Gustav Klimt portrait breaks modern art record with $236m sale

A record-setting piece of contemporary art, a Gustav Klimt portrait, has sold for $ 236.4 million.

After a 20-minute bidding war at Sotheby’s in New York on Tuesday, Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer sold.

During World War II, the painting saved the Jewish subject’s life from Nazis.

The 6-foot-tall (1. 8-meter) portrait, which was created between 1914 and 1916, features the daughter of one of Vienna’s richest families draped in an East Asian emperor’s cloak.

The Austrian artist has only ever owned one of his two full-length portraits, one of which is privately held. The Klimt painting that caught fire in an Austrian castle was kept separate from the other pieces.

Before Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938, the Lederer family lived a luxurious lifestyle. The National Gallery of Canada, where the painting was previously on loan, had only the family portraits, which were deemed “too Jewish” to be worth stealing, after the Third Reich looted the Lederer art collection.

Elisabeth Lederer made up the myth that Klimt, who was not Jewish and passed away in 1918, was her father in an attempt to save herself. The artist’s years of meticulous work on her portrait was a plus.

She persuaded her former brother-in-law, a senior Nazi official, to sign a document claiming her ancestry, to persuade the Nazis to grant her a copy of the document. That made it safe for her to reside in Vienna until 1944 when she passed away from illness.

The buyer of the portrait’s identity was not identified by Sotheby’s. An Andy Warhol portrait of Marilyn Monroe, which sold for $ 195 million in 2022, set a previous record for the sale of 20th-century art.