On November 18th, Sotheby’s opened its new Manhattan headquarters at the Breuer Building with one of the most significant auctions the art world has seen in years. The evening centered on works from the Leonard A. Lauder Collection and quickly became a milestone event for the global market.
Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer by Gustav Klimt
Along with his brother Ronald, Leonard Lauder ran the cosmetics company founded by and named for his mother, Estée Lauder. Prior to his death earlier this year, he was known not only as a businessman but a philanthropist and art collector.
The sale was dominated by Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, a full-length depiction painted between 1914 and 1916. Commissioned by the subject’s parents, August and Serena Lederer, the painting showcases Klimt’s embrace of decorative elements and East Asian motifs in his portraiture. It is also an incredibly rare work of art, since much of the Lederer family collection was confiscated by the Nazis and ultimately destroyed by the end of the Second World War.
Bidding on the portrait started at $130 million, surpassing its estimate of $150 million within three minutes. When the $200 million bid came in, a round of applause swept through the sale room. Finally, the hammer came down at $205 million (or $236.4 million w/p), selling to a bidder represented in the phone bank by Julian Dawes, head of Sotheby’s New York impressionist and modern art division.
Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer is now the auction record for Gustav Klimt, doubling the record price set by Dame mit Fächer, which sold at Sotheby’s London in June 2023 for £74 million hammer. It also set a new world auction record for modern art, making the Lederer portrait the second-most expensive artwork ever sold at auction (the only painting that has fetched more at auction is Salvator Mundi, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, which sold in 2017 for approximately US $450.3 million).
The remaining two of the top three lots on Tuesday evening were both Klimt landscapes. Blumenwiese, or Blooming Meadow, was created around 1908 in the area of the Attersee, a large lake in upper Austria. Sotheby’s specialists describe the painting as a “flat, kaleidoscopic carpet of hues”. Despite the abstraction, viewers familiar with the landscape of the region can identify specific flowers common around the lake. Many Klimt scholars note that when the artist was at his home near the Attersee, he rarely ever traveled more than a hundred meters from his front door to paint. He therefore likely created the work facing away from the lake, looking up a hill near his boathouse. The painting also shows influence from post-impressionist artists like Van Gogh. It uses foreshortened perspective by placing the horizon line at the very top of the work, which some art historians say is inspired by post-Impressionist use of East Asian artistic conventions, specifically from Japanese wood block prints.
The other landscape, Waldahbang bei Unterach am Attersee, shows a town at the bottom of a wooded hill on the shores of the lake. Klimt had an interesting relationship with the Attersee, viewing it as a sort of untouched parcel of nature free from the corrupt influences of modernity. In this landscape, Klimt shows the town of Unterach while omitting many of the signs of modern life, including roads and even human figures.
Unfortunately, both Klimt landscapes sold for below their pre-sale estimates: Blooming Meadow at $75 million (or $86 million w/p) against an $80 million estimate, and Waldahbang at $61 million (or $68.3 million w/p) against a $70 million estimate.
The success of the Klimts set the tone for the night. Just those three paintings amounted to 75% of the sale’s total, which added up to $531.3 million w/p across its offerings, and the full evening sale brought Sotheby’s to a remarkable total of $706 million, the highest single-night total in the auction house’s history.
The results highlight continued confidence among top collectors and institutions, particularly for masterpieces with exceptional provenance and art-historical significance. Even amid economic uncertainty, the night demonstrated that liquidity remains exceptionally strong at the blue-chip level and that legacy works continue to lead the market.