A modern masterpiece just became the most expensive ever sold at auction

The last piece of news I fell asleep to last night and the first one I woke up to this morning was that Gustav Klimt’s legendary painting sold for 236.4 million dollars at Sotheby’s in New York, breaking the auction record for the early twentieth century Viennese artist. It is now the most expensive work of modern art ever sold at auction, as well as the most expensive artwork ever sold at Sotheby’s. The painting, titled Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer (1914), estimated at 150 million dollars, was offered last night at an auction dedicated to works from the estate of Leonard Lauder, the major collector who passed away in June of this year. Although Lauder donated his unmatched Cubist collection to the Metropolitan Museum in 2013, he kept other valuable works, including three Klimt paintings and six bronze sculptures by Henri Matisse. Around twenty pieces from this collection were sold last night at Sotheby’s new global headquarters in the Breuer building on Madison Avenue.

The portrait depicts the daughter of the artist’s most important patrons, Serena and August Lederer. Klimt painted three portraits of women from three generations of the Lederer family. Portrait of Serena Lederer (1899) belongs to the Metropolitan Museum, while the portrait of her daughter, created fifteen years later, is gentler and more mysterious, with Chinese imperial iconography in the background. The Nazis attempted to loot it and nearly destroyed it in a fire during the Second World War, but it was returned in 1948 to Elisabeth’s brother Erich, a frequent model in the drawings and paintings of Egon Schiele, Klimt’s friend and contemporary. Erich kept it for most of his life, until it was sold in 1983, two years before his death. Lauder purchased Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer in 1985 at the Serge Sabarsky Gallery in New York for an undisclosed amount, according to Sotheby’s records.

 

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Lauder lived with this work and occasionally lent it to museums anonymously. It was shown in the exhibition Klimt’s Women at the Belvedere in Vienna in 2000, as well as in several exhibitions at the Neue Galerie in New York, which was founded by his brother Ronald Lauder. Most recently, the painting was the central piece of the exhibition Klimt and the Women of Vienna’s Golden Age, 1900–1918 (2016–17) at the Neue Galerie, where it hung next to Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer II (1912), once owned by Oprah Winfrey. In 2017, Leonard Lauder lent his precious portrait to the National Gallery of Canada. This is one of only two full length Klimt female portraits that remain in private ownership.

Courtesy of Sotheby’s New York

The most expensive artwork ever sold at auction remains Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, which reached 450.3 million dollars in 2017. As for Klimt, his auction results peaked in 2023 when Lady with a Fan (1917–18) achieved 108.8 million dollars at Sotheby’s in London. Private sales have surpassed auction prices. The highest recorded sum for a Klimt is for Water Serpents II from 1907, which Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev purchased in 2012 for around 187 million dollars. Winfrey privately sold Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer II for 150 million dollars in 2016. Both paintings later ended up with buyers in Asia.