Why this mysterious Klimt painting sold for $236m

A portrait of the artist Elisabeth Lederer, hidden from public view for decades, has been sold at auction for a record amount. Why is it so valuable?

A mysterious and relatively little-known Gustav Klimt painting has become the most expensive modern art piece ever sold at auction and the most expensive work ever sold by Sotheby’s. A teasingly complex canvas, a full-length portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, the daughter of the Austrian artist’s most ardent patron, sold for $236.4 million (£180 million) in New York. November 18thThis far exceeded the price two years ago for Klimt’s Woman with a Fan (1917-18), which sold for $108 million (about £82 million) in London in 2023, making it the highest price ever sold for a painting at auction in Europe.

The sale makes Klimt’s canvas the second most expensive artwork in history, surpassing Andy Warhol’s portrait of Marilyn Monroe, 1964, which sold for $195 million at Christie’s in New York in 2022, and behind Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, sold around 1500. In 2017 it was $450.3m (£343m). But why does this portrait of a 2m-tall 20-year-old heiress, eerily elongated as if pupated in a cocoon-like dress of shimmering white silk, command such an eye-popping price?

On the surface, Bildonis Elisabeth Lederer (Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer), 1914-16 may seem to lack the overt opulence of Klimt’s better-known paintings from his so-called “golden period,” a time when he produced such brilliant works as Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907, and The Kiss, 1907-8. While these sumptuous masterpieces glow with the flamboyance of the Vienna Secession, an influential movement emphasizing artistic freedom that Klimt helped found, Lederer’s lyrical portraits, produced in the artist’s later years (Klimt died in 1918 at age 55), pulse with a more psychologically caustic intensity. The aesthetic richness of the canvas is richer if it is more hidden.

Alamy

After the annexation of Austria in 1938, Lederer’s extensive Klimt collection was confiscated by Nazi officials, but the portrait reappeared on the market in the early 1980s. That’s when it became the private property of billionaire Leonard A. Lauder of the Estée Lauder cosmetics fortune. People who died in June 2025. Hidden from public view for decades, the portrait was, in a sense, biding its time, waiting to be brought back into the spotlight. Whatever the price tag, this mysterious piece is finally ready to reveal its secrets. Its extraordinary story blurs fact and symbolism into a richly colored visual tapestry whose intrigue extends both within and beyond the painting’s surface.

“Culturally complex details”

Created in the early years of World War I, this elevated portrait of Lederer, the daughter of August and Selena Lederer from one of Vienna’s wealthiest Jewish families, can be read as the last glorious gasp of the Golden Age. At first glance, an elaborate array of seemingly decorative East Asian-influenced motifs – circling a young woman in a dazzling, timeless setting of celestial blue – and the imploding stillness of her dark eyes transport us beyond time and place, out of the accelerating turmoil of European history. The boldness of gold, on which Klimt had previously relied, has not gone away, but has just been transformed, by a kind of reverse alchemy, into a fearlessness of bright, evocative colors that approximates the boldness of Expressionism.