Gustav Klimt’s six-foot-tall Bildnis Elisabeth Lederer (Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer (1914-16) bought for $205m ($236.3m with charges) at its public sale debut at Sotheby’s New York on Tuesday evening (18 November).
After a virtually 20-minute bidding warfare that proceeded at occasions in increments of $5m and sprang again to life after a number of “honest warnings” from auctioneer Oliver Barker, the portray in the end went to a bidder on the cellphone with Julian Dawes, Sotheby’s vice chairman and head of Impressionist and trendy artwork. The crowded room at Sotheby’s new headquarters within the former Whitney Museum of Trendy Artwork constructing on Madison Avenue erupted with applause after Dawes’s bidder outdueled 4 different cellphone bidders and one girl seated in one of many entrance rows.
Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer is the second-most worthwhile murals ever bought at public sale, surpassing Andy Warhol’s Sage Shot Blue Marilyn (1964) that bought for $195m with charges at Christie’s New York in 2022. The portray can also be probably the most worthwhile work ever bought by Sotheby’s. Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer additionally broke Klimt’s public sale document, surpassing Dame mit Fächer (Girl with Fan, 1917), which bought for £85.3m (with charges) at Sotheby’s in London in 2023.
The highest lot of the standalone sale of works from the gathering of the late billionaire cosmetics inheritor Leonard A. Lauder, it hung in Lauder’s house for many years earlier than a long-term mortgage to the Nationwide Gallery of Canada that ended earlier this yr.
Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer got here to market with an on-request estimate of greater than $150m. It was backed by a assure and irrevocable bids, making certain it could obtain a document consequence. It is likely one of the final main full-length portraits by Klimt nonetheless in non-public arms.
The portray exhibits 20-year-old Elisabeth Lederer, the daughter of Jewish industrial magnate August Lederer, wearing a flowing gown and posed in entrance of an East Asian art-influenced backdrop. Lederer and his spouse, Serena, have been Klimt’s most essential collectors. So shut have been the Lederers to Klimt that Elisabeth was in a position to escape Nazi persecution throughout the invasion of Austria by claiming Klimt was her organic father. Elisabeth’s portrait was seized by Nazis in 1939 and returned to the household after the Second World Warfare. It has been in Lauder’s assortment because the Eighties.
This story can be up to date with a full report from the evening’s gross sales at Sotheby’s.
