Gustav Klimt’s towering masterpiece Bildnis Elisabeth Lederer has just sold for $236.4 million at Sotheby’s inaugural auction at the Breuer Building in New York, more than doubling the previous auction record for the artist and marking the most valuable work ever sold in Sotheby’s history.
The sale, which occurred Tuesday evening, was part of the Leonard A. Lauder collection. “To see Gustav Klimt’s exquisite portrait of Elisabeth Lederer set a new auction record for the artist is thrilling in itself; to see it become the most valuable work ever sold at Sotheby’s is nothing short of sensational,” says Helena Newman, Chairman of Impressionist and Modern Art Worldwide and Chairman of Sotheby’s Europe. “Klimt is one of those rare artists whose magic is as powerful as it is universal. Since we first announced the sale of the Lauder Collection, this masterpiece has garnered a huge outpouring of love and admiration from around the world, manifest here New York in the tens of thousands of people who came to the Breuer building to see it.”
The Lauder collection sale also included two never-before-offered landscape paintings of Attersee by Klimt, six sculptures by Henri Matisse, and additional works by Picasso, Agnes Martin, and others. “Leonard Lauder’s legacy as a patron and collector is deeply intertwined with the history of postwar American art,” Lisa Dennison, Sotheby’s Chairman Americas, previously said.
Main Image: Gustav Klimt, Porträt der Elisabeth Lederer (Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer) . Photo: Courtesy of Sotheby’s