Gustav Klimt’s six-foot-tall Bildnis Elisabeth Lederer (Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer (1914-16) offered 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 conflict that proceeded at occasions in increments of $5m and sprang again to life after a number of “truthful warnings” from auctioneer Oliver Barker, the portray finally 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 Fashionable Artwork constructing on Madison Avenue erupted with applause after Dawes’s bidder outdueled 4 different cellphone bidders and one lady seated in one of many entrance rows.
Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer is the second-most useful murals ever offered at public sale, surpassing Andy Warhol’s Sage Shot Blue Marilyn (1964) that offered for $195m with charges at Christie’s New York in 2022. The portray can be essentially the most useful work ever offered by Sotheby’s. Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer additionally broke Klimt’s public sale report, surpassing Dame mit Fächer (Woman with Fan, 1917), which offered 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, guaranteeing it could obtain a report outcome. It is without doubt one of the final main full-length portraits by Klimt nonetheless in personal arms.
The portray reveals 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 necessary collectors. So shut have been the Lederers to Klimt that Elisabeth was in a position to escape Nazi persecution in the course of 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 shall be up to date with a full report from the evening’s gross sales at Sotheby’s.
