NEW YORK — A portrait by Austrian artist Gustav Klimt sold for $236.4 million in New York City on Tuesday, making it the second most expensive piece ever sold at auction and the priciest in the modern art era.
The auction featuring “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer” was hosted by Sotheby’s and attracted six bids over 19 minutes. The auction house declined to identify the buyer of the painting; the sale price includes a buyer’s premium.
The sale topped a previous record for 20th-century art set by an Andy Warhol portrait of Marilyn Monroe that sold for $195 million in 2022.
The most anticipated lot of the evening, Gustav Klimt’s 'Bildnis Elisabeth Lederer (Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer)', has just sold for an astonishing $236.4 million.
— Sotheby's (@Sothebys) November 18, 2025
It now stands as the most valuable work of Modern art ever sold at auction. pic.twitter.com/hZFP1fC47l
The most expensive artwork sold at auction is Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi,” which fetched a $450.3 million price (including the buyer’s premium) in a 2017 Christie’s auction.
The 6-foot tall painting of Lederer, the daughter of Klimt’s prominent patrons -- Serena and August Lederer -- came from the estate of cosmetics heir and billionaire Leonard A. Lauder, who died in June. The portrait, finished between 1914 and 1916, hung for nearly 40 years in Lauder’s New York City apartment.
The portrait was looted by the Nazis and almost destroyed in a fire during World War II. It was kept separate from other Klimt paintings that burned in the fire at an Austrian castle.
The painting also topped the previous auction high for a Klimt painting, which sold for $108 million in 2023.
It depicts the luxurious lifestyle of the Lederer family before Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938. When the Nazis looted the Lederer art collection, they left only the family portraits, which were considered to be “too Jewish” to steal, The Associated Press reported, citing the National Art Gallery of Canada. The gallery previously housed the painting on loan.
In an attempt to save herself from the Nazis, Elisabeth Lederer fabricated a story that Klimt, who was not Jewish and died in 1918, was her father.
She convinced Nazi officials to give her a document stating that she descended from the artist. That allowed her to remain safely in Vienna until she died in 1944.
The artwork was returned to Lederer’s brother, Erich. It remained in Lauder’s possession until he sold it in 1983, according to Sotheby’s.
The auction’s total sales on Tuesday topped $706 million, the highest total ever achieved by Sotheby’s in a single night.
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