Gustav Klimt portrait that spared its subject from Nazis breaks modern art record with $236M sale

A Gustav Klimt portrait painting that helped save the life of its Jewish subject during the Holocaust sold Tuesday for $236.4 million, a record for a modern art piece.

Klimt’s “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer” sold after a 20-minute bidding war at Sotheby’s in New York, where the flashiest item of the night was a solid gold, fully functioning toilet that went for $12.1 million.

The 6-foot-tall (1.8-meter-tall) portrait, painted over three years between 1914 and 1916, depicts the daughter of one of Vienna’s wealthiest families adorned in an East Asian emperor’s cloak. It is one of two full-length portraits by the Austrian artist that remain privately owned. The work was kept separate from other Klimt paintings that burned in a fire at an Austrian castle.

The colorful painting depicts the Lederer family’s life of luxury before Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938. Nazis looted the Lederer art collection, leaving only the family portraits, which were considered “too Jewish” to be worth stealing, according to the National Gallery of Canada, where the painting was previously on loan.

In an attempt to save herself, Elisabeth Lederer made up a story that Klimt, who was not Jewish and died in 1918, was her father. It helped that the artist spent years working meticulously on her portrait.

With help from her former brother-in-law, a high-ranking Nazi official, she convinced the Nazis to give her a document stating that she descended from Klimt. That allowed her to remain safely in Vienna until she died of an illness in 1944.

The portrait was part of the collection of billionaire Leonard A. Lauder, heir to cosmetics giant The Estée Lauder Companies. He died this year at 92, leaving behind an impressive collection worth more than $400 million.

Sotheby’s declined to 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 $195 million in 2022.

Five Klimt pieces from Lauder’s collection sold at the auction for a total of $392 million, Sotheby’s said.

Pieces by Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse and Edvard Munch were among other notable sales.

Later in the evening, an 18-karat-gold toilet by Maurizio Cattelan — the provocative Italian artist known for taping a banana to a wall — hit the auction block. Cattelan has said the 223-pound (101-kilogram) piece, titled “America,” satirizes superwealth.

“Whatever you eat, a $200 lunch or a $2 hot dog, the results are the same, toilet-wise,” he once said.

The toilet, owned by an unnamed collector, was one of two that Cattelan created in 2016. The other was displayed in 2016 at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, which pointedly offered to lend it to U.S. President Donald Trump when he asked to borrow a Van Gogh painting.

Then the piece was stolen while on display in England at Blenheim Palace, the country manor where Winston Churchill was born. Two men were convicted in the toilet heist, but it’s unclear what they did with the loo. Investigators aren’t privy to its whereabouts but believe it was likely broken up and melted down.

“America” was exhibited at Sotheby’s New York headquarters in the weeks leading up to the auction. Sotheby’s called the commode an “incisive commentary on the collision of artistic production and commodity value.”