Auerbach outperformed, bringing in a total of £11.2 million ($14.2 million), above a high collective estimate of £9 million ($11.5 million).

A rare self-portrait by Leonor Fini, titled Autoportrait au turban rouge (1938–41), saw six bidders vie for it. This competition eventually brought its final sale price to £711,200 ($904,100). The low estimate was £400,000.

Earlier on in the night, the “Now” portion saw some unexpected feats for less commercial names. The top lot of was Mark Bradford’s Stand down soldier, an urban landscape of Los Angeles, which sold for £3.1 million ($3.9 million), against an estimate of £2.5 million. Monster (1988), a self-portrait by Arthur Jafa featuring the artist pointing a camera in mirror, was the first lot of the night. It went for £139,700 ($177,600). The result was more than three times the £40,000 estimate.

A lesser-known figure on the auction circuit who starred in the contemporary portion was the late Luxembourg-born artist Michel Majerus, who was the subject of a multitude of exhibitions across Germany, as well as a survey in Miami, last year. His 1999 canvas MoM Block Nr. 57, an image of a stark Black figure wearing a bronze crown alluding to Jean-Michael Basquiat’s paintings, was among the “Now” sale’s star lots. It attracted attention from five bidders during sale before going for a final price of £660,400 ($839,534), more than double the low £250,000 estimate.

Another by the closely followed artist, the 55-year-old Canadian Steven Shearer, followed a similar track. His portrait Vulgarian Applique (2016) also saw five bidders go after it. The action moved the final price to £203,200 ($258,318), double its low £80,000 estimate.

With fees, the total price achieved exceeded £85.3 million ($108 million). Alberto Giacometti’s Walking Man I held the previous record for a European auction, selling for $104.3 million at Sotheby’s London in 2010.

Lady with a Fan was expected to reach around $80 million. The masterpiece was last on the auction block at Sotheby’s New York in 1994, when it sold for $11.6 million, a fraction of its current record-smashing price. 

According to the auction house, Lady with a Fan was still on an easel in Klimt’s studio when the artist died from a stroke in early 1918. Despite being less famous than The Kiss (1907–08) or Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907), Lady with a Fan displays all the spontaneity and formal prowess of the artist’s most cherished works. 

The auction house is promoting the painting, which previously sold at Sotheby’s in New York in 1994 for $11.6 million with fees, as “the star of the summer auction season in London” as well as “one of the finest and most valuable works of art ever to be offered in Europe.” It will head to sale on June 27.

Sotheby’s high estimate for Dame mit Fächer (Lady with a Fan) was based on previous auction and private sales of the Austrian artist’s work and the fact that most of Klimt’s golden period commissioned portraits are held by museums. This means very few are ever available for public or private sale.

Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II (1912), for example, sold at Christie’s in New York for a record $87.9 million with fees in November 2006, more than 3.5 times the high end of its $18 million–$25 million estimate. According to Bloomberg, the buyer was Oprah Winfrey, who reportedly sold the work privately for around $150 million in 2016. According to the Art Newspaper, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I was reportedly sold to Ronald Lauder for the Neue Galerie in New York for $135 million in 2006.

Frauenbildnis, portrait of Ria Munk III sold at Christie’s in London in 2010 for $27.9 million with fees (£18.8 million). In 2017, Sotheby’s sold Klimt’s 1907 scenic garden work Bauerngarten (Blumengarten) for $59.1 million (£48 million) as part of its Impressionist and modern art evening sale in London. Last month, Klimt’s waterscape, Insel im Attersee, sold at Sotheby’s in New York for $53.2 million to a private Japanese collector after a seven-minute-long bidding war, well exceeding its estimated price around $45 million.

Dame mit Fächer (Lady with a Fan) was acquired shortly after the death of the artist by Erwin Böhler, an industrialist in Vienna. Böhler’s family were close friends and patrons of both Klimt and the painter Egon Schiele. The family even vacationed with Klimt at a lake near Salzburg that served as the inspiration for many of the artist’s landscape works and were photographed there together.

The painting was eventually passed to Erwin’s brother Heinrich, a close friend of Klimt, and then to Heinrich’s wife Mabel in 1940 after his death. The next owner was Rudolf Leopold, the Viennese art collector and museum director, who also bought many Schiele works from Mabel Böhler in 1952. The family of the current owner acquired Dame mit Fächer (Lady with a Fan) through a Sotheby’s auction in New York in 1994. Sotheby’s did not to reveal the family’s identity or the reason for its current sale.

