Gustav Klimt Portrait That Saved Its Subject from the Nazis Sells for a Record $236 Million

A portrait by painter Gustav Klimt, which helped save the life of its Jewish subject during the Holocaust, reached $236.4 million on Tuesday, a record for a modern work of art.

The “Portrait of Fräulein Elisabeth Lederer” was sold after a 20-minute bidding war at Sotheby's in New York, in an auction where the most striking item was a fully functional solid gold toilet that fetched $12.1 million.

The portrait, standing 1.8 meters tall and painted between 1914 and 1916, depicts the daughter of one of Vienna's wealthiest families adorned in an East Asian emperor's mantle. It is one of only two full-length portraits by the Austrian artist that remain in private hands. The work was separated from other Klimt paintings that were destroyed in a fire at an Austrian castle.

The colorful painting represents the Lederer family's luxurious life before Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938. The Nazis looted their art collection but spared the family portraits, which were deemed “too Jewish” to be stolen, according to the National Gallery of Canada, where the painting was previously on loan.

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

With the help of her former brother-in-law, a high-ranking Nazi official, she convinced them to issue a document stating she was a descendant of Klimt. This allowed her to remain safely in Vienna until she passed away from an illness in 1944.

The painting was part of the collection of billionaire Leonard A. Lauder, heir to the cosmetics giant The Estée Lauder Companies, who died this year at 92, leaving behind an impressive art collection valued at over $400 million.

Sotheby's did not identify the buyer of the portrait. The auction surpassed the previous record for a 20th-century work set by an Andy Warhol portrait of Marilyn Monroe, which sold for $195 million in 2022.

Five Klimt pieces from the Lauder collection were also sold on Tuesday for a combined $392 million, according to Sotheby's.

Other notable sales of the evening included pieces by Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, and Edvard Munch.

Later in the evening, an 18-karat gold toilet by Maurizio Cattelan, the provocative Italian artist known for duct-taping a banana to a wall, went up for auction. According to the artist, the 101-kilogram (223-pound) work, titled “America,” is a satire of extreme wealth.

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

The toilet, owned by an anonymous collector, was one of two created by Cattelan in 2016. The other was exhibited that year at New York's Guggenheim Museum, which later offered to lend it to U.S. President Donald Trump when he requested to borrow a Van Gogh painting.

That piece was later stolen while on display at Blenheim Palace, the country estate where Winston Churchill was born, in England. Two men were convicted for the toilet's theft, but its fate remains unclear. Investigators do not know its whereabouts but believe it was likely dismantled and melted down.

“America” was on display at Sotheby's New York headquarters in the weeks leading up to the auction. Sotheby's described the piece as “an incisive commentary on the collision between artistic production and commodity value.”