Why this mysterious Klimt portray offered for $236m

Hidden for many years from public view, the artist’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer has now offered at public sale for a report sum. Why is it so worthwhile?

A mysterious and comparatively little-known portray by Gustav Klimt is now the most costly work of contemporary artwork ever to promote at public sale and the most costly ever to be offered by Sotheby’s. The teasingly complicated canvas, a full-length portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, the daughter of the Austrian artist’s most dedicated patrons, fetched $236.4m (£180m) in New York on 18 November, far outpacing the worth paid two years in the past for Klimt’s Lady with a Fan, 1917-18, which broke information when it offered for $108m (£82m) in London in 2023, making it the most costly portray ever offered at public sale in Europe.

The sale noticed Klimt’s canvas go Andy Warhol’s portrait of Marilyn Monroe, Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, 1964 (which offered at Christie’s in New York in 2022 for $195m), to turn out to be the second priciest murals ever to go below the hammer, behind Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi (Saviour of the World), c 1500, which offered in 2017 for $450.3m (£343m). But what’s it about this practically 2m-tall likeness of a 20 year-old heiress, whose eerily elongated determine appears to chrysalise in a cocoon-like robe of shimmering white silk, that instructions such a jaw-dropping price ticket?

On its floor, Bildnis Elisabeth Lederer (Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer), 1914-16, could seem to lack the overt opulence of better-known work from Klimt’s so-called “Golden Period”, the period during which he produced such glimmering works as his Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907, and The Kiss, 1907-8. Where these luxurious masterpieces glisten with the glamour of the Vienna Secession (the influential motion emphasising inventive freedom that Klimt helped discovered), the lyrical likeness of Lederer, created within the final years of the artist’s life (Klimt died in 1918, aged 55), pulses with a extra psychologically teasing depth. The canvas’s aesthetic riches are copious, if extra hid.

Seized by Nazi officers, who confiscated the Lederer’s huge assortment of Klimts after Austria’s annexation in 1938, the portrait resurfaced into the market within the early Eighties. It was then that it entered the personal holdings of the billionaire inheritor to the Estée Lauder cosmetics fortune, Leonard A Lauder, who died in June 2025. Hidden for many years from public view, the portrait has, in a way, been biding its time, ready to return to the highlight. Whatever the worth tag, the mysterious work is poised lastly to disclose its secrets and techniques. Its extraordinary story blurs reality and symbolism right into a richly charged visible tapestry whose intrigue extends into and out of doors the portray’s floor.

‘Culturally complicated particulars’

Undertaken within the opening years of World War One, the portrait’s prismatic exaltation of Lederer – the daughter of August and Serena Lederer, one among Vienna’s wealthiest Jewish households – may be learn because the final superb gasp of the Golden Age from which it emerged. At first look, the flowery array of deceptively decorative East Asian-influenced motifs – that orbit the younger girl in a stunning timeless stage of celestial blue – and the implosive calm of her darkish eyes transport us from the accelerating turmoil of European historical past, transcending time and place. The audacity of gold on which Klimt beforehand relied has not a lot disappeared as been transmuted, in a sort of reverse alchemy, right into a fearlessness of vibrant, evocative color that borders on the boldness of Expressionism.