"A Gustav Klimt portrait painting that helped save the life of its Jewish subject during the Holocaust sold Tuesday for $236.4 million, a record for a modern art piece. Klimt's "Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer" sold after a 20-minute bidding war at Sotheby's in New York, where the flashiest item of the night was a solid gold, fully functioning toilet that went for $12.1 million."
"In an attempt to save herself, Elisabeth Lederer made up a story that Klimt, who was not Jewish and died in 1918, was her father. It helped that the artist spent years working meticulously on her portrait. With help from her former brother-in-law, a high-ranking Nazi official, she convinced the Nazis to give her a document stating that she descended from Klimt. That allowed her to remain safely in Vienna until she died of an illness in 1944."
"The portrait was part of the collection of billionaire Leonard A. Lauder, heir to cosmetics giant The Estée Lauder Companies. He died this year at 92, leaving behind an impressive collection worth more than $400 million. Sotheby's declined to share the identity of the portrait's buyer. The sale topped a previous record for 20th-century art set by an Andy Warhol portrait of Marilyn Monroe, which sold for $195 million in 2022."
The Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, painted by Gustav Klimt between 1914 and 1916, sold for $236.4 million at Sotheby's after a 20-minute bidding war. The six-foot portrait depicts the daughter of a wealthy Viennese family in an East Asian emperor's cloak and survived while other Klimt works burned in a castle fire. Nazis looted the Lederer collection but left the family portraits; Elisabeth Lederer claimed Klimt as her father and, with help from a former brother-in-law who was a Nazi official, obtained a document that allowed her to remain in Vienna until her 1944 death. The painting came from Leonard A. Lauder's collection and surpassed the previous 20th-century art record.
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