Gustav Klimt portrait of Elisabeth Lederer sold for £180m at Sotheby’s

Painted around 1916, the oil and canvas portrait showed Elisabeth in her early 20s. Her parents, August and Szerena Lederer, were Klimt’s leading patrons, and at the time the wealthiest family in Vienna after the Rothschilds.

After the Nazis took power in Austria in the Anschluss, Lederer claimed that Klimt was her father, in order to protect herself from deportation as the child of a celebrated artist. The Reich authorities accepted her claim, and she was able to stay on in Vienna until she died of an illness in 1944.

The painting was stolen from her family by the Nazis in 1939 but was returned to Lederer’s brother Erich in 1948, four years after her death.

At the auction in New York, six collectors battled for 20 minutes over the painting, a very rare example of a full-length portrait by Klimt.

The clamour to acquire the work pushed the price up far above the original estimate of $150m at the auction.

The previous record for a painting by Klimt was the $135million paid by Lauder’s younger brother Ronald Lauder in 2006 for the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, also known as ‘The Woman in Gold’.

Other items in the auction included Munch’s Midsummer Night, sold for $35m, and a pen and ink drawing by Van Gogh which went for $11.2m, a record price for a work of the type by the artist.

Highlights of the Lauder sale also included six Matisse bronzes which far exceeded estimates to make a total of $49m, and a $17.6m painting by Canadian artist Agnes Martin which was the subject of its own fierce 10-minute bidding war.

The sale total smashed Sotheby’s own amount for the highest total in a single night.

The sale of the Salvator Mundi, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, in 2017 for $450.3m, is the record for a single work of art.