Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer

The second most expensive work of art ever sold at auction, and a painting whose price is inseparable from the reason it still exists. Klimt was commissioned in 1914 by August and Serena Lederer, his principal patrons, to paint their twenty-year-old daughter. He worked on it for two years, would not call it finished, and it was reportedly taken off his easel in 1916 by Serena. The Lederers were the only family for whom Klimt painted three generations of women, and after his death in 1918 Serena bought his estate.

The collection was impounded at the family's Vienna apartment on 26 November 1938 and seized by the courts a year later. Most of the Lederer Klimts, including the three Faculty Paintings, burned at Schloss Immendorf on 8 May 1945. This canvas was not sent there, because under Nazi rules a portrait of a Jewish sitter was not worth confiscating; it survived because the regime that stole it did not want it. Elisabeth herself survived the deportations in Vienna by petitioning to have Klimt recognised as her father, a fiction her mother swore to from exile, which in 1940 got her reclassified as half-Jewish while her brothers remained full Jews. She died of illness in October 1944.

The seizure was terminated on 30 September 1948 and the painting returned to her brother Erich in Geneva. Serge Sabarsky bought it from him by 1983; Leonard Lauder bought it from Sabarsky in December 1985 and kept it for forty years. On 18 November 2025 it came to auction for the first time in its existence, hammering at 205 million dollars and totalling 236,360,000 with fees. It is not the Adele Bloch-Bauer case: there was no sixty-five-year fight with a state museum here, and that difference is precisely what the buyer was paying for.

A commission that took three years and had to be taken away from him

Oil on canvas, 180.4 by 130.5 centimetres, signed Gustav Klimt towards the lower right. That is roughly six feet by four: a full-length, life-size standing portrait, which in Klimt's practice is the largest and most expensive thing a private client could commission. August and Serena Lederer ordered it in 1914, when their daughter Elisabeth was twenty and still living at home. Klimt was paid 35,000 crowns.

He then worked on it for two years and would not call it finished. The story preserved in the literature is that in 1916 Serena Lederer went to the studio, decided the picture was done, and took it off the easel over the artist's objection. It is the sort of anecdote that usually dissolves under checking; this one is carried in Tobias Natter's complete-paintings catalogue, in the National Gallery of Canada's account, and in Sotheby's own 2025 lot essay, and it is consistent with the physical evidence. The upper background is unresolved in a way the rest of the canvas is not.

Klimt died in February 1918, two years after the picture left his studio. He never got it back to finish.

Klimt painted three generations of this one family

August Lederer was a Bohemian-born industrialist who built a fortune on distilleries; by the 1910s the Lederers were reckoned the second wealthiest family in Vienna after the Rothschilds. Serena Pulitzer Lederer, whom Josef Hoffmann called the best-dressed woman in Vienna, was the driving force behind the collection. They lived at Bartensteingasse 8, minutes from Klimt's studio, with a room in the flat given over to Klimt and the interiors executed by the Wiener Werkstaette circle.

Klimt painted Serena in 1899, a picture that is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He painted Elisabeth between 1914 and 1916. He painted Serena's mother, Charlotte Pulitzer, in 1917. Three generations of women in one family, which Sotheby's calls a distinction unparalleled in his career. The only other sitter he painted more than once was Adele Bloch-Bauer.

The scale of the patronage matters for reading the price. The Lederer collection held Philosophy and Jurisprudence from the Faculty Paintings, the Beethoven Frieze, Music, Schubert at the Piano, Water Snakes I, Friends II, the family portraits, landscapes, and more than twenty-five major drawings acquired in 1919. When Klimt died, Serena Lederer bought his estate. For a period of about twenty years, one Viennese family was the single largest private repository of this artist's work in the world, and Klimt in turn depended on them: writing to Serena for an advance on her mother's portrait, he asked for what he called the meagre rest of the fee, saying he was waiting for it like the devil for a poor soul.

