Hidden for decades from public view, the artist’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer has now sold at auction for a record sum. Why is it so valuable?
A mysterious and relatively little-known painting by Gustav Klimt is now the most expensive work of modern art ever to sell at auction and the most expensive ever to be sold by Sotheby’s. The teasingly complex canvas, a full-length portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, the daughter of the Austrian artist’s most committed patrons, fetched $236.4m (£180m) in New York on 18 November, far outpacing the price paid two years ago for Klimt’s Lady with a Fan, 1917-18, which broke records when it sold for $108m (£82m) in London in 2023, making it the most expensive painting ever sold at auction in Europe.
The sale saw Klimt’s canvas pass Andy Warhol’s portrait of Marilyn Monroe, Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, 1964 (which sold at Christie’s in New York in 2022 for $195m), to become the second priciest work of art ever to go under the hammer, behind Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi (Saviour of the World), c 1500, which sold in 2017 for $450.3m (£343m). But what is it about this nearly 2m-tall likeness of a 20 year-old heiress, whose eerily elongated figure seems to chrysalise in a cocoon-like gown of shimmering white silk, that commands such a jaw-dropping price tag?
On its surface, Bildnis Elisabeth Lederer (Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer), 1914-16, may seem to lack the overt opulence of better-known paintings from Klimt’s so-called “Golden Period”, the era in which he produced such glimmering works as his Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907, and The Kiss, 1907-8. Where those sumptuous masterpieces glisten with the glamour of the Vienna Secession (the influential movement emphasising artistic freedom that Klimt helped found), the lyrical likeness of Lederer, created in the last years of the artist’s life (Klimt died in 1918, aged 55), pulses with a more psychologically teasing intensity. The canvas’s aesthetic riches are copious, if more concealed.
Wow