A painting by Gustav Klimt has sold for a record-breaking $236.4 million (£179.7m / A$364m) including fees, making it the second most expensive artwork ever sold at auction and the most expensive work of modern art ever to appear under the hammer.
The six-foot-tall canvas, Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, was created between 1914 and 1916. It depicts Elisabeth Lederer—an heiress and the daughter of two of Klimt’s key patrons—wrapped in a richly patterned Chinese robe, embodying the artist’s late stylistic language.
On Tuesday night in New York, six bidders competed intensely for nearly 20 minutes at Sotheby’s. The auction house did not disclose the identity of the winning bidder.
The work’s history is as dramatic as its result: looted by the Nazis and nearly destroyed in a fire during the Second World War, the portrait was restituted in 1948 to Elisabeth’s brother, Erich Lederer—a close friend of Egon Schiele and a frequent subject in Schiele’s drawings. Erich kept the painting for most of his life until selling it in 1983, two years before his death.
In 1985, the painting entered the private collection of Leonard A. Lauder, the Estée Lauder heir, who displayed it in his Fifth Avenue residence, except for occasional loans to institutions. Lauder passed away in June at the age of 92.
