Gustav Klimt’s Bildnis Elisabeth Lederer (Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer) has become the most expensive work of modern art ever sold at auction after reaching $236.3m at Sotheby’s in New York. The result also marks the highest price ever achieved by the auction house and places the portrait as the second-most expensive artwork sold at auction, behind Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, which sold at Christie’s in 2017 for $450.3m.
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Painted between 1914 and 1916, the six-foot portrait depicts Elisabeth Lederer, the daughter of Klimt’s most important patrons. She was 20 years old when he painted her wearing a white robe against a backdrop of stylised Chinese figures.
In 1939, the Lederer family’s art was confiscated after the Nazi annexation of Austria. Many works were later lost in a fire, but the portrait survived, having been separated from the rest of the collection because its subject was Jewish. It was returned in 1948 to Elisabeth’s brother, Erich Lederer, and remained with him until 1983. Two years later it entered the collection of Leonard A. Lauder, the longtime Estée Lauder heir who died in June. It stayed with him for decades and was shown publicly only on loan.
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At Sotheby’s, bidding began at $130m. Six bidders competed for nearly 20 minutes until the hammer came down at $205m ($236.3m with fees), selling to a telephone bidder. One of only two full-length Klimt portraits still in private hands, the work far surpassed its presale expectation of more than $150m and overtook the $195m achieved by Andy Warhol’s Shot Sage Blue Marilyn in 2022. It also more than doubled Klimt’s previous auction record, set last year when Lady with a Fan sold for $108m.
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The sale accounted for more than 40% of the value of Lauder’s collection, which was offered the same evening and generated a total of $456.2m ($527.4m with fees). For Lauder, the Klimt had long been a centrepiece; it hung in his Fifth Avenue home for years, rarely out of sight.
