The Most Expensive Klimt Painting: Why Elisabeth Lederer Sold for $236 Million

The most expensive Klimt painting is the Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer (1914–1916). It sold at Sotheby's New York on November 18, 2025 for $236.4 million after 20 minutes of bidding. No work of modern art has ever made more at auction, and among all paintings only Leonardo's Salvator Mundi has.

The result surprised people who know Klimt mostly through gold. Anyone who has browsed the Klimt paintings copied most often will picture a golden couple or a woman set in a mosaic of gold leaf. This picture has none of that. It shows a 20-year-old in a white dress against a blue ground crowded with small Chinese figures, and it now outranks every golden Klimt that has ever changed hands.

So why this one? Four things came together: scarcity, a wartime survival story, forty years off the market, and two phone bidders who refused to stop.

Twenty minutes on Madison Avenue

The portrait was the star lot of the Leonard A. Lauder Collection evening sale, the first auction in Sotheby's new headquarters: the Breuer building on Madison Avenue, once home to the Whitney Museum, where Lauder had served as chairman. Going in, it carried an estimate of more than $150 million.

Auctioneer Oliver Barker opened at $130 million. At least six bidders took part. One telephone bidder waited until the price reached $171 million before joining at all. By the end it was a duel between two clients on the phones, one talking to specialist David Galperin, the other to Julian Dawes. Twenty minutes after the first bid, the hammer came down at $205 million for Dawes's client. Buyer's fees took the total to $236.4 million.

"Tonight, we made history," Helena Newman, Sotheby's worldwide chairman, said afterward. You can watch the bidding war unfold and judge the room's nerves for yourself. The price set several records at once:

• It more than doubled Klimt's previous auction record, the £85.3 million ($108.4 million) paid for Lady with a Fan in London in 2023.
• It passed Picasso's Les Femmes d'Alger (Version O), sold at Christie's for $179.4 million in 2015, as the most expensive work of modern art ever sold at auction.
• It became the most expensive work Sotheby's has sold in its 281-year history.
• It ranks second at auction only to Salvator Mundi, which sold at Christie's for $450.3 million in 2017.

Two Klimt landscapes from the same collection sold that night too: Blumenwiese (Blooming Meadow), 1908, at $86 million and Forest Slope in Unterach on the Attersee, 1916, at about $68 million, together $154.3 million. Across two auctions, the Lauder evening at the Breuer brought in $531.3 million.

Why the portrait went so high

Almost nothing like it is left to buy

Klimt's full-length portraits of women were commissions for a handful of rich Viennese families. Only two of them are still in private hands: this one and Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II (1912). A collector who wanted a standing Klimt woman had, in practice, two candidates, and the other one had last sold privately for $150 million in 2016.

Size helps too. The canvas measures 180.4 × 130.5 cm, roughly six feet tall, so Elisabeth stands at life size. She wears a flowing white dress and a chiffon shawl in the Paris fashion of the day, against a blue field of figures drawn from Chinese material culture and Peking opera. Infrared scans show Klimt painted out more figures that once stood above the carpet. He kept reworking it.

"He elevates her to almost mythical stature," Lisa Dennison told NBC News before the sale. That is the pitch in one line, and the bidders bought it.

A lie that kept her alive and the canvas out of the fire

Elisabeth was the daughter of August and Serena Lederer, Jewish industrialists and Klimt's most important patrons. At the time they were the second-richest family in Vienna, after the Rothschilds. Serena had sat for Klimt herself in 1899. The family commissioned their daughter's portrait in 1914 and paid 35,000 crowns. In 1916 Serena carried it out of the studio while Klimt still insisted it was unfinished. It was shown in Stockholm the next year.

After Austria's annexation in 1938, the Nazi regime classed Elisabeth as a "full Jew." Her way out was a story: she let it be known that she was Klimt's illegitimate daughter, and her mother swore an affidavit that Klimt, not August, was her father. On paper she became "half-Aryan." The full account of that affidavit is a hard read. She stayed in Vienna and died of illness on October 19, 1944.

The painting had its own narrow escape. The regime seized the Lederer collection, and most of it went to Schloss Immendorf for storage. In 1945 retreating German forces set the castle on fire, and 15 Klimt paintings from the family burned. Elisabeth's portrait was not there. Portraits of Jewish sitters were considered not worth confiscating, so it sat in Vienna at the Dorotheum auction house instead. In 1948 it went back to her brother Erich.

