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A painting by Gustav Klimt became the second most expensive piece of art ever sold at an auction.
Klimt’s “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer” sold on Tuesday after a 20-minute bidding war between six bidders at Sotheby’s in New York.
Five Klimt pieces from the collection sold at the auction for a total of $392 million (around €339 million), Sotheby’s said. The “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer” fetched $236.4 million alone.
Sotheby’s did not reveal the identity of the portrait’s buyer.
The most expensive painting ever sold at auction remains the “Salvator Mundi,” attributed to Leonardo da Vinci — though some art historians doubt this attribution.
What is the story behind Klimt’s painting?
The portrait painted by Klimt between 1914 and 1916 is known to have helped save the life of its Jewish subject during the Holocaust.
The 6-foot-tall (1.8-meter-tall) artwork shows the daughter of Klimt’s main patron, a member of one of Vienna’s wealthiest families, dressed in Chinese-inspired clothing, standing before a blue tapestry with Asian-inspired motifs.
The painting depicts the luxurious life led by the Lederer family before the Nazis took over Austria in 1938.
Nazis looted the Lederer familiy’s 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. It had belonged to billionaire Leonard A. Lauder, the heir to the Estée Lauder cosmetics giant. He died earlier this year at 92.
In order to save herself from the Nazis, Elisabeth Lederer told them that Klimt, who was not Jewish and died in 1918, was her father. The artist having had painted her portrait helped Elisabeth’s story sound believable.
Claiming a relation to Klimt helped her stay in Vienna safely until she died of an illness in 1944.
The artwork is one of the only two full-length portraits painted by the Austrian artist that are still privately owned.
Edited by: Elizabeth Schumacher
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