The bidding started at $130m for Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer and six bidders competed for 20 minutes at the Sotheby’s auction on Tuesday night in New York. The painting sold for a record-breaking $236.4m (£179.7m) with fees, making it the most expensive work of modern art sold at auction.
It was painted between 1914 and 1916 and shows Lederer, a young heiress who was the daughter of Klimt’s patrons, draped in a Chinese robe
