A painting by Gustav Klimt just became the most expensive piece of modern art to be sold at auction.
The Austrian painter’s work Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer sold at Sotheby’s in New York for $236 million on Tuesday. Six bidders sought the piece, which was painted between 1914 and 1916 and was part of a collection from late billionaire Leonard A. Lauder, heir to the Estée Lauder Companies. Sotheby’s did not disclose the buyer’s identity.
Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer features the then 20-year-old daughter of one of Klimt’s patrons, the Jewish industrial magnate August Lederer. The painting was stored separately from other Klimt works, which were later destroyed in a fire at an Austrian castle during World War II.
In 1938 and 1939, the Nazis raided the Lederer art collection, as they did with those of many Jewish collectors at the time. However, Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer was left behind, deemed “too Jewish” to be valuable, according to the National Gallery of Canada.
In order to survive Nazi rule as a Jewish woman, Elisabeth claimed that the late Klimt — who was not Jewish and was known for his philandering around the time of her birth — was her biological father. The scheme worked, and the Nazis provided documentation to Elisabeth indicating that she had a non-Jewish father. Elisabeth died in 1944.
Elisabeth’s portrait resurfaced in the 1980s, when Lauder added it to his personal collection, keeping it out of public view. It was featured in the exhibition Klimt and the Women of Vienna’s Golden Age at the Neue Galerie in New York City from September 2016 to January 2017 and was then loaned to the National Gallery of Canada in 2017, where it remained until earlier this year. Lauder died in June 2025, leading to the auction of Klimt’s work.
Though Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer is the most expensive piece of modern art to sell at auction, it is not the most expensive painting overall. That title goes to Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, which fetched $450.3 million at Christie’s in New York in November 2017. Five Klimt pieces from Lauder’s collection sold at the auction this week at a combined cost of $392 million.
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