A portrait by the Austrian artist Gustav Klimt was sold for $236.4m (\u00a3179m) in New York on Tuesday, making it the second most expensive piece ever sold at auction. <\/p>\n
Six people took part in a 20-minute bidding battle for the Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer which was painted between 1914 and 1916. <\/p>\n
Auction house Sotheby’s has not disclosed the buyer’s identity.<\/p>\n
The portrait was looted by the Nazis and almost destroyed in a fire in World War Two, but was rescued in 1948. <\/p>\n
The artwork was returned to Lederer’s brother, Erich, a friend and subject of Klimt’s contemporary, Egon Schiele. The piece remained in Lederer’s possession for most of his life, before he sold it in 1983, according to Sotheby’s. <\/p>\n
The painting shows Lederer, an heiress and the daughter of one of Klimt’s patrons, wearing a white robe and stood in front of a blue tapestry covered in Asian motifs. <\/p>\n
The Nazis, who annexed Austria in 1938, looted the Lederer art collection but left family portraits behind, says the National Gallery of Canada. <\/p>\n
Est\u00e9e Lauder heir Leonard A Lauder made it part of his private collection in 1985, where it was displayed in his Fifth Avenue home in New York. <\/p>\n
Tuesday’s sale shot past expectations, with the painting predicted to sell for $150m before the auction. The second highest sale for a Klimt on record was Lady with a Fan, which sold for $108.8m in 2023 in London. <\/p>\n
Several other Klimt works in Lauder’s collection were auctioned at the same event, including Flowering Meadow and Forest Slope at Unterach am Attersee, which fetched between $60m and $80m each. <\/p>\n
The most expensive artwork ever sold at auction was Salvator Mundi, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, which sold in 2017 for $450.3m.<\/p>\n
Tuesday also saw a sculpture of a fully functioning gold toilet by the conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan picking up $12.1m just an hour after the record-breaking Klimt sale.<\/p>\n
The 101-kg toilet received just one bid. Sotheby’s said that the buyer was a famous American brand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A portrait by the Austrian artist Gustav Klimt was sold for $236.4m (\u00a3179m) in New York on Tuesday,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":301041,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[228,226,227,229,88],"class_list":{"0":"post-301040","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-design","12":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=301040"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301040\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/301041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}