Most recently, Dame mit Fächer (Lady with a Fan) was part of the 2021–22 exhibition “Gustav Klimt’s Last Works” at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna, marking the first time it had been on public display since its acquisition from the Sotheby’s auction in 1994.

Helena Newman, Sotheby’s Europe chairman, told the Art Newspaper she expected to see strong Asian interest in this portrait, due to Klimt’s portrayal of artist’s portrayal of lotus blossoms, phoenixes, and dragons in the background, and due to the motifs on the unnamed woman’s robe.

“Klimt is in that rare category of artists—including Modigliani, Picasso and Giacometti—whose work has achieved over $100 million at auction,” Newman said.

As part of the deal, Lauder agreed to reacquire the work The Black Feather Hat (1910), giving him legal title to it, after returning it to the descendants of its original Jewish owner, Irene Beran. Exact details of the settlement and the amount paid to the Beran heirs have not been disclosed.

The resolution was reached after research into the painting’s ownership record that began in 2018.

Lauder, who serves a head of the World Jewish Congress, has supported restitution efforts in the past. In a statement, he said that the research efforts “arduously” aimed to trace the work’s ownership but still has left “gaps remaining.”

Lauder first acquired the 1910 painting, a portrait of a red-haired woman, in 1973. At various times, the collector has displayed it at the Neue Galerie, the private Upper East Side museum he established in 2001. Its collection is considered separate from that of Lauder’s private art holdings. The work was last on view at the museum in 2020 as part of an exhibition dedicated to Austrian art, the institution’s area of focus.

Until 1934, the work had been in the collection of Beran, who lived in the city of Brno, in what is now the Czech Republic. Eventually, she fled Europe to avoid Nazi persecution, landing in New York in 1947. Beran was found to have owned the work as far back at 1928.

The painting’s location was undocumented between 1934 and 1957, and it finally resurfacing in an exhibit in Stuttgart, Germany, that was organized an Austrian dealer and known Nazi party member, Friedrich Welz.

The Headlines

BILLIONAIRE BUSINESSMAN AND PHILANTHROPIST Ronald S. Lauder has agreed to restitute a Gustav Klimt painting to the heirs of Irene Beran, a Jewish woman who owned it before World War II in what is now the Czech Republic, and then repurchase it for an undisclosed sum, the New York Times reports. Lauder bought Klimt’s The Black Feather Hat (1910) 50 years ago; in 2018 he “agreed with the Beran family heirs to begin reviewing the work’s” provenance, Colin Moynihan writes. That investigation established that Beran had the painting in 1934 and next identified it in 1957, in a show in Stuttgart, Germany, presented by Austrian art dealer Friedrich Welz, a Nazi party member. Beran escaped from Europe in 1943. “I felt it was critical to recognize the family’s previous history with this work despite the lack of concrete documentation regarding how this painting left the Beran collection,” Lauder said in a statement. Lauder is a fervent Klimt collector, and drew headlines in 2006 when it was reported that he had spent $135 million for a 1907 portrait—then the most ever paid spent on a painting.

PHOTOGRAPHER JULIAN WASSER, who created canonical portraits of artists and their social worlds in 1960s and ‘70s Los Angeles, died on Wednesday, Hunter Drohojowska-Philp reports in the Los Angeles Times. He was 89. Wasser’s most famous images include artist Marcel Duchamp, clothed, playing chess against a writer Eve Babitz, nude, at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1963 and Joan Didion smoking a cigarette while leaning against her Corvette Stingray in 1968. “Cruising to jobs in his black Mustang convertible, Wasser had a gift for getting up close and personal with even the most remote personalities,” Drohojowska-Philp writes.

