Tuesday night’s Sotheby’s auction in New York delivered a spectacle woven from history, memory, and provocation. At its center stood a masterpiece by Gustav Klimt, sold for an astonishing $236.4 million, setting a new record for a modern artwork. Yet the audience’s attention was also drawn to a solid-gold toilet by contemporary artist Maurizio Cattelan, a figure known for sharp satire and flamboyant excess.
Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, painted between 1914 and 1916, is one of the very few full-length Klimt figures still in private hands and one of the rare works to survive World War II unscathed. The young Viennese woman appears wrapped in a sumptuous, Asian-inspired cloak, a reflection of the opulence that marked the Austro-Hungarian elite on the brink of the Empire’s collapse. The painting survived because it had been stored separately from the family’s other works: many of Klimt’s canvases were lost in the fire that consumed an Austrian castle in the war’s final days.
Before the 1938 Anschluss, the Lederer family was among Vienna’s most prominent art collectors. After the Nazis’ arrival, their holdings were systematically looted; only the portraits were spared, deemed—according to the National Gallery of Canada—too strongly “marked by their Jewish identity” to interest the occupiers.
Paradoxically, one of those paintings became a tool of survival. To escape persecution, Elisabeth Lederer claimed that Klimt—non-Jewish and deceased since 1918—was her biological father. The artist’s intense devotion to the work lent credibility to the story, and with help from her former brother-in-law, a high-ranking Nazi official, she obtained documents certifying the fabricated lineage. The lie played a part in saving her life.
The painting came from the collection of billionaire Leonard A. Lauder, heir to the Estée Lauder empire, who died early last year. Sotheby’s has not disclosed the identity of the new owner.