An emperor's robe, and what infrared found under it

Elisabeth stands frontally at the centre, in a close-fitting white top and skirt under a floral chiffon shawl, on a pink and orange carpet whose green and white roundels recall Chinese jade and whose borders recall Hoffmann and Wimmer-Wisgrill designs for the Wiener Werkstaette. The dress is contemporary Parisian: the ambiguous trouser-like fall of the skirt derives from Paul Poiret's hobble skirt and his Chinese-inflected tunics, which were the height of fashion in the early 1910s.

Behind her stands a field of small figures drawn from Chinese material culture and Peking opera, scholars and low-ranking military types and courtiers with lanterns, each separate, all attending on her. Klimt owned ukiyo-e prints, kimonos, Qing court robes and a library of East Asian art books, and the blue garment forming her train has been identified as a late Qing dragon robe of the Guangxu period. Kirsten Appleyard of the National Gallery of Canada makes the sharper point: two light blue dragons rise from crested waves on the robe, and with the other symbols present that makes it an emperor's cloak. Klimt used Asian motifs in several late pictures. This is the only portrait in which he put imperial iconography on the sitter.

Infrared reflectography shows he changed his mind. Additional background figures once occupied the empty space above the carpet and were painted out. Traces of underdrawing remain visible in the white garment. Klimt made many preparatory drawings of Elisabeth but developed the ornament directly on the canvas, which is the opposite of the procedure a decorator would follow and part of why the picture took three years.

It left the Lederer collection exactly once before the war, travelling across a Europe at war to the Austrian art exhibition at the Liljevalchs Konsthall in Stockholm in 1917, where the Swedish art historian Andreas Lindblom described a figure who had walked on a road of flowers to her magic carpet, the precious stones of her eyes betraying her humanity.

What is documented about how Elisabeth Lederer survived

This is the part that press coverage compresses into a sentence, and the compression loses the whole point.

Elisabeth Franziska Lederer was born in Vienna on 20 January 1894. She trained at the Imperial-Royal School of Arts and Crafts under Michael Powolny, on Klimt's suggestion, and worked as a sculptor. In 1921 she married Baron Wolfgang von Bachofen-Echt and converted to Protestantism. Their only child, August Anton, died in 1938 at the age of four; the marriage ended in divorce the same year. Her father was already dead. After the Anschluss her mother fled to Budapest and her brothers left the country. She was a divorced Jewish woman alone in Vienna in 1938, which under the Nuremberg framework was close to the worst position available.

What she then did is documented, and it is more specific than the shorthand suggests. In 1939 she wrote a memoir of her childhood emphasising her closeness to Klimt. She submitted it as part of a petition to have Gustav Klimt, who was not Jewish, recognised as her biological father. Serena Lederer, writing from exile in Hungary, swore an affidavit that Elisabeth was the product of an adulterous affair with the painter. The Reich office for genealogical research accepted the petition, and in 1940 Elisabeth received a certificate of descent. She was also, on one account, assisted by a senior Nazi official who was a former brother-in-law.

The precise legal effect is the fact worth carrying. The certificate did not make her Aryan. It reclassified her as half-Jewish, a Mischling of the first degree, while her brothers Erich and Fritz remained classified as full Jews. That reclassification was enough to keep her out of the deportations. She stayed in Vienna and died there of illness on 19 October 1944, at fifty, seven months before the end of the war in Europe. She is buried at Hietzing cemetery, near Klimt.

Two things should be kept apart. That the petition was made, that Serena swore to it, that the certificate was issued in 1940, and that it produced a Mischling classification are all documented. That Klimt was actually her father is not: art historians have concluded it was a fiction, invented to save her life and corroborated under oath by a mother who knew exactly what she was signing. The claim survives as family legend precisely because it worked. It should not be repeated as biography.

