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 auctioning history.
Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, a six-foot tall oil-on-canvas 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 the late Estée Lauder heir Leonard A Lauder, who acquired it in 1985 and displayed it for decades in his Fifth Avenue apartment. The work had been estimated at around $150m (£114.14m), but the final hammer price of $236.4m (£179.7m) far exceeded that estimate.
It was the centrepiece of Sotheby’s inaugural sale in its newly acquired Manhattan headquarters, inside its new headquarters in New York’s 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.
At least six bidders competed in a bidding war that lasted nearly 20 minutes, and ended when a telephone bidder represented by Julian Dawes, Sotheby’s vice-chairman and head of Impressionist and modern art, secured the work.
ArtNews reported that the hammer fell at $205m (£156m) before fees, and the room reportedly erupted in applause when Barker brought down the gavel.
“Tonight, we made history at the Breuer,” Helena Newman, Sotheby’s worldwide chairman of Impressionist and modern Art and chairman 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 also 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. With some help from her former brother-in-law who was a high-ranking Nazi official, she managed to secure a document stating that she descended from Klimt, which let her stay safely in Vienna until she died in 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 cosmetics heir Leonard A Lauder, in whose Fifth Avenue apartment it hung for decades.
