Gustav Klimt’s six-foot-tall portray Bildnis Elisabeth Lederer (Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer (1914-16) offered for $205m ($236.3m with charges) at its public sale debut at Sotheby’s in New York on Tuesday evening (18 November).
The portray is now the second-most precious murals ever offered at public sale, surpassing Andy Warhol’s Sage Shot Blue Marilyn (1964) that offered for $195m with charges at Christie’s New York in 2022. Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer can be essentially the most precious work ever offered by Sotheby’s and broke the public sale report for a piece by Klimt, eclipsing Dame mit Fächer (Woman with Fan, 1917), which offered for £85.3m (with charges) at Sotheby’s in London in 2023. (The all-time report for a murals at public sale stays the Salvator Mundi attributed to Leonardo Da Vinci, which Christie’s offered for $450.3m in 2017.)
After an almost 20-minute bidding warfare that proceeded at occasions in increments of $5m and sprang again to life after a number of calls of “truthful warning” from auctioneer Oliver Barker, Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer in the end went to a bidder on the telephone with Julian Dawes, Sotheby’s vice chairman and head of Impressionist and fashionable artwork. The crowded room at Sotheby’s new headquarters within the former Whitney Museum of Trendy Artwork constructing on Madison Avenue erupted with applause after Dawes’s bidder outdueled 4 different telephone bidders and one lady seated in one of many entrance rows.
Gustav Klimt’s Bildnis Elisabeth Lederer (Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, 1914-16) got here to market with an on-request estimate $150m (estimates are calculated with out charges) and in the end offered for a hammer worth of $205m ($236.3m with charges) Courtesy Sotheby’s
The highest lot of the standalone sale of works from the gathering of the late billionaire cosmetics inheritor Leonard A. Lauder, the Klimt hung in Lauder’s house for many years earlier than a long-term mortgage to the Nationwide Gallery of Canada that ended earlier this 12 months.
Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer got here to market with an on-request estimate of greater than $150m. It was backed by a assure and irrevocable bids, guaranteeing it will obtain a report end result. It is among the final main full-length portraits by Klimt nonetheless in non-public arms.
The portray reveals 20-year-old Elisabeth Lederer, the daughter of Jewish industrial magnate August Lederer, wearing a flowing gown and posed in entrance of an East Asian art-influenced backdrop. Lederer and his spouse, Serena, have been Klimt’s most essential collectors. So shut have been the Lederers to Klimt that Elisabeth was in a position to escape Nazi persecution through the invasion of Austria by claiming Klimt was her organic father. Elisabeth’s portrait was seized by Nazis in 1939 and returned to the household after the Second World Struggle. It has been in Lauder’s assortment for the reason that Nineteen Eighties.
Maurizio Cattelan’s America (2016) was provided with a $9.9m estimate primarily based on its weight in gold Courtesy Sotheby’s
One other buzzy lot Tuesday night was Maurizio Cattelan’s America (2016), provided as a part of the multiple-owner The Now and up to date artwork night sale and broadly reported to have been consigned by Steve Cohen, the Museum of Trendy Artwork trustee and billionaire proprietor of the New York Mets. Sotheby’s had set the estimate for the 18-karat gold, totally useful rest room at simply over $9.9m primarily based on the worth of the gold used to make it as of 5pm on Tuesday. Nonetheless, the work was met by an public sale room seemingly drained of curiosity.
America garnered a single bid, from a shopper on the telephone with Sotheby’s vice chairman for science and pure historical past Cassandra Hatton, and offered for a hammer worth of $10m ($12.1m with charges). A cryptic announcement by Sotheby’s after the sale mentioned the work had “offered to a well-known American model”, however a spokesperson for the public sale home declined to elaborate.
The end result for America fell wanting Cattelan’s public sale report, which stays $17.2m, set in 2016 at Christie’s New York by the sculpture Him (2001), which consists of a kneeling, child-like depiction of Adolf Hitler.
Sotheby’s mentioned this iteration of America is the one identified model nonetheless in existence. One other version was put in in a toilet on the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the place it drew greater than 100,000 customers throughout a year-long run. That piece was later loaned to Blenheim Palace within the UK in 2019, however was stolen simply two days after it went on show. Two males have been convicted within the case earlier this 12 months, and investigators consider the gold rest room was in the end melted down and destroyed.
This story can be up to date with a full report from the evening’s gross sales at Sotheby’s.
