WAR RELIC

Klimt Portrait Smashes Record for Most Expensive Modern Art Sold at Auction

The painting saved a Jewish woman from the Nazis.

A painting that once helped save its Jewish subject from the Holocaust has set a new modern art record at auction. Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer fetched $236.4 million under the hammer at Sotheby’s on Tuesday on a cash-soaked night in New York, where a gold toilet went for $12.1 million. Austrian Klimt spent three years painting the 6-foot-tall work from 1914 to 1916. The Nazis plundered the art collection of the Lederer family, which was one of the richest in Austria, but decided the family portraits were “too Jewish,” the Associated Press reports, and left them behind. Elisabeth Lederer, with the help of her former brother-in-law, a Nazi officer, was able to convince them that Klimt, who was not Jewish, was her real father. He died in 1918, and Elisabeth died of an illness in Vienna before the war was over. The full-length portrait was taken to auction as part of the $400 million collection of Leonard A. Lauder, the heir to the Estée Lauder Companies empire who died this year at the age of 92. The identity of the buyer was not made public. The sale broke the previous 20th-century record set by Andy Warhol’s portrait of Marilyn Monroe, which sold for $195 million.