A buyer at this level pays for the object and for the certainty behind it. A work returned to the family decades ago, then sold openly, carries no restitution claim waiting to surface. That clean record is worth a great deal of money.

Forty years above a dining table

Erich Lederer kept the portrait until 1983, when he sold it to the dealer Serge Sabarsky. Leonard Lauder bought it in 1985 and hung it above the dining table in his New York home. It left the house only for short, anonymous loans: to the Belvedere in Vienna in 2000, to the Neue Galerie in New York in 2016–2017, and to the National Gallery of Canada in 2017.

Lauder died in June 2025 at 92. His rule for collecting was blunt: "Only buy the best, don't be a bottom fisherman." Forty years out of circulation meant no recent price for anyone to argue down from, and the market had never had a chance to get bored with it.

Klimt's most expensive paintings, ranked

Here are the highest prices on record for Klimt canvases. Auction prices include fees. Private-sale figures are the amounts that became public afterward, so treat them as close rather than exact.

A few of these deserve a closer look.

Lady with a Fan was the last portrait Klimt completed before he died in 1918. It had sold for $11.6 million in 1994. At the London sale in June 2023, four bidders fought over it for ten minutes, and the £85.3 million result became the highest price paid at auction in Europe for any work of art at that time.

The 1903 Birch Forest came from the estate of Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen and sold at Christie's New York on November 9, 2022, for $104.6 million. It was part of Allen's $1.5 billion collection sale, and every dollar went to charity under the terms of his will.

The Adele Bloch-Bauer portraits sit on both sides of the private and public line. In January 2006 an arbitration panel in Vienna ordered Austria to return Klimt paintings to the heirs of the Bloch-Bauer family, led by Adele's niece Maria Altmann. Ronald Lauder then bought the golden portrait of Adele from 1907 for $135 million, at the time a record for any painting. The second portrait sold at Christie's that November for almost $88 million to Oprah Winfrey, who sold it in 2016 to an unnamed Chinese buyer for $150 million.

Water Serpents II is the outlier: a private deal in 2013, when the dealer Yves Bouvier sold it to Dmitry Rybolovlev for $183.8 million. It held the top spot among known Klimt sales until the Lederer portrait came along.

How much is a Gustav Klimt painting worth?

A major Klimt oil painting that comes to market today sells for tens of millions of dollars at the least. Every canvas in the table above went for between $68 million and $236.4 million. The climb has been steep: Lady with a Fan multiplied its price more than sevenfold between 1994 and 2023.

Where his best-known pictures are

The paradox of Klimt's market is that the pictures people think of first will almost certainly never sell. They belong to museums.

What is Gustav Klimt's most famous piece?

The Kiss (1907–1908) is Klimt's most famous painting. It is a square canvas, 180 × 180 cm, done in oil and gold leaf with touches of silver and platinum, and it hangs in the Belvedere in Vienna. The Austrian government bought it, still unfinished, when it was first put on public view. You can see the embracing couple under gold leaf everywhere, which is exactly why the white Lederer portrait looked like an unlikely record holder.

Adele Bloch-Bauer I has hung at the Neue Galerie in New York since 2006. The story of her return to the family became the 2015 film Woman in Gold, with Helen Mirren as Maria Altmann.

If you want the wider picture beyond Klimt, start with the paintings nearly everyone recognizes on sight.

A Klimt for your own dining room

Lauder kept his Klimt above the dinner table for forty years. A hand-painted copy lets you do the same at a very different price. You can browse every Klimt the studio paints by hand, from his Danae to the second of his Schloss Kammer views on the Attersee, painted in oil on canvas at the size you choose.

Sources

• Sotheby's, $236.4 Million Klimt Portrait Sets Records as Sotheby's Inaugurates the Breuer
• NBC News, Klimt's Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer goes for $236.4 million
• Smithsonian Magazine, Watch the Record-Breaking Auction of This Gustav Klimt Portrait
• The Conversation, How a desperate lie saved a Gustav Klimt portrait from the Nazis
• Al Jazeera and the Associated Press, Klimt painting sets European record with $108m price tag
• CBS News, Paul Allen art collection sale at Christie's