The Digest

TOP LOTS. A Tintin drawing by Hergé sold for €2.16 million (about $2.31 million) at Artcurial in Paris on Friday, a record for a black-and-white drawing by the artist, the Guardian reports, and a 1908 Strap Tank Harley-Davidsonwent for $935,000—the most ever paid at auction for a motorcycle—at Mecum Auctions in Las Vegas last month, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam said that “there are no more tickets available” for its acclaimed Johannes Vermeer blockbuster, which runs through June 4. However, it added, “We are working hard to ensure more people have the opportunity to see the exhibition.” [@Rijksmuseum/Twitter]

Police have filed disorderly conduct charges against a dealer in Native American art who was videotaped insulting Indigenous performers outside of his storefront in Scottsdale, Arizona, last week. The gallery owner, Gilbert Ortega, has apologized, saying, “If I could go back and change my words and behavior, I certainly would.” [CNN]

More than 300 works from the collection of the late collector Susann Craig, who helped found Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art in Chicago, will be offered at the Hindman auction house in the Windy City. The material includes pieces by artists Roger Brown, Gladys Nilsson, Lee Godie, and many more. [The Art Newspaper]

Amanda Dotseth, the curator of the Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, has been tapped to be its director. Mark Roglán, who led the institution for 20 years, died in 2021; since then, Dotseth has been serving as its director ad interim. [The Dallas Morning News]

An Alice Neel show opens at the Barbican in London this week, and in the Financial Times, painter Chantal Joffe wrote about what the portraits that she considers Neel’s best. Those include a vulnerable-looking Andy Warhol (“Nobody has painted Warhol like that”) and a nude John Perrault “lying on that bed like a big ginger cat.” [FT]

The Kicker

BUCKLE UP! The freewheeling New York gallery O’Flaherty’s—run by the artists Jamian Juliano-Villani and Billy Grant and the musician Ruby Zarsky—is reopening this week in a new location after shuttering last August. (It seems that their landlord may not have been a fan: The NYPDpaid a visit to their final opening.) First up in the new locale: a show by the irrepressible Austrian collective Gelitin. Airmail just profiled the gallery, and Juliano-Villani explained what she and her partners are up to. “We’re in a unique position with artists because we’re not trying to represent them,” she told Max Lakin. “That’s when things start to suck. We just want to do shows artists aren’t able to do anywhere else. Basically a faster, shittier Met.” [Airmail]

The gesture is one of a string of recent ones intended to push governments across the world to take quicker action to combat the effects of climate change. Past actions have seen tomato soup hurled at a van Gogh in London, mashed potatoes tossed at a Monet in Germany, and maple syrup spilled on an Emily Carr in Vancouver.

The action on Tuesday was done by Letzte Generation, the Germany-based group that also conducted the Monet action.

Letzte Generation activists targeted Death and Life (1910/11), one of a number of Klimt masterpieces that regularly draw tourists to the Leopold Museum. In video documenting the event, one activist appears to spill the black oil out from a sac while another glues himself to the piece. A security guard then appears to intercept the action and start to haul one of the activists away.

“New oil and gas drilling is a death sentence to humanity,” Letzte Generation wrote on Twitter.

In a statement, Leopold Museum director Hans-Peter Wipplinger said, “The concerns of climate activists such as those of the ‘Letzte Generation’ are valid, but attacking artworks is definitely the wrong way to prevent the intended goal of preventing the projected climate collapse.”

At similar protests, the works involved have undergone minimal damage or none at all. The activists involved, from groups such as the U.K.-based Just Stop Oil, have been clear that they are not seeking to harm the artworks in the process.

The Leopold Museum said that there had been “evident and significant” damage to the glass atop the painting, the surrounding frame, and the nearby wall and floor.

Asked if any arrests had made, a museum spokesperson told ARTnews, “Police checked the personal data of the activists. As far as I know the activists are still at large.”

Museums directors across the globe have fiercely decried protests such as this one, citing the “fragility” of the artworks being targeted. Institutions have also begun initiating heightened security measures in the hopes of stopping these actions before they happen.

Titled “Gustave Klimt: Gold in Motion,” the show is being billed as a “multi-sensory celebration” of the Austrian painter’s oeuvre. Klimt’s The Kiss, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, and Lady with Fan are among the works featured in renderings on the exhibition’s website. The animated projections will be accompanied by a “digital experience” based on works by one of Klimt’s successors, the Austrian visual artists and architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser. The presentation also includes a history and design of the Emigrant Industrial Saving Banks, one of the oldest banking institutions in the city.

Buoyed by a desire for post-pandemic escapism, immersive digital art shows have sprung up in dozens of cities around the globe. Last summer two simultaneous van Gogh light experiences competed for crowds in New York, while 30 spaces nationwide hosted similar shows dedicated to the popular post-Impressionist. Works by Frida Kahlo, Claude Monet, and Leonardo Da Vinci have since been digitized and shown at pop-ups from Barcelona to Chicago. Each experience offered glowing animated projections of the artist’s best-known paintings and an assortment of add-ons, usually a modicum of artist biography and some form of VR.

