Pollock sale fetches record

Los Angeles music and movie mogul David Geffen has sold one of Jackson Pollock’s most-admired “drip paintings” for $140 million, a deal that appears to end the brief reign of Gustav Klimt’s golden Adele Bloch-Bauer portrait as the painting sold for the highest-known price in history.

Geffen declined to comment Thursday, and international financier David Martinez, who was identified by anonymous sources in the New York Times as the buyer, did not return messages. But a source with inside knowledge confirmed that Geffen had sold the work, titled “No. 5, 1948.”

The painting, which measures 4 by 8 feet, was completed eight years before Pollock’s death, about a year after the New York artist began “drip painting,” dribbling and flinging paint onto canvases (and fiberboard) with an abandon that appalled traditionalists and excited his fellow Abstract Expressionists.

The sale comes on the heels of the bizarre nonsale of casino billionaire Steve Wynn’s Picasso painting “Le Reve.”

That painting was to be sold for $139 million to art collector Steven Cohen, but Wynn, whose sight is impaired, accidentally puts his elbow through the canvas last month, voiding the deal.

Geffen, a collector of 20th century art, made two other sales last month -- works by Jasper Johns and Willem de Kooning -- for a combined $143.5 million.

He bought the Pollock painting from magazine magnate S.I. Newhouse in 1995. Its new sale price puts it just ahead of Klimt’s “Adele Bloch-Bauer I,” which cosmetics billionaire Ronald S. Lauder’s Neue Galerie bought in July for $135 million from Bloch-Bauer’s heirs.

That Klimt portrait was one of five seized by the Nazis in the 1930s and recently returned to Bloch-Bauer’s family by a court ruling. The other Klimt works will go up for auction Nov. 8.

Martinez is managing director of London-based Fintech Advisory, which deals in international corporate and government debt.

christopher.reynolds@latimes .com