Barbra Streisand is not only a respected figure in film and music circles but also, less known to the public, in the world of art collecting. This month, she experienced a particularly painful reminder of one of her past decisions when she shared her regrets about selling a Gustav Klimt painting with her Instagram followers.
In a 1969 photograph taken by American photographer Lawrence Schiller, the "Woman in Love" singer poses in her suite at London's Claridge's hotel with two Egon Schiele watercolors and, behind her, the Klimt work in question: "Ria Munk on Her Deathbed." This is a posthumous portrait that Klimt created in 1912 at the request of the family of this wealthy Viennese heiress. A year earlier, young Ria Munk had taken her own life following a romantic disappointment.
As Streisand explains in her Instagram post, she purchased the painting for $17,000 in 1969 and only parted with it in 1998 when she became more interested in pieces by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright and the Arts & Crafts movement. The singer doesn't specify exactly why she regrets selling it so much, simply concluding with advice: "You should never sell a work of art that you love."
Those who follow the art market can easily understand the source of this bitterness. Just days earlier, Sotheby's sale of another Klimt portrait, that of Elisabeth Lederer (who was actually Ria Munk's cousin), reached the highest price in the auction house's history at $236.4 million. This was more than two hundred times the estimate made by Christie's in 1998 for Streisand's Klimt when it went to auction. The final price is unknown, but it was certainly far below what it would be worth today.
In "My Name is Barbra," her recent autobiography, the singer and actress recounts other frustrations of the same kind, such as a 2013 dentist visit that caused her to miss "La Juive," a Modigliani painting that was being auctioned at the same time. Under the effects of anesthesia, Streisand asked the doctor to briefly interrupt the treatment so she could bid by phone, but her attempt failed and she ultimately missed out on the painting. "La Juive is a portrait of Maud Abrantes, Modigliani's American mistress, and she had a bump on her nose like me," she explains.
Modigliani is her favorite artist, and Barbra has been pursuing his works since the beginning of her collection, which, as she recounts in her book, started alongside her career. In the New York apartment she rented after landing her first Broadway contract in 1961, she initially settled for hanging an inexpensive reproduction of a Rembrandt, "Woman Bathing in a River." But three years later, she was already wealthy enough to afford originals by masters.
In 1964, she spent $55,000 from her salary from "Funny Girl," the musical that made her famous and whose film adaptation would earn her the Oscar for Best Actress, to buy a Matisse. At the time, she still felt unsure of herself when tackling big names. Years later, she would discover that the Van Gogh that had triggered her passion for collecting a year earlier, when she had seen it at producer William Goetz's house, was actually a fake. For this Matisse, she called the painter's son to confirm the work's authenticity. Pierre Matisse confirmed it but specified that it wasn't, in his opinion, among his father's great canvases. "That's when I understood that just because a painting is signed by a great artist doesn't necessarily make it a great painting," Barbra writes.
Shortly after, she fell in love with a Modigliani nude exhibited at the Klaus Perls gallery, but she couldn't buy it because she had just acquired the Matisse: "I should have returned the Matisse, which I ended up doing anyway, and immediately bought the Modigliani. It's a painting that continues to enchant me. Today, it belongs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a similar Modigliani nude recently sold at Christie's for $170.4 million." She adds that much later, she still managed to console herself by buying another painting by her favorite artist, thanks to a concert tour she admits to accepting solely to be able to afford it.
"I can't work just for money. I have to work for an object that pleases me, for something I want to live with. What's the point of money? To buy stocks, bonds? You can't see that. On the other hand, a painting, I can look at it and enjoy it every day," she explained in 2017.
Just as the years will have no hold on her songs or films, Barbra Streisand's name will always be associated with the history of certain works she has owned. She is, for example, the owner of Van Gogh's "Peasant Woman with Child on Her Lap," a painting for which she paid $4.47 million in 2020. In 2015, the singer donated a portrait signed by John Singer Sargent, purchased in 2002, to LACMA in Los Angeles, while she chose to sell her Tamara de Lempicka, "Adam and Eve." Put up for auction for $2 million in 1994, the painting reached the highest price ever paid for a work by the Polish artist.
"When the bidding exceeded one million dollars, I screamed," Barbra Streisand recounted at the time. "Ten years earlier, I had only paid $135,000 for it." Her sharp collector's eye again rewarded her with some beautiful surprises in 1999. After selling one of her Hollywood houses, she also decided to part with the Arts & Crafts collection she kept there. Frank Lloyd Wright furniture, Tiffany lamps, and a Gustav Stickley oak sideboard, which then became the most expensive American Arts & Crafts piece ever sold, fetching more than half a million dollars. In total, the collection lots reached $2.9 million.
Barbra Streisand's popularity undoubtedly contributed to driving up prices, with many bids coming from her admirers. But the sale also came at a time when the Arts & Crafts market was attracting a large number of young Wall Street collectors. Undoubtedly, as Barbra Streisand says, one should never sell works of art that one loves. But in the market, what really matters is knowing the right time to part with one's former loves.
