Gustav Klimt portrait that spared its subject from Nazis breaks modern art records with $236M sale

By Canadian Press on November 18, 2025.

A Gustav Klimt portrait painting that helped save the life of its Jewish subject during the Holocaust sold Tuesday for $236.4 million — a record for a modern art piece — at an auction where a solid gold toilet also fetched $12.1 million.

Klimt’s “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer” sold at Sotheby’s in New York after a 20-minute bidding war, also becoming the most expensive work of art ever sold by the fine art broker worldwide. It is one of two full-length portraits by the Austrian artist that remain privately owned.

Later in the evening, a fully functional 18-karat-gold toilet by Maurizio Cattelan — the provocative Italian artist known for taping a banana to a wall — hit the auction block. Cattelan has said the 101-kilogram (223-pound) 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 of the piece.

Klimt’s portrait, painted over three years between 1914 and 1916, 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 colorful portrait depicts 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 descended from Klimt.

The portrait was part of the collection of billionaire Leonard A. Lauder, heir to cosmetics giant The Estée Lauder Companies. He died this year at 92, leaving behind an impressive collection.

Five Klimt pieces from the collection sold at the auction for a total of $392 million, Sotheby’s said.

Pieces by Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse and Edvard Munch were among other notable sales.

The toilet, owned by an unnamed collector, was one of two that Cattelan created in 2016. The other 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.

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 was likely broken up and melted down.

“America” was exhibited at Sotheby’s New York headquarters in the weeks leading up to the auction. Sotheby’s called the commode an “incisive commentary on the collision of artistic production and commodity value.”

Hannah Schoenbaum, The Associated Press