Gustav Klimt rewriting the history of the art market: the «Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer» became the second most expensive painting ever sold at auction, breaking the Austrian painter’s record on Tuesday night.
The sale far exceeded its estimate of $150 million after more than 19 minutes of bidding, reaching $236.4 million, including commission, at Sotheby’s in New York.
Klimt, new record
Only Leonardo da Vinci’s «Salvator Mundi» achieved a higher price, selling for 450 million dollars (then about 380 million euros) in New York in 2017.
The auction, dedicated to the collection of cosmetics magnate Leonard A. Lauder, who died last June, had been heralded for months as one of the most anticipated events of the year. Expectations did not disappoint: the room was packed, the atmosphere tense, and Klimt’s masterpiece – which had never appeared on the market before – sparked a fierce competition between international collectors who exceeded all expectations to win the portrait of Klimt’s patron’s daughter, commissioned by her parents in 1914.
Leonard Lauder purchased the painting in 1985 from the Serge Sabarsky gallery. It was not until 2023 that Sotheby’s broke Klimt’s previous record with «Lady with a Fan», selling for 108.8 million dollars. Last night the new record symbolically surpassed that milestone, redefining the artist’s value on the international market and confirming his central role in European modernism.
Work
Created between 1914 and 1916, the «Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer» represents one of the absolute pinnacles of Klimt’s artistic maturity: a breakaway Viennese icon, where aristocratic elegance coexists with the decorative sensuality of his signature golden palette and oriental motifs. Young Elisabeth poses in a modernist gown inspired by Paul Poiret fashion, suspended in a dimension of incomparable elegance. The painting is also part of twentieth-century history: confiscated by the Nazis in 1939 and returned to his heirs after the war, it underwent a complicated collecting process before being acquired by Leonard A. Lauder (eldest son of Estée and Joseph Lauder, founders of the cosmetics company of the same name), since then becoming one of the most valuable works still in private hands.
Auction
Accompanying the portrait, two other Klimt lots, again from the same Lauder collection, attracted great attention at Sotheby’s: «Flowering Meadow» sold for 86 million dollars, and «Wooded Slope at Unterach am Attersee», sold for 68.3 million dollars. The evening also honored the figure of Leonard A. Lauder, an extraordinary American patron, with a selection of his collections that marked museums such as the Whitney and the Metropolitan Museum, to which he donated a fundamental collection of Cubism. In total, 24 lots from Lauder’s collection brought $527.5 million at Sotheby’s auction.
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