Lauder’s art treasures go on sale

She made the claim 20 years after her portrait was completed when she sought to escape deportation after the Anschluss. Although Lederer converted to Protestantism in 1921 when she married a baron, their subsequent divorce in the 1930s rendered her Jewish again in the eyes of the Nazis. Elisabeth’s mother Serena backed her claim that “Uncle” Klimt was her daughter’s father, despite the damage to her reputation. The Reich’s Department for Genealogical Research believed their story and Elisabeth was allowed to remain in Vienna until her death from illness in 1944.

The painting, meanwhile, was confiscated by the Nazis in 1939 but restituted to the Lederer heirs in 1946. It has changed hands twice since then following private sales, and was acquired in the mid-1980s by Lauder, who was a champion of Austrian and German art.

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Also included in the auction is a 1916 landscape that was the first Klimt work to be bought by Lauder. It is one of a series depicting Klimt’s his holiday playground of Attersee and is expected to sell for $70 million. An even greater sum is expected for the 1906 work Blooming Meadow. This painting entered the collection of Broncia Kroller, herself a Jewish artist who exhibited with Klimt, and was later sold to Serge Sabarsky, the famous Jewish art dealer who fled Vienna to New York to escape Nazi persecution. He later co-founded the city’s Neue Galerie where the Bloch-Bauer portrait hangs. 

The three Klimts, which have never been available before on the open market, will undoubtedly dominate the Leonard Lauder sale on November 18 but his collection of six bronze sculptures by Matisse are expected to fetch $30million. A further $20million is anticipated for a lyrical Munch landscape with figures, Midsummer Night’s Eve, and further works from the extensive collection will be sold the following day.

Between them, the two billionaire sons of beauty tycoon Estee Lauder, who was born in the US to Hungarian Jewish immigrants, transformed the New York art museum scene. Leonard, CEO and chairman of the board of his mother’s vast empire, may have had a predilection for Klimt, Matisse and Picasso, but he also championed homegrown artists as chairman of the city’s Whitney Museum of American Art, gifting it $131million, the largest donation in the museum’s history. He also held the world’s most prized collection of Cubist art, making a landmark donation of 89 works valued at more than $1 billion to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Ronald, president of the World Jewish Congress and a one-time American ambassador to Austria, is a former chairman of MoMA, the New York Museum of Modern Art, and has also enriched the Metropolitan Museum of Art with the gift of nearly 100 pieces from his world-class collection of Medieval and Renaissance armour.

Ronald now remains the sole heir of a family cosmetics business that was grown by his brother to a $14 billion empire. The Neue Galerie may be considered a prime bidder for yet another Klimt portrait of a Jewish Vienna beauty to add to the three it already holds.