Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer has bought for $236.4 million at a Sotheby’s public sale in New York, making it the costliest trendy paintings ever bought and the second costliest paintings general, surpassed solely by Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi. The sale exceeded pre-auction estimates of $150 million and set a brand new document for the Austrian artist, eclipsing the $108 million fetched by Woman with a Fan in 2023.
Painted between 1914 and 1916, the full-length portrait depicts Elisabeth Lederer, the daughter of Klimt’s principal patrons, August and Serena Lederer. She is carrying a white imperial Chinese language gown and standing earlier than a blue tapestry adorned with East Asian-inspired motifs, lending her an virtually mythic presence paying homage to Botticelli’s Delivery of Venus. Artwork historians have famous that Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer exemplifies the transition from Klimt’s ‘Golden Interval’ to a extra psychologically intense, richly colored model bordering on Expressionism.
Leonard A Lauder public sale Lot 8: Gustav Klimt, Bildnis Elisabeth Lederer (Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer)
(Picture credit score: Sotherby’s)
The portray’s worth stems not solely from its creative brilliance but in addition from its extraordinary story. The Lederers, one among Vienna’s wealthiest Jewish households, noticed their artwork assortment looted by the Nazis following Austria’s annexation in 1938. Remarkably, this portray survived, whereas lots of Klimt’s works have been destroyed in a fireplace set in 1945 by retreating Nazis to forestall them from falling into Allied palms.
However that is solely half of the portrait’s story. It additionally, remarkably, performed a job in Elisabeth’s survival: dealing with the specter of deportation to focus camps, she fabricated a declare that Klimt, who was not Jewish however was identified for his affairs, was her organic father. Her mom supported the declare with a sworn affidavit. A high-ranking Nazi official, who was Elisabeth’s former brother-in-law, aided the ruse, granting her a revised standing that allowed her to stay safely in Vienna till her loss of life from sickness in 1944.
For those who look carefully on the portrait, you possibly can see that Klimt has embedded refined shapes within the gown’s design, echoing the biomorphic kinds he realized about in lectures on cell idea and anatomy. Thus, mythological symbols intertwine with notions of lineage and biology, including profound resonance on condition that Elisabeth’s bloodline was each the supply of her persecution and her salvation. The portrait thus emerges as an emotionally and traditionally charged visible tapestry.
A picture taken by Martin Gerlach in about 1930 of Serena Lederer standing in her salon in entrance of the portrait of her daughter
(Picture credit score: Getty Pictures/brandstaetter photos)
The portray was returned to Elisabeth’s brother, Erich Lederer, in 1948. In 1985, it entered the personal assortment of Leonard A Lauder, the Estée Lauder cosmetics inheritor, who displayed it in his Fifth Avenue house for 4 a long time, till his loss of life in June 2025. The sale of Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer was the centrepiece of the Lauder Assortment public sale at Sotheby’s new Breuer Constructing headquarters this week, which introduced in a complete of $575.5 million.
Supply: Wallpaper