Why this picture is not ash

The confiscation is documented to the day. The painting was impounded in situ at Bartensteingasse 8 by the Zentralstelle for the protection of monuments on 26 November 1938. It was seized by the Vienna Landesgericht and deposited at Kirchner and Co in Vienna on 10 December 1939. Serena Lederer's collection was formally confiscated from her in 1940.

The bulk of the Lederer Klimts went to Schloss Immendorf in Lower Austria, the country seat of the Freudenthal family, used as a supposedly safe wartime depot. On 8 May 1945, the last day of the war in Europe, the castle burned. The cause has never been established; the standing presumption is arson by retreating German troops, possibly the Feldherrnhalle tank corps, to keep the contents from the Red Army.

What burned there is the reason Klimt's late work is scarce. The three Faculty Paintings for the university's ceremonial hall went, with their composition studies. So did the overdoor paintings Music and Schubert at the Piano from the Dumba palace, and, from the expropriated Lederer collection, The Golden Apple Tree (1903), Country Garden with Calvary (1912), Wally (1916), Friends II (1916/17), Garden Path with Chickens (1916) and Leda (1917). Accounts of the total range from about ten Klimts to fifteen depending on what is counted.

This portrait was never sent to Immendorf. The reason is grotesque and it is the single most important fact in the object's history. Under the applicable Nazi rules, portraits of Jewish sitters were not considered worth confiscating for the Reich's own collections. Being a picture of a Jewish woman disqualified it from the treatment that destroyed the rest of the collection. It stayed in Vienna, ending up at the Dorotheum, and it survived because the regime that stole it did not want it.

1948, and the price Austria charged for the door

The seizure was terminated on 30 September 1948 and the painting restituted that year to Erich Lederer, Elisabeth's brother, then living in Geneva. Both surviving Lederer portraits, Serena's and Elisabeth's, had been scheduled for a Dorotheum sale in Vienna in 1948; Erich stopped it and secured their return. Serena had died in Budapest in 1943 and never saw any of it back.

Restitution and export are two different things, and Austria kept them apart deliberately. The Beethoven Frieze, recovered from the Altaussee salt mine in 1945, was formally returned to Erich Lederer but could not leave the country. He spent a quarter of a century trying. In 1973 he sold the frieze to the Austrian state for 750,000 dollars, described by the family as roughly half its market value, in exchange for Chancellor Bruno Kreisky granting export licences for the family's other Klimt pictures. Members of the family lodged a claim for the frieze in 2013; the Austrian art restitution advisory board rejected it in 2015, finding that Erich had negotiated the price voluntarily, and the government upheld that.

So the Lederer restitution is not a clean story with a happy ending. It is a partial recovery obtained at a discount, from a state that used its export regime as leverage, and the reckoning over that leverage was still running in 2015. Whether this specific portrait was among the pictures whose export licences were granted under the 1973 arrangement is not established in the published sources, and this record does not assume it.

Sabarsky, Lauder, and forty years off the market

Erich Lederer sold the portrait to the Serge Sabarsky Gallery in New York; Sotheby's records it acquired by 1983, and Erich died in Geneva in January 1985. Sabarsky is the right dealer for this object in a way that is not coincidence. Born Siegfried Sabarsky in Vienna in 1912, he worked as a clown and set designer at the Simplicissimus cabaret, fled the Nazis in 1938 to Paris and in 1939 to New York, and opened a Madison Avenue gallery in 1968 that did more than any other to build an American market for Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka. With Ronald Lauder he planned the Neue Galerie, which opened in 2001, five years after his death in 1996.

Leonard A. Lauder, Ronald's elder brother, acquired the painting from Sabarsky in December 1985 for an undisclosed sum. It hung above his dining table on Fifth Avenue for four decades. He lent it, always anonymously, to the Belvedere's Klimt's Women in Vienna in 2000 to 2001, to several Neue Galerie shows including Klimt and the Women of Vienna's Golden Age in 2016 to 2017 where it was reunited with Serena's portrait, and then on long-term loan to the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa from 2017 until the sale. Lauder died on 14 June 2025 at ninety-two, having already given a Cubist collection valued at over a billion dollars to the Metropolitan Museum. The remaining fifty-five works, valued at more than 400 million dollars, went to Sotheby's, with proceeds to the Lauder trust.

