Gustav Klimt Second Most Expensive Artwork Sold at Sotheby’s

Summary

• Gustav Klimt’s “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer” (1914–16) sold for $236.4 million USD at Sotheby’s inaugural Breuer Buildin sale, making history as the second most expensive artwork and the most expensive modern artwork ever sold at auction.
• Bringing a total of $706 million USD, the two-part auction saw the highest single-evening sale in the house’s history.

Sotheby’s christened its new New York Breuer Building headquarters last night with a record-breaking debut, delivering the highest single-evening total in the company’s history. Tallying an astonishing $706 million USD — more than twice the sum achieved at its comparable sales last year — the sale signaled signaled momentum in a previously shrinking art market.

Headlining the sale was Gustav Klimt’s six-foot-tall “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer” (1914–16), which, after a 20-minute bidding battle, took home the titles of the second most expensive painting and the priciest work of modern art ever sold at auction. Sold for $236.4 million USD, surpassing its $150 million USD estimate, the artwork is now second to Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi,” which reached $450.3 million at Christie’s in 2017.

The six-foot-tall painting portrays Lederer, a young Austrian heiress and daughter of one of Klimt’s patrons, and is regarded as one of the artist’s most intricate late portraits. Alongside its compositional brilliance, the work itself holds a heft history, having been restituted after Nazi looting in 1938 and later spared from the fire at Immendorf Castle in 1945 that destroyed several Klimt masterpieces.

In addition to the Lederer portrait, noteworthy fetches for the night’s subsequent Now & Contemporary sale include “High Society (1997-8),” which broke a new record for British painter Cecily Brown at $9.8 million USD and the leading “Crowns (Peso Neto)” (1981) by Jean-Michel Basquiat, featured in the artist’s first New York solo, which sold for a staggering $48.3 million USD, marking a memorable auction debut.

In another head-turning moment Maurizio Cattelan’s notorious 18-karate gold toilet, “America,” sold for $12.1 million on a single bid, just slightly above the sculpture’s raw gold value. Ahead of the sale, the sculpture was installed in a restroom inside the Breuer building, where visitors viewed it one at a time, though, unlike past installations, it was kept strictly off-limits for use. Cattelan described the piece as “a short circuit between the most ordinary object and the most symbolic material of power and desire.” The night’s mix of art-historical gravitas and unrivaled spectacle sparked confidence to collectors, and unforgettable inauguration for the house’s new home.