Barbra Streisand reveals multimillion dollar mistake that saw her SELL iconic artwork she bought for paltry sum

Barbra Streisand shared her ‘regret’ about selling a painting by legendary Austrian artist Gustav Klimt after purchasing it for just $17,000 in 1969.

A different work by Klimt – Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer – was sold this Tuesday by Sotheby’s for $236 million, becoming the second most expensive painting ever purchased at auction after Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi.

After the hotly announced purchase, Streisand shared wistfully the story of Klimt, a story that had once slipped through her fingers.

Streisand, 83, once owned Ria Munk, her 1912 work At Death’s Edge, which depicts a woman who kills herself after being abandoned by her playboy fiancee.

She received her artistic recognition the same year she won her first Oscar for her 1968 debut film, Funny Girl, based on the Broadway musical that first catapulted her to stardom.

But he sold the piece in 1998, 27 years before Klimt’s $236 million sale of a painting by Elisabeth Lederer, who coincidentally is Ria Munk’s cousin.

Streisand told her story on Instagram alongside an old black-and-white photo of herself surrounded by some paintings she owns, including a Klimt.

‘My long-time assistant made me an art book that I loved and sold. “One of them was Gustav Klimt’s Lady Ria Munk at the Deep of Death, which I bought for $17,000 in 1969, which seemed like a lot of money at the time,” he said.

‘I sold it in 1998 because I became interested in Frank Lloyd Wright and the Arts & Crafts movement. Oh, how I regret selling it. As the book’s title suggests, “You should never sell art you love,”‘ the People hitmaker added.

Klimt was one of the reigning figures in the art world during the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and continues to be celebrated to this day for his role in spearheading the Viennese Secession, a local offshoot of the groundbreaking Art Nouveau movement.

Maria ‘Ria’ Munk was a Viennese girl from a prominent Jewish family; his great-grandfather was Joseph Pulitzer, for whom the prize is named.

In her 20s, she fell in love with the much older German horror novelist Hanns Heinz Ewers and became engaged to him, despite his widespread reputation as a womanizer.

Streisand purchased the artwork the same year she won her first Oscar for her 1968 film debut, Funny Girl; Photographed with his award at the 1969 Academy Awards

The 83-year-old artist once owned Klimt’s 1912 painting Ria Munk at the Edge of Death, which depicts a woman who kills herself after being abandoned by her philandering fiancee.

Ewers broke off the engagement, calling Munk ‘a hopeless romantic and detached from reality’, according to Klimt’s biographers Jane Rogoyska and Patrick Bade, leaving him so crushed that he shot himself.

Her heartbroken mother, Aranka, had Klimt paint three paintings of her dead daughter; One of these paintings belonged to Streisand, the other was two paintings of her while she was alive.

Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, meanwhile, was commissioned at the dawn of the First World War by the subject’s parents, the Viennese Jewish industrialist August Lederer and his wife Serena—Aranka Munk’s sister—who were Klimt’s leading patrons.

When the Third Reich engulfed Austria in the Anschluss, the Lederer collection was looted by the Gestapo and stored in Immendorf Castle in Lower Austria.

On the last day of the European Theater of World War II, the retreating Germans burned the castle containing works of art to prevent the Red Army from capturing it.

However, Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer survived the war; Because the Nazis did not find the Jewish portraits worth preserving for themselves, they were thrown into an auction house in Vienna instead of being hidden in Immendorf Castle.

A different painting by Klimt – Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer – was sold this Tuesday by Sotheby’s for $236 million; Photo taken at the press preview held at Sotheby’s on November 7

The real Elisabeth was stranded in Vienna during the war, but managed to avoid being killed in the Holocaust because she had a high-ranking former brother-in-law in the Nazi civil service who helped her pose as the daughter of the late Klimt, a non-Jew.

But he succumbed to an illness at the age of 50 in October 1944, six months before Vienna was liberated by the advancing Soviets.

In the post-war period, Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer was returned to her brother and subsequently remained in the possession of one of Estée Lauder’s sons for 40 years until his death in June. This led to the painting being sold at auction by Sotheby’s this week.