A watershed moment for the November auctions arrived tonight at Sotheby’s, where Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer (1914–16) sold for $236.4 million after 20 minutes of bidding, eclipsing the artist’s previous auction record and instantly becoming one of the most valuable portraits of the 20th century, and the second most expensive artwork ever sold at auction.
The bidding started at $130 million, ultimately leading to a battle between two phone bidders speaking with Sotheby’s specialists, one with David Galperin and the other with Julian Dawes. The hammer came down with Dawes’s bidder the winner at a $205 million hammer price (the final price includes fees). (Art adviser Patti Wong was bidding early on, in the room.) After the hammer came down, the salesroom erupted in applause, with Sotheby’s owner Patrick Drahi spotted grinning near the phone back.
The final tally of $236.4 million is the highest price for any work of modern art ever sold at auction and also set an auction record for the artist. Until Tuesday evening, that record had been held by Pablo Picasso’s 1955 Les Femmes d’Alger (“Version O”), which sold at Christie’s New York in 2015 for $179.4 million. The Klimt record also marks the most expensive artwork ever sold by Sotheby’s.
“Tonight, we made history at the Breuer,” Helena Newman, Sotheby’s worldwide chairman of Impressionist and modern Art and chairman of its European operations, said in a statement shortly after the lot sold. “To see Gustav Klimt’s exquisite portrait of Elisabeth Lederer set a new auction record for the artist is thrilling in itself; to see it become the most valuable work ever sold at Sotheby’s is nothing short of sensational. Klimt is one of those rare artists whose magic is as powerful as it is universal.”
The full-length portrait, one of only two such named Klimt commissions left in private hands, led the highly anticipated sale of the Leonard A. Lauder Collection, a 55-work trove valued at more than $400 million. Lauder acquired the painting in the mid-1980s from dealer Serge Sabarsky, adding to a collection that also included Cubist masterpieces, which he would later donate to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Proceeds from the sale will go to the Lauder trust.
Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer is widely considered one of Klimt’s most intricately conceived late portraits, begun when the artist was at the height of his powers and completed after nearly three years of revisions. Commissioned by the family that served as Klimt’s most important patrons, the work survived confiscation during the Nazi era and was restituted in 1948 before entering Lauder’s collection. Few Klimts ever surface publicly; fewer still carry the weight of this portrait.
Estimated in excess of $150 million, the painting was the crown jewel of the November auction season and had been expected to challenge—or surpass—the $108.4 million achieved by Klimt’s Dame mit Fächer at Sotheby’s London in 2023. Tonight’s result confirms Klimt’s position as one of the few early-modern painters capable of commanding nine-figure prices in a volatile market.
For Sotheby’s, the result marks a high-profile victory in a season overshadowed by questions about the depth of top-end demand, geopolitical uncertainty, and a shrinking pool of trophy consignments. The sale also inaugurates the auction house’s new headquarters in the refurbished Breuer Building—a space Lauder knew intimately as a longtime trustee of the Whitney Museum, which called the Breuer its home from 1966 to 2014.
The most expensive work ever to be sold at auction remains Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, which sold for $450M at Christie’s in 2017, but this Klimt now takes second place, taking the spot of Picasso’s Women of Algiers, which sold at Christie’s in 2015 for $179M.
