A Gustav Klimt portrait painting that helped save the life of its Jewish subject during the Holocaust on Tuesday sold for US$236.4 million, a record for a modern art piece.
Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer sold after a 20-minute bidding war at Sotheby’s in New York, where the flashiest item of the night was a solid gold, fully functioning toilet that went for US$12.1 million.
The 1.8m-tall portrait, painted over three years between 1914 and 1916, depicts the daughter of one of Vienna’s wealthiest families adorned in an East Asian emperor’s cloak. It is one of two full-length portraits by the Austrian artist that remain privately owned.
Photo: Sotheby’s via AP
The work was kept separate from other Klimt paintings that burned in a fire at an Austrian castle.
The colorful painting depicts the Lederer family’s life of luxury before Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938. Nazis looted the Lederer art collection, leaving only the family portraits, which were considered “too Jewish” to be worth stealing, according to the National Gallery of Canada, where the painting was previously on loan.
In an attempt to save herself, Elisabeth Lederer made up a story that Klimt, who was not Jewish and died in 1918, was her father. It helped that the artist spent years working meticulously on her portrait.
With help from her former brother-in-law, a high-ranking Nazi official, she convinced the Nazis to give her a document stating that she descended from Klimt. That allowed her to remain safely in Vienna until she died of an illness in 1944.
Sotheby’s declined to share the identity of the portrait’s buyer.
Later in the evening, an 18-karat-gold toilet by Maurizio Cattelan — the provocative Italian artist known for taping a banana to a wall — hit the auction block. Cattelan has said the 101kg piece, titled America, satirizes superwealth.
“Whatever you eat, a US$200 lunch or a US$2 hot dog, the results are the same, toilet-wise,” he once said.
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