Sotheby’s sells Klimt painting, stolen by Nazis and depicting a Jew, for US$236.36 million
A painting, which depicts a Jewish woman and which the Nazis stole after annexing Austria, sold for $236.36 million—reportedly a record for Viennese decorative artist Gustav Klimt—at a Sotheby’s auction on Tuesday.
Dated between 1914 and 1916, the oil painting is titled “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer” and portrays the daughter of Klimt’s “most important patrons,” Serena and August Lederer, and captures “the social prominence and beauty of the sitter,” according to Sotheby’s.
The auction house described the work as having “lush ornament details, complex palette, dazzling brushwork and carefully choreographed iconography.”
Both Serena and August Lederer were Jewish. When the Nazis stole the family’s property, Serena “signed an affidavit swearing that Elisabeth was not Lederer’s daughter, but that she was the result of a sexual liaison with Gustav Klimt, and therefore only half Jewish,” wrote the author Laurie Lico Albanese. “As a result, the Nazis let Elisabeth live freely in Vienna until her death in 1944.”
The painting sold on Tuesday came from the collection of Leonard Lauder, the older son of Estée Lauder, who owned it for 40 years. Estée, who was Jewish, died in 2004, and Leonard died on June 14 at 92. Leonard’s younger brother Ronald Lauder, who is 81, is also an art collector and is president of the World Jewish Congress.
The work was “realized when the artist was at the height of his powers and reputation as the premier artist of Austrian modernism,” Sotheby’s stated.
The auction house added that the Nazis “confiscated” the painting during World War II and it “narrowly escaped the fate of other works by Klimt in the Lederers’ collection, which were likewise seized but ultimately destroyed in a fire at the war’s end.”
According to Sotheby’s, the painting was returned to Erich Lederer, brother of the woman depicted in the work, in 1948. (Elisebath Lederer died in 1944.) Serge Sabarsky Gallery, in New York, bought it from Lederer in 1983 and sold it to Lauder in 1985.
The portrait was part of an auction of 55 works from Leonard Lauder’s collection, valued at more than $400 million, according to ARTnews. Two phone bidders drove the price of the Klimt far past its $130 million starting bid, eventually landing at $205 million, before fees, the magazine reported.
By: Jessica Russak-Hoffman/JNS