The Hall des Lumières will feature a new installation every 10 to 12 months, with opening dates for the first show to be announced in the coming weeks.

The book’s thesis is that the late nineteenth-century abandonment of bodily forms disposed within perspectival space “enabled the materialization of novel ideas about the human psyche,” which in turn called into question the prestige of the humanistic subject, and maybe even the concept of consciousness itself. To make her case, Butterfield-Rosen provides readers with a general introduction to the history of human disposition (both mental and physical) within the visual arts, followed by three studies of paradigmatic works by the Neo-Impressionist Georges Seurat, the Vienna Secessionist Gustav Klimt, and the dancer-choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, respectively. Each chapter functions as a self-sufficient unit, but they are connected through a “structure of analogies,” which includes shared motifs and gestures or relevant contemporaneous developments in the fields of art history, archaeology, psychology, and evolutionary biology.

Out of all these intellectual resources, the book’s most important inspiration comes from the work of nineteenth-century Danish art historian Julius Lange, credited with coining the word “frontality” in the early 1890s. The concept of frontality gained currency in twentieth-century criticism of modernist abstraction, and Butterfield-Rosen aims to restore the “figural derivation of the word” in Lange’s pioneering research. According to Lange, frontality—or an artist’s fidelity to the represented body’s vertical axis and the avoidance of obliquity or torsion—was visual art’s “default condition,” since, he argued, archaic or so-called primitive art, irrespective of place or culture, shares this characteristic. With the rise of naturalism in Classical Greek statuary (think of the shift from the Archaic Kouros to the classicized Kritios Boy), art history experienced an epochal break. Bodies in art now appeared as actual human bodies might, arranged in postures that reflect a subject’s responsiveness to both external forces, such as gravity, and internal ones, such as intentionality. Lange named this Post-Classical figure le moi—the subject of reflective consciousness. During the Renaissance, this new sculpted figure found its footing within the illusionistic space of painting. In Butterfield-Rosen’s view, the primitivist return to frontality in later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art registers the increasing awareness of alternative, more ancient figural forms to the classical ideal, which modernist painters encountered in museum displays or art history textbooks, and then redeployed in order to represent new models of subjectivity.

Georges Seurat: Study for Poseuses, 1886–87, Conté crayon on laid paper, 8.86 by 11.69 inches.

Butterfield-Rosen’s Seurat chapter should be mandatory reading for students of nineteenth-century art. She provides original insights into Seurat’s manifesto painting, Un dimanche après-midi à l’île de la Grande Jatte (1884), a pointillist depiction of Parisians enjoying weekend sunshine on the banks of the Seine, and she also develops the most comprehensive examination to date of the painter’s deadpan follow-up, Les Poseuses (1886–88), which depicts three nude artist’s models in three different poses—one dorsal, one frontal, and one profile—in the artist’s studio. With respect to this latter painting, Butterfield-Rosen notices an ambiguity in the meaning of the figures’ artful postures. On the one hand, the central front-facing model evokes an ancient figure of thought—or rather, a Classical sculpture in the collection of the Louvre of an ancient thinker, Demosthenes—such that this depicted figure seems to preside over the artist’s studio space as a substitute for the thinking artist, “half-defiant, and half-mournful, perhaps.” On the other hand, Seurat’s presence is perceived everywhere within his work. We see partial views of his earlier painting, La Grande Jatte. We can identify all the models’ individual poses as discrete art historical citations of ancient sculptural prototypes, and then also recognize a Classical source for their triadic arrangement: the Three Graces. Finally, we know from Seurat’s contemporaries that he was a bit of a control freak, allegedly leaving nothing in his work to chance. As a result, the central figure oscillates between appearing in an active pose she chose for herself and a more passive one that the artist selected for her. In either case, the viewer squares off with this model from the same position once occupied by the painter, thereby also functioning as a surrogate Seurat.

Detail of Gustav Klimt’s Beethovenfries at the Secession Building, Vienna, Austria.

