A portrait by Austrian artist Gustav Klimt has fetched a record for a modern art piece, at an auction where a solid gold, fully functional toilet satirising the ultrarich also went under the hammer.<\/p>\n
Six bidders battled for 20 minutes over the Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, which Klimt painted between 1914 and 1916, before it was sold for $US236 million ($363 million), a record at Sotheby’s worldwide.<\/p>\n
The piece depicts the daughter of Klimt’s main patron dressed in a white imperial Chinese dress, standing before a blue tapestry with Asian-inspired motifs.<\/p>\n
Sotheby’s did not disclose the identity of the buyer.<\/p>\n
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A gold toilet, by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, went up for auction at Sotheby’s in New York. The starting bid for the 101 kilogram, 18 carat gold work was about $US10 million. (Sotheby’s)<\/p>\n
The toilet, by Maurizio Cattelan \u2014 the provocative Italian artist known for taping a banana to a wall<\/a> \u2014 also went up for auction on Tuesday evening at Sotheby’s in New York and fetched $US12.1 million ($18.6 million).\u00a0<\/p>\n The starting bid for the 101 kilogram, 18 carat gold work was about $US10 million ($15.4 million).<\/p>\n Cattelan has said the piece, titled America, satirises superwealth.<\/p>\n “Whatever you eat, a $200 lunch or a $2 hot dog, the results are the same, toilet-wise,” he once said.<\/p>\n Sotheby’s calls the commode an “incisive commentary on the collision of artistic production and commodity value”.<\/p>\n Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer was one of the few by the Austrian artist that survived World War II intact.\u00a0<\/p>\n Duct-taped banana artwork Comedian sells for nearly $10m<\/a><\/p>\n A piece of conceptual art consisting of a banana duct-taped to a wall has sold for $US6.2 million ($9.57 million) at an auction in New York.<\/p>\n It depicts the young daughter of one of Klimt’s patrons and was kept separate from his other paintings that were burned in a fire at an Austrian castle.<\/p>\n The piece was part of the collection of billionaire Leonard A Lauder, heir to cosmetics giant Est\u00e9e Lauder, who died earlier this year.<\/p>\n The toilet, which had been owned by an unnamed collector, was one of two that Cattelan created in 2016.\u00a0<\/p>\n The other was displayed in 2016 at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, which pointedly offered to lend it to US President Donald Trump when he asked to borrow a Van Gogh painting.\u00a0<\/p>\n Two men jailed for stealing golden toilet<\/a><\/p>\n Two men have been jailed for stealing an 18-carat golden toilet that was on display at Winston Churchill’s birthplace.<\/p>\n Then the piece was stolen while on display in England at Blenheim Palace, the country manor where Winston Churchill was born.<\/p>\n