Why did a mysterious Klimt painting sell for $236 million?

A painting by Elizabeth Lederer, which was hidden from the public eye for decades, has now been sold at auction for a record sum. Why is it so valuable?

A mysterious and relatively unknown painting by Gustav Klimt has become the most expensive work of modern art ever sold at auction, and the most expensive work ever sold by Sotheby’s. The disturbingly complex painting, a full-length portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, the daughter of one of the Austrian artist’s most committed patrons, sold for $236.4 million (£180 million) in New York on November 18, far exceeding the price paid two years earlier for Klimt’s Lady with a Fan, 1917-1918, which broke records when it sold for $108 million (£82 million) in London in 1917. 2023, making it the most expensive painting ever sold at auction in Europe.

The sale saw it overtake Klimt’s Andy Warhol portrait of Marilyn Monroe, Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, 1964 (which sold at Christie’s in New York in 2022 for $195 million), to become the second most expensive work of art ever to go under the hammer, after Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi (Savior of the World), circa 1500, which sold in 2017 for $450.3 million. (£343 million). But what about this nearly two-metre-tall figure of a 20-year-old heiress, whose eerily elongated figure seems to cascade into a cocoon-like gown of shimmering white silk, that commands such a stunning price?

On the surface, it might seem that Beldenis Elisabeth Lederer (Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer), 1914-16, lacks the overt extravagance of the more famous paintings from Klimt’s so-called “golden period,” the era in which he produced such scintillating works as Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907, and The Kiss, 1907-8. Where these sumptuous masterpieces shimmer with the charm of the Vienna Secession (the influential movement emphasizing artistic freedom that Klimt helped establish), Lederer’s lyrical likeness, created in the last years of the artist’s life (Klimt died in 1918, aged 55), pulses with a more psychologically evocative force. The aesthetic riches of the fabric are abundant, if more hidden.

Scientific

Seized by Nazi officials, who confiscated Lederer’s extensive collection of Klimts paintings after the annexation of Austria in 1938, the picture reappeared on the market in the early 1980s. It was then that it entered the private estate of billionaire heir to the Estée Lauder cosmetics fortune, Leonard Lauder, who died in June 2025. The image, which had been hidden from public view for decades, was biding its time, more or less, waiting to return to the spotlight. Whatever the cost, the mysterious business is finally ready to reveal its secrets. Her extraordinary story blurs truth and symbolism in a richly charged visual tapestry whose intrigue extends to the surface of the painting and beyond.

“Culturally complex details”

Taken in the early years of World War I, the photo’s prismatic glorification of Lederer — daughter of August and Serena Lederer, one of Vienna’s wealthiest Jewish families — can be read as the last glorious moments of the golden age from which it emerged. At first glance, we see an elaborate array of beguiling East Asian-influenced decorative motifs – swirling the young woman in a dazzling, timeless phase of azure – and the explosive calm of her dark eyes transports us from the accelerating turmoil of European history, transcending time and space. The boldness of gold on which Klimt had previously relied has not so much disappeared, but has been transformed, in a kind of reverse alchemy, into a bravery of vibrant, evocative colors that borders on the boldness of Expressionism.