Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer by Gustav Klimt sold for a record £180m at Sotheby’s after a 20‑minute bidding war. Painted between 1914 and 1916, the six‑foot portrait survived wartime losses and is one of two full‑length Klimt canvases still privately owned. The sitter used a false paternity claim to remain in Vienna during the Nazi era; the work came from Leonard A. Lauder’s collection. The sale makes Klimt the most expensive modern artist at auction.
Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer Sells for Record £180m After Intense Sotheby’s Bidding War
Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer by Gustav Klimt sold for a record £180m at Sotheby’s after a 20‑minute bidding war. Painted between 1914 and 1916, the six‑foot portrait survived wartime losses and is one of two full‑length Klimt canvases still privately owned. The sitter used a false paternity claim to remain in Vienna during the Nazi era; the work came from Leonard A. Lauder’s collection. The sale makes Klimt the most expensive modern artist at auction.
05:59 PM, 11/19/2025Culture
Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, a full‑length Gustav Klimt painting, fetched a record £180m at Sotheby’s in New York after a 20‑minute bidding contest between six bidders.
Painted between 1914 and 1916 and standing about six feet tall, the work depicts Elisabeth Lederer — the daughter of one of Vienna’s wealthiest families — draped in an East Asian emperor’s cloak. It is one of only two full‑length Klimt portraits still in private hands and was kept apart from other Klimt works that were lost in a castle fire during World War II.
The portrait evokes the world the Lederer family inhabited before Austria’s annexation by Nazi Germany in 1938. Although Nazis looted much of the family’s art collection, they reportedly left behind some family portraits they considered "too Jewish" to be worth taking, according to the National Gallery of Canada, where the painting had previously been on loan.
In a bid to protect herself, Elisabeth Lederer obtained a document asserting Gustav Klimt — who was not Jewish and who died in 1918 — was her father. With assistance from a former brother‑in‑law who served as a high‑ranking Nazi official, she secured papers that allowed her to remain in Vienna; she later died of natural causes in 1944.
The painting was part of the collection of Leonard A. Lauder, heir to The Estée Lauder Companies, whose collection was reported to be worth more than $400m. Lauder died in June at the age of 92. Sotheby’s did not disclose the identity of the buyer.
The £180m sale surpasses the previous record for 20th‑century art — an Andy Warhol portrait of Marilyn Monroe that sold for $195m in 2022 — making the Klimt work the most expensive modern artwork sold at auction and the second‑highest auction price ever, behind Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi (which sold for over $450m in 2017).
Sotheby’s said five Klimt works from Lauder’s collection sold at the auction for a combined $392m. Other lots included paintings by Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse and Edvard Munch.
Gold Toilet and Other Notable Lots
Also attracting attention was an 18‑karat gold, fully functioning toilet by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan titled America, which sold for more than £9m. Weighing roughly 101kg and created in 2016, the work is a satirical comment on wealth and consumption; Cattelan has quipped, "whatever you eat, a $200 lunch or a $2 hot dog, the results are the same, toilet‑wise."
One of the two copies of the plumbed gold commode was exhibited at New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 2016; another was displayed at Blenheim Palace in England and later stolen. Two men were convicted in relation to that theft, though investigators believe the stolen work may have been dismantled and melted down. A version of the gold lavatory was shown at Sotheby’s headquarters in New York in the run‑up to the sale.
The auction underlined how masterpieces combine artistic significance with complex provenance — from wartime survival and disputed ownership to modern works that comment on wealth and value.