Similar tensions surrounding artistic control and intersubjectivity recur in the work of all three of Butterfield-Rosen’s protagonists. Klimt, for his part, expected his viewers to “look at my pictures attentively and try from them to recognize what I am and what I am about.” This is no small feat for beholders of the Beethovenfries (1901), Klimt’s monumental decorative frieze and quasi-illustration of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which he designed for the Vienna Secession building. Klimt’s work is jam-packed with iconographic oddities. Butterfield-Rosen pays particular attention to its creaturely forms, its series of wiggly, hovering female figures, and, finally, the pair of simian-ish faces (aptly described as “golden emojis”) that levitate above Klimt’s now iconic kissing couple. By comparing the buoyant eroticism of Klimt’s Beethovenfries with the freighted contemplativeness of Max Klinger’s Beethoven (1902)—a massive sculptural tribute to the same composer, also exhibited at the Secession—Butterfield-Rosen teases out a series of critical inversions underlying Klimt’s vision. She views his Beethovenfries as a celebration of ornamental painting over the fine art tableau; free-floating unconscious states over brooding forms of thought; and Darwinian aesthetics over Kantian ideals.

Like Klimt, Nijinsky also made interpretative demands upon his viewers: “I know what an eye is. An eye is the theater. The brain is the audience. I am the eye in the brain.” In the case of L’Après-midi d’un faune (1912), the dance at the center of Butterfield-Rosen’s Nijinsky chapter, the choreographer composed a ballet of a faun’s frustrated seduction of a nymph in the style of an “archaic bas-relief.” In practice, this meant that his performers had to learn to restrict their movements so as to affirm their relationship to the dance’s relief-plane: the backdrop. For Nijinsky, the theatrical stage no longer functioned as a deep space in which dancers formed compelling relationships or broke out into exhibitionist turns. Rather, it served as a shallow band of ground sufficient only for stylized, schematic action. This too was an exhibitionist form of dance, but with a few differences. By preventing his dancers from arranging themselves in depth, Nijinsky diminished the presence of internal spectatorship within his dance, such as in banquet scenes of classical storybook ballets, in which corps members encircle soloists and principals as they pair up and show off. In so doing, Nijinsky, like Seurat, foregrounded “the primary relationship between the faun and the audience,” as opposed to that of the faun and the nymphs. Additionally, Butterfield-Rosen interprets the erotic content of L’Après-midi and its choreographic sublimation into artful poses of bodily stiffness through the lens of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic account of exhibitionism and dream interpretation.

Nijinsky as the Faun with Flore Revalles as Tall Nymph in L’Après-midi d’un faune, 1916, New York, New York.

In short, all three protagonists in Modern Art and the Remaking of Human Disposition were preoccupied with managing spectators’ attention, which they accomplished through archaizing techniques of figuration. Their frontally posed bodies did not sustain the Classical fiction of psychic depth, because they were too stylized and their poses alluded to too many other works of art. As a result, mindedness was displaced from the actions of represented figures disposed within a painting and onto the pictorial representation as a whole. Viewers had to interpret the thoughts and motivations of Seurat, Klimt, and Nijinsky, not those of posers, lovers, and nymphs. Given the apparent vacancy of all these flattened figures, Butterfield-Rosen argues that modernist forms of frontality ran parallel with contemporaneous shifts in the status of the human subject in fin-de-siècle philosophy and science. In her words, “postural antinaturalism can be seen as instituting naturalism of a different kind . . . a visual sign for acknowledging the ‘naturalization of mind.’” No longer an ideal medium of conscious thought, the mind became a purely physical thing: a brain.

Modern Art and the Remaking of Human Disposition by Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen, University of Chicago Press, 2021; 352 pages, 30 color and 94 black-and-white illustrations, $55 hardcover.

It is here that readers confront one potential limitation to this impressive book. In her effort to elaborate her exquisite structure of analogies, Butterfield-Rosen occasionally neglects the possibility that this same stylistic shift could mean different, or even contradictory, things. Consider Maurice Denis’s polemical essay “Définition du néo-traditionnisme” (1890), which makes a cameo appearance in Butterfield-Rosen’s introduction. Denis sets off by reminding his reader that “a painting, before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or any given anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors arranged in a certain order.” Scholars often read this statement forward, as if Denis anticipated a future of total abstraction. Following Butterfield-Rosen, it will be clear that this reading is overly hasty. Sure enough, Denis’s essay sought to rescue the painted figure from the same Post-Renaissance naturalistic criteria that Seurat, Klimt, and Nijinsky also abandoned in their work, which is why Butterfield-Rosen quotes the following from Denis’s essay: “‘Art, it’s when things turn,’ another confused definition.” What is left out of Butterfield-Rosen’s citation, however, are Denis’s specific reasons for finding this classical concept of art misguided, which conflict with her interpretations.

