Klimt Dethrones Warhol and Picasso with a Triple Record

A hammer stroke turned Gustav Klimt into Gustav 'King'. 'Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer', a rare and seductive work by the Austrian painter, became ... yesterday the most expensive modern painting in history. Sold for $236.4 million (about 205 million euros), it set a new triple record: for the piece, for its author, and for the auctioneer, dethroning Warhol and Picasso.

Until then, Andy Warhol had held the crown as the auction king thanks to 'Shot Sage Blue Marilyn', the blue portrait of the legendary actress which fetched $195 million in 2022. He was followed by the Malaga genius with 'Les Femmes d'Alger (Version O)', awarded for $179.4 million in 2015.

The 'Klimt-King' portrait would also be the second most expensive work in the market overall, behind Leonardo Da Vinci's controversial 'Salvator Mundi', which reportedly sold for $450 million in a private sale. An American company might have purchased the Klimt work, but Sotheby's did not provide details. We will have to wait to get them.

Klimt painted the modernist portrait of Elisabeth Lederer between 1914 and 1916. It is one of two full-body portraits by the Austrian painter that remain in private hands. The dazzling piece was in the formidable collection of Leonard Lauder, a cosmetics king as heir to an empire, who passed away last June.

Patrons

Klimt portrayed the young daughter of his patrons with a sumptuous Chinese shawl. Daughter of the industrialist August Lederer and his wife Serena, she called Klimt "uncle". When the Nazis invaded Austria, she claimed that the painter was her biological father trying to prove she had no Jewish blood.

Confiscated by the Nazis, the painting was recovered by the Lederer family and acquired by the son of the businesswoman Estée Lauder in the 1980s. For four decades, it was in Lauder's luxurious apartment on Fifth Avenue in New York, very close to where it found its new owner, the brand-new Sotheby's headquarters in the former Whitney Museum building, the imposing brutalist block by Marcel Breuer.

The price of the Klimt canvas was expected to reach $150 million. But its rarity awakened the predatory instincts of major collectors. Six of them contested the piece, driving up its price in a tight bid that lasted twenty minutes. It soon surpassed $200 million amid the enthusiasm of the crowd that burst into applause. The ovation was thunderous when it climbed to the new triple record.

Until now, the most expensive Klimt painting was the legendary 'Lady with a Fan'. It was the last portrait he painted before his unexpected death in 1918 and was sold in 2023 for almost one hundred million euros at Sotheby's in London.

The definitive and historic hammer stroke sounded on the second day of the auction season of the multinational auction house, with all eyes on 'America', the solid gold toilet by Italian Maurizio Cattelan. It was awarded at a 'modest' $12.1 million (11 million euros). A disappointing figure, just two million above its market price by weight in gold, reached in a single bid.

Landscapes

The second and third most expensive works of the evening were two landscapes by Klimt that had never been auctioned before: 'Flower Field' ('Blumenwiese', 1916), sold for $86 million, and 'Forest Slope at Unterach on the Attersee' ('Waldabhang bei Unterach am Attersee', 1917) sold for $68 million.

In the same session, Sotheby's awarded 24 pieces by other great artists from the Lauder collection, such as Edvard Munch, Henri Matisse, or Vincent van Gogh. The firm raised $527 million, of which $392 million was due to Klimt's works, the three paintings and two drawings. It also marked a milestone in Sotheby's history, surpassing the more than $157 million obtained by Amedeo Modigliani's 'Reclining Nude' in 2018.