Gustav Klimt portrait breaks modern art record with $236m sale

The coating helped prevention the beingness of its Jewish taxable from Nazis during World War II.

A Gustav Klimt representation has sold for $236.4m, a grounds for a modern creation piece.

Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer sold aft a 20-minute bidding warfare astatine Sotheby’s successful New York connected Tuesday.

The coating helped prevention the beingness of its Jewish taxable from the Nazis during World War II.

The 6-foot-tall (1.8-metre) portrait, painted implicit 3 years betwixt 1914 and 1916, depicts the girl of 1 of Vienna’s wealthiest families adorned successful an East Asian emperor’s cloak.

It is 1 of 2 full-length portraits by the Austrian creator that stay privately owned. The enactment was kept abstracted from different Klimt paintings that burned successful a occurrence astatine an Austrian castle.

The coating depicts the Lederer family’s beingness of luxury earlier Nazi Germany annexed Austria successful 1938. The Third Reich looted the Lederer creation collection, leaving lone the household portraits, which were considered “too Jewish” to beryllium worthy stealing, according to the National Gallery of Canada, wherever the coating was antecedently connected loan.

In an effort to prevention herself, Elisabeth Lederer made up a communicative that Klimt, who was not Jewish and died successful 1918, was her father. It helped that the creator spent years moving meticulously connected her portrait.

With assistance from her erstwhile brother-in-law, a high-ranking Nazi official, she convinced the Nazis to springiness her a papers stating that she descended from Klimt. That allowed her to stay safely successful Vienna until she died of an unwellness successful 1944.

Sotheby’s declined to stock the individuality of the portrait’s buyer. The merchantability topped a erstwhile grounds for 20th-century creation acceptable by an Andy Warhol representation of Marilyn Monroe, which sold for $195m successful 2022.