For Denis, Impressionism represented the latest expression of the centuries-old naturalistic imperative, since it fostered an “eclectic and exclusive habit of interpreting optical sensations,” which meant that beholders were expected to judge a painting’s meaning and a painter’s identity (“l’ipséité du peintre”) by the same criterion. The Naturalist novelist Émile Zola captured this Impressionist sentiment best: “Art is a corner of nature seen through a temperament.” Denis rejected traditional naturalist orthodoxy—be true to external nature—and its post-Impressionist redefinition—be true to your true nature. Instead, he championed more aestheticized forms of figuration. “The grandest art, which we call decorative, of the Indians, Assyrians, Egyptians, Greeks, the art of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and the superior works of modern art,” he claimed, all shared a common aim: “the transformation (travestissement) of vulgar sensations—natural objects—into sacred, hermetic, and imposing icons.” Like Seurat, Klimt, and Nijinsky, Denis recovered models for new forms of “postural anti-naturalism” from archaic art, but he did so while rejecting the scientific picture of mindedness that Butterfield-Rosen argues her case studies affirm. Crucially, as Alison Morehead has documented in her important study of Symbolism, Denis developed this Neo-Traditionist project as a consequence of his interest in experimental science, not in spite of it. He was therefore an active participant in the art historical and intellectual transformations that Butterfield-Rosen’s book seeks to explain, but his project remains inassimilable to her thesis.

To the author’s credit, Modernism and the Remaking of Human Disposition never forecloses alternative explanations. Instead, Butterfield-Rosen concludes elliptically, which is to say that she concludes without any concluding chapter. One senses in this gesture an acknowledgment that the complex work of understanding her “simple formal observation” is still ongoing. Such is the effect of a breakthrough.

As part of its efforts, Google also digitally recreated three of Klimt’s lost works from 1899, using artificial intelligence technology to colorize black-and-white photography of the works.

The three paintings—Medicine, Philosophy, and Jurisprudence—together form the “Faculty Paintings,” which was commissioned by the University of Vienna. Upon the works’ unveiling, university officials deemed them “pornographic” and “perverse.” They were ultimately sold to a private buyer. 

In 1945, during the final days of World War II in Europe, the paintings were lost in a fire, and they now survive only in the form of black-and-white photographs. (In a post on the hub, the Austrian National Library looks at the mysterious circumstances of the fire that claimed the works.)

With the support of Google, Klimt scholars and AI researchers came together to bring color to these enigmatic paintings. Franz Smola, a curator at the Belvedere, worked with Emil Wallner, a resident at the Google Arts & Culture Lab, to develop an algorithm that could accurately recolor the “Faculty Paintings.”

First, Smola combed through various archives to find documentation describing the works, especially their coloration. He then looked for motifs present in the “Faculty Paintings” that could also be found in similar paintings of Klimt’s from the same time period. For example, the three women in Jurisprudence are wrapped in snakes, similar to the artist’s Beethoven Frieze (1902), in which a woman is also surrounded by serpents colored in his trademark gold leaf. These parallels helped Smola and his team to vaguely sketch the color profiles used in parts of the paintings. 

Meanwhile, Wallner began putting together an algorithm that was trained to do a statistical analysis of Klimt’s coloring style. The obstacles and breakthroughs of this machine learning process are described in an article by Wallner. 

Using a huge data set (1 million pictures of the real world and 91,749 image of artworks by various artists), the algorithm ascertained a sense of skin tones and the hues of the sky from the real world images, and a sense of composition, object boundaries, and textures from the paintings. Added to that initial data set were 80 full-color reproductions of Klimt paintings, meant to key the algorithm in to the Vienna Secession artist’s style. The resulting AI-colored images provide what might be the closest we will ever get to seeing a complete image of those lost paintings. 

In a statement, Smola said, “The result for me was surprising because we were able to color it even in the places where we had no knowledge, with machine learning we have good assumptions that Klimt used certain colors.”