The sale

Lot 8, Leonard A. Lauder, Collector, Evening Auction, Sotheby's New York, 18 November 2025, the sale that inaugurated the house's new headquarters in the Breuer building. The estimate was published as Upon Request; the figure briefed to the press before the sale was in the region of 150 million dollars. The lot carried both of Sotheby's disclosure symbols: guaranteed property, and an irrevocable bid. Neither the guarantee level nor the identity of the irrevocable bidder is disclosed.

Oliver Barker opened it at 130 million dollars. It ran about twenty minutes and came down to two telephone bidders, one with David Galperin and one with Julian Dawes. Dawes's client won.

The hammer was 205,000,000 dollars. With buyer's premium the total was 236,360,000 dollars. Both figures matter and most coverage carries only one: Sotheby's rounds it to 236.4 million, The Art Newspaper and others truncate to 236.3 million, and the two are the same number. It is the most expensive work of modern art ever sold at auction and the second most expensive work of art of any kind, behind the Leonardo Salvator Mundi at 450.3 million dollars in 2017. It roughly doubled Klimt's previous auction record, 85.3 million pounds with fees, about 108.4 million dollars, for Lady with a Fan at Sotheby's London in June 2023. It was also the most valuable work Sotheby's has ever sold.

It was the picture's first appearance at auction in its existence. The twenty-four-lot evening sale was a white glove, 456.2 million dollars hammer and 527.4 million with fees; Sotheby's puts the Lauder collection at 531.3 million dollars across two sessions.

One caution belongs on the currency. Every dollar figure here is the sale currency, and any euro or sterling equivalent a reader encounters is derived and depends on the day it was converted.

This is not the Woman in Gold case

Press coverage and general readers routinely fold this picture into the story of Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I and Maria Altmann. They are different cases in nearly every structural respect, and the difference is the whole reason this painting could be sold in a public saleroom in 2025 without a cloud on it.

The Adele case was a dispute with the Republic of Austria that ran for sixty-five years. The picture went to the Austrian Gallery Belvedere in December 1941 under a claimed reading of Adele Bloch-Bauer's 1923 will, which had expressed a wish rather than a binding bequest and which in any event concerned works Ferdinand owned, not she. The museum kept it, renamed it Dame in Gold to obscure the sitter, and denied it was looted. It took Hubertus Czernin's archival work in 1998, a claim by Ferdinand's niece Maria Altmann with E. Randol Schoenberg, a ruling by the United States Supreme Court in 2004 that Austria could be sued at all, and an Austrian arbitration panel in 2006 before five paintings were returned. Altmann then sold the Adele portrait to Ronald Lauder for 135 million dollars so that it would sit in a public museum, the Neue Galerie, where it is today.

Elisabeth Lederer's portrait was restituted in 1948, three years after the war, by a court terminating its own seizure, to the family's own heir, without litigation and without an adversary museum. Austria's leverage over the Lederers was exercised on export, and above all on the Beethoven Frieze, not on this canvas. The title has then been unbroken through two owners for seventy-seven years, forty of them in one American collection, with no claim ever brought against it in the sources consulted.

That is what a resolved Nazi-era break in title looks like, and it is worth being precise about how rare it is. The overwhelming majority of works taken between 1938 and 1945 have no such record: they were destroyed, like ten to fifteen of this family's other Klimts at Immendorf; or they are still contested, like the frieze in 2015; or they simply vanished, like Klimt's portrait of Charlotte Pulitzer, missing since 1945 and never found. A documented seizure with a documented termination is not a blemish on this picture's provenance. In this market it is the strongest condition a Nazi-era object can be in, and part of what 236 million dollars bought.