A portrait by Austrian painter Gustav Klimt has sold for £179.7m, making it the most valuable art ever sold at Sotheby’s and the second most expensive work of art in auction history.
Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, a six-foot oil painting made between 1914-1916, depicts 20-year-old Elisabeth Lederer, daughter of prominent Viennese art patrons August and Serena Lederer, dressed in a Chinese-style dragon robe in a shimmering decorative setting.
The portrait came from the collection of Estee Lauder heir Leonard A Lauder, who acquired it in 1985 and displayed it for decades in his Fifth Avenue apartment. The work had an auction estimate of around $150m (£114.14m), but ended up fetching $236.4m.
It was the centrepiece of Sotheby’s inaugural sale in its newly acquired Manhattan headquarters at the Breuer Building, formerly home to the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Only two full-length Klimt portraits remain in private hands, and the auctioneer, Oliver Barker, described the canvas as “one of the last opportunities to acquire a portrait of this significance by the artist”.
“She’s looking directly at you, she’s not passive,” Emily Braun, curator of the Leonard A Lauder Collection, told The New York Times.
Six people launched a bidding war that lasted nearly 20 minutes, and ended when a telephone bidder represented by Julian Dawes, Sotheby’s vice-chair and head of impressionist and modern art, secured the work.
ArtNews reported that the hammer fell at $205m before fees.
“Tonight, we made history at the Breuer,” Helena Newman, Sotheby’s worldwide chair of impressionist and modern art and chair of its European operations, said in a statement.
“To see Gustav Klimt’s exquisite portrait of Elisabeth Lederer set a new auction record for the artist is thrilling in itself; 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.”
The painting carries considerable historical weight. During the Second World War, the Lederer family’s collection was seized by the Nazis, and many of their Klimt paintings were later destroyed in a fire at Immendorf Castle in Austria.
Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, however, was stored separately and escaped the blaze.
Elisabeth herself relied on her association with Klimt to protect her during the Nazi occupation, claiming she was his illegitimate daughter and therefore not Jewish; her mother also signed an affidavit to that effect. With some help from her former brother-in-law, who was a high-ranking Nazi official, Elisabeth managed to secure a document stating that she descended from Klimt, which enabled her to reside safely in Vienna until her death in October 1944.
Returned to Elisabeth’s brother Erich in 1948, the portrait was sold in 1983 to the art dealer Serge Sabarsky and acquired two years later by Lauder.
“People were terrified someone might back a chair into it, but it was never going to happen,” Ms Braun said.
She also told NBC News that the painting’s story “had a multilayered meaning for him,” since Lauder’s wife, Evelyn, had fled Vienna as a child because she was Jewish.
It was one of three Klimt oils consigned from Lauder’s collection for the sale; two landscapes sold for $86m and $70.7m.
The Klimt portrait accounted for almost 45 per cent of the $527.5m fetched that evening from the Lauder collection. It also surpassed Klimt’s previous auction high, his 1917-18 portrait Lady with a Fan, which sold in 2023 for £85.3m.
The only higher public sale remains Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci, which sold in 2017 for $450.3m at Christie’s.
The auction also featured several Matisse sculptures and two Agnes Martin paintings, which sold for $14.6m and $7.3m. Sotheby’s said around 25,000 visitors viewed the works during the pre-sale exhibition, with queues forming around the block.
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