The art market just saw a major shake-up after a portrait by Austrian painter Gustav Klimt became the second-most expensive artwork ever sold at auction.
Klimt’s celebrated Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer — a work that survived Nazi seizure and narrowly escaped destruction in a World War II fire — achieved a historic result in New York.
On Tuesday night, Nov. 18, after about 20 minutes of intense bidding, the painting sold for $236.4 million including fees at Sotheby’s, according to reports from ARTnews, The New York Times and the BBC. The price marks a new high for Klimt at auction and ranks just behind Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, which fetched $450.3 million at Christie’s in 2017, per the Times.
“To see Gustav Klimt’s exquisite portrait of Elisabeth Lederer set a new auction record for the artist is thrilling in itself,” Helena Newman, Sotheby’s worldwide chairman of Impressionist and modern art and chairman of its European operations, told ARTnews in a statement. “To see it become the most valuable work ever sold at Sotheby’s is nothing short of sensational. Klimt is one of those rare artists whose magic is as powerful as it is universal.”
Klimt, a leading Symbolist painter, is perhaps best known for The Kiss (1907–08), according to Sotheby’s. His patrons Serena and August Lederer commissioned him to paint their daughter, Elisabeth, a portrait that was completed in 1916, two years before Klimt’s death.
As World War II spread across Europe, Elisabeth — then a young, single Jewish woman — claimed that Klimt was her biological father. The false statement ultimately saved her life, according to the auction house.
During the war, the portrait was among the works from the Lederer collection confiscated by the Nazis. Many of those paintings were stored in Immendorf Castle, which was destroyed in a fire at the end of the conflict. The family portraits, however, had been moved elsewhere and survived.
Klimt’s portrait of Elisabeth was restituted to the Lederer family in 1948, along with two other works, Sotheby’s notes. In more recent decades, the portrait of the 20-year-old Elisabeth hung for nearly 40 years in the Manhattan apartment of Leonard A. Lauder, heir to The Estée Lauder Companies’ cosmetics fortune, until his death in June, according to the Times.
Before the sale, Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer was estimated at $150 million, but bidding quickly surpassed expectations. In a striking contrast later that evening, Maurizio Cattelan’s 18-karat gold toilet sold for $12.1 million, the Times reported.
While the painting evokes the elegance of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before its collapse at the end of World War I, its impact reaches far beyond its era, Sotheby’s says.
“Painted on the cusp between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it is a masterpiece of portraiture,” the auction house wrote, “one whose pictorial inventiveness, daring and decorative effusion, propelled the course of modernism.”
