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A Gustav Klimt painting that helped save the life of its Jewish subject during the Holocaust sold Tuesday for $236.4 million US, with fees, breaking a record for a modern art piece.
Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer sold at Sotheby’s in New York City after a 20-minute bidding war, also becoming the most expensive artwork sold by the fine art broker worldwide. The flashiest item of the night, however, was a solid gold, fully functioning toilet that went for $12.1 million.
The Klimt piece is one of two full-length portraits by the Austrian artist that remain privately owned and that survived the Second World War intact.
Painted over three years between 1914 and 1916, it depicts the daughter of one of Vienna’s wealthiest families adorned in an East Asian emperor’s cloak. The work was kept separate from other Klimt paintings that later burned in a fire at an Austrian castle.
The colourful portrait shows the Lederer family’s life of luxury before Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938. Nazis looted the Lederer art collection, leaving only the family portraits, which were considered “too Jewish” to be worth stealing, according to the National Gallery of Canada, where the painting was previously on loan.
In an attempt to save herself, Elisabeth Lederer made up a story that Klimt, who was not Jewish and died in 1918, was her father. It helped that the artist spent years working meticulously on her portrait.
With help from her former brother-in-law, a high-ranking Nazi official, she convinced the Nazis to provide her with a document stating that she was Klimt’s descendant.
The piece was part of a collection owned by billionaire Leonard A. Lauder, heir to cosmetics giant The Estée Lauder Companies. He died earlier this year.
Sotheby’s declined to share the identity of the portrait’s buyer. The sale topped a previous record for 20th-century art set by an Andy Warhol portrait of Marilyn Monroe, which sold for $195 million in 2022.
Golden toilet fetches $12.1M
At the same auction, a solid gold, fully functional toilet satirizing the ultra-rich went for $12.1 million US.
The 101-kilogram, 18-karat-gold piece by Maurizio Cattelan — the provocative Italian artist known for taping a banana to a wall — had a starting bid of about $10 million US.
A solid gold toilet, called America and made by artist Maurizio Cattelan, was offered at auction by Sotheby’s on Tuesday night. It sold for $12,110,000 US, according to the auction house. (Eduardo Munoz/Reuters)
Cattelan has said the piece, titled America, satirizes superwealth.
“Whatever you eat, a $200 lunch or a $2 hot dog, the results are the same, toilet-wise,” he once said.
Sotheby’s, for its part, called the commode an “incisive commentary on the collision of artistic production and commodity value.”
Not the only Cattelan-created loo
The toilet, which had been owned by an unnamed collector, is not the only one Cattelan created.
Another was displayed in 2016 at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, which pointedly offered to lend it to U.S. President Donald Trump when he asked to borrow a Van Gogh painting.
WATCH | Maurizio Catellan’s ‘America’:
Then the piece was stolen while on display in England at Blenheim Palace, the country manor where Winston Churchill was born.
Two men were convicted in the toilet heist, but it’s unclear what they did with the loo. Investigators aren’t privy to its whereabouts but believe it probably was broken up and melted down.
America was exhibited at Sotheby’s New York headquarters in the weeks leading up to the auction.
