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 file sum. Why is it so invaluable?

A mysterious and comparatively little-known portray by Gustav Klimt is now the costliest work of contemporary artwork ever to promote at public sale and the costliest 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 value paid two years in the past for Klimt’s Girl with a Fan, 1917-18, which broke information when it offered for $108m (£82m) in London in 2023, making it the costliest portray ever offered at public sale in Europe.

The sale noticed Klimt’s canvas cross 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 beneath the hammer, behind Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi (Saviour of the World), c 1500, which offered in 2017 for $450.3m (£343m). However what’s it about this almost 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 Interval”, the period wherein he produced such glimmering works as his Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907, and The Kiss, 1907-8. The place 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.

Alamy

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 Nineteen Eighties. It was then that it entered the non-public 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. Regardless of the price ticket, the mysterious work is poised lastly to disclose its secrets and techniques. Its extraordinary story blurs truth 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 Warfare One, the portrait’s prismatic exaltation of Lederer – the daughter of August and Serena Lederer, certainly one of Vienna’s wealthiest Jewish households – will be learn because the final wonderful 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 lady in a blinding 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.