This Gustav Klimt painting just became the second most expensive artwork ever sold – it has an incredible backstory

Gustav Klimt's Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer has sold for $236.4 million at a Sotheby’s auction in New York, making it the most expensive modern artwork ever sold and the second most expensive artwork overall, surpassed only by Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi. The sale exceeded pre-auction estimates of $150 million and set a new record for the Austrian artist, eclipsing the $108 million fetched by Lady with a Fan in 2023.

Painted between 1914 and 1916, the full-length portrait depicts Elisabeth Lederer, the daughter of Klimt’s principal patrons, August and Serena Lederer. She is wearing a white imperial Chinese robe and standing before a blue tapestry adorned with East Asian-inspired motifs, lending her an almost mythic presence reminiscent of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Art historians have noted that Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer exemplifies the transition from Klimt's ‘Golden Period’ to a more psychologically intense, richly coloured style bordering on Expressionism.

The painting’s value stems not only from its artistic brilliance but also from its extraordinary story. The Lederers, one of Vienna’s wealthiest Jewish families, saw their art collection looted by the Nazis following Austria’s annexation in 1938. Remarkably, this painting survived, while many of Klimt’s works were destroyed in a fire set in 1945 by retreating Nazis to prevent them from falling into Allied hands.

But this is only half of the portrait’s story. It also, remarkably, played a role in Elisabeth’s survival: facing the threat of deportation to concentration camps, she fabricated a claim that Klimt, who was not Jewish but was known for his affairs, was her biological father. Her mother supported the claim with a sworn affidavit. A high-ranking Nazi official, who was Elisabeth’s former brother-in-law, aided the ruse, granting her a revised status that allowed her to remain safely in Vienna until her death from illness in 1944.

If you look closely at the portrait, you can see that Klimt has embedded subtle shapes in the robe’s design, echoing the biomorphic forms he learned about in lectures on cell theory and anatomy. Thus, mythological symbols intertwine with notions of lineage and biology, adding profound resonance given that Elisabeth’s bloodline was both the source of her persecution and her salvation. The portrait thus emerges as an emotionally and historically charged visual tapestry.

The painting was returned to Elisabeth’s brother, Erich Lederer, in 1948. In 1985, it entered the private collection of Leonard A Lauder, the Estée Lauder cosmetics heir, who displayed it in his Fifth Avenue home for four decades, until his death in June 2025. The sale of Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer was the centrepiece of the Lauder Collection auction at Sotheby’s new Breuer Building headquarters this week, which brought in a total of $575.5 million.