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Washington: A World War I-era painting by Austrian master Gustav Klimt has sold for $US236.4 million ($366 million) in New York, making it the second most expensive painting ever sold at auction, and breaking the record for a modern artwork.
Klimt’s six-foot tall Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, which depicted the daughter of one of Vienna’s wealthiest families, sold for $US205 million ($317 million) under the hammer, plus fees, after a 20-minute bidding war.
Painted between 1914 and 1916, the portrait played a role in Elisabeth Lederer’s deception of the Nazis after Austria was annexed in the 1930s.Credit: Sotheby’s via AP
It helped deliver Sotheby’s its highest ever total for a single auction night, $US706 million, driven chiefly by billionaire Estée Lauder heir Leonard Lauder’s collection, which netted more than $US527 million.
Lauder’s collection, including several Klimts, Matisses, Piccasos, a van Gogh and an Edvard Munch, generally outsold price estimates. Lauder died in June, aged 92.
Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer sold for $US236.4 million including fees.Credit: Ben Sklar
The audience cheered as the price for Lederer hit $US200 million, and again, with greater gusto, when the hammer finally came down. “That is a record for any work of art ever sold at Sotheby’s – somewhat unsurprisingly, of course – and also the highest price for any modern work of art ever sold at auction,” said auctioneer Oliver Barker.
The colourful painting depicts the Lederer family’s life of luxury before Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938. Elisabeth, as a Jewish divorcee, was in grave danger. Ultimately, the painting helped save her life.
She penned a memoir about her young life which falsely claimed Klimt, not August Lederer, as her biological father. “After various types of examinations, Elisabeth was recognised as the artist’s illegitimate daughter and therefore as possessing some of his ‘Aryan’ blood,” Sotheby’s said.
The Nazis, possibly seeing the family portraits as “too Jewish” looking, put them in storage instead of displaying them as they did with the other seized paintings from the Lederer collection. The portraits were returned to the family after the war.
Lederer was reportedly sold by financier Steve Cohen, one of the wealthiest men in America, who also owns the New York Mets baseball team.
Sotheby’s declined to confirm the vendor or 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 $US195 million in 2022. The most expensive artwork ever sold at auction is Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, which netted $US450 million in 2017.
The gold toilet by Maurizio Cattelan.Credit: Ben Sklar
Tuesday night’s auction was the first at Sotheby’s new home in the renovated Breuer building on Madison Avenue, which once housed the Whitney Museum of American Art and then briefly the Frick Collection.
While the Klimt painting took prize position, much of the pre-auction hype focused on a work of a different nature – a 101.2kg useable toilet, made from gold, by the Italian conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan.
It is the second known fabrication of Cattelan’s concept, called America. The first was installed at New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 2016. Curator Nancy Spector famously offered to loan it to President Donald Trump after the White House requested a van Gogh.
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Later, that toilet was loaned to Blenheim Place in the United Kingdom, where it was stolen in 2019. Two men were found guilty of the heist earlier this year, but the artwork itself was never found. It is assumed the thieves melted it down for sale.
But at Tuesday night’s auction, America failed to live up to the hype, selling after a single bid for the toilet’s value in gold, plus fees ($US12.1 million). A Sotheby’s spokesperson told The New York Times the sculpture was purchased by “a famous American brand”.
With AP
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