Gustav Klimt’s six-foot-tall painting Bildnis Elisabeth Lederer (Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer (1914-16) sold for $205m ($236.3m with fees) at its auction debut at Sotheby’s in New York on Tuesday night (18 November).
The painting is now the second-most valuable work of art ever sold at auction, surpassing Andy Warhol’s Sage Shot Blue Marilyn (1964) that sold for $195m with fees at Christie’s New York in 2022. Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer is also the most valuable work ever sold by Sotheby’s and broke the auction record for a work by Klimt, eclipsing Dame mit Fächer (Lady with Fan, 1917), which sold for £85.3m (with fees) at Sotheby’s in London in 2023. (The all-time record for a work of art at auction remains the Salvator Mundi attributed to Leonardo Da Vinci, which Christie’s sold for $450.3m in 2017.)
After a nearly 20-minute bidding war that proceeded at times in increments of $5m and sprang back to life after several calls of “fair warning” from auctioneer Oliver Barker, Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer ultimately went to a bidder on the phone with Julian Dawes, Sotheby’s vice chairman and head of Impressionist and modern art. The crowded room at Sotheby’s new headquarters in the former Whitney Museum of Modern Art building on Madison Avenue erupted with applause after Dawes’s bidder outdueled four other phone bidders and one woman seated in one of the front rows.
Gustav Klimt’s Bildnis Elisabeth Lederer (Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, 1914-16) came to market with an on-request estimate $150m (estimates are calculated without fees) and ultimately sold for a hammer price of $205m ($236.3m with fees) Courtesy Sotheby’s
The top lot of the standalone sale of works from the collection of the late billionaire cosmetics heir Leonard A. Lauder, the Klimt hung in Lauder’s home for decades before a long-term loan to the National Gallery of Canada that ended earlier this year.
Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer came to market with an on-request estimate of more than $150m. It was backed by a guarantee and irrevocable bids, ensuring it would achieve a record result. It is one of the last major full-length portraits by Klimt still in private hands.
The painting shows 20-year-old Elisabeth Lederer, the daughter of Jewish industrial magnate August Lederer, dressed in a flowing robe and posed in front of an East Asian art-influenced backdrop. Lederer and his wife, Serena, were Klimt’s most important collectors. So close were the Lederers to Klimt that Elisabeth was able to escape Nazi persecution during the invasion of Austria by claiming Klimt was her biological father. Elisabeth’s portrait was seized by Nazis in 1939 and returned to the family after the Second World War. It has been in Lauder’s collection since the 1980s.
Maurizio Cattelan’s America (2016) was offered with a $9.9m estimate based on its weight in gold Courtesy Sotheby’s
Another buzzy lot Tuesday evening was Maurizio Cattelan’s America (2016), offered as part of the multiple-owner The Now and contemporary art evening sale and widely reported to have been consigned by Steve Cohen, the Museum of Modern Art trustee and billionaire owner of the New York Mets. Sotheby’s had set the estimate for the 18-karat gold, fully functional toilet at just over $9.9m based on the value of the gold used to make it as of 5pm on Tuesday. However, the work was met by an auction room seemingly drained of interest.
America garnered a single bid, from a client on the phone with Sotheby’s vice chairman for science and natural history Cassandra Hatton, and sold for a hammer price of $10m ($12.1m with fees). A cryptic announcement by Sotheby’s after the sale said the work had “sold to a famous American brand”, but a spokesperson for the auction house declined to elaborate.
The result for America fell short of Cattelan’s auction record, which remains $17.2m, set in 2016 at Christie’s New York by the sculpture Him (2001), which consists of a kneeling, child-like depiction of Adolf Hitler.
Sotheby’s said this iteration of America is the only known version still in existence. Another edition was installed in a bathroom at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, where it drew more than 100,000 users during a year-long run. That piece was later loaned to Blenheim Palace in the UK in 2019, but was stolen just two days after it went on display. Two men were convicted in the case earlier this year, and investigators believe the gold toilet was ultimately melted down and destroyed.
This story will be updated with a full report from the night’s sales at Sotheby’s.
