What does a notorious gold toilet and a nearly destroyed Klimt painting have in common? They christened Sotheby’s first sale out of its new US headquarters in New York on Tuesday evening in a buzzy, record-breaking night.
Early on, the headlining artwork by Gustav Klimt, “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer,” became the most valuable work of modern art to ever sell at auction, reaching $236.4 million to gasps and applause from the room during the 20-minute bidding war. It was also the most expensive work of art ever sold by Sotheby’s globally. The portrait of Klimt’s patrons’ young daughter, made in the last years of the artist’s life, was spared from destruction during World War II when it was separated from his works that later burned during a fire at Immendorf Castle in Austria.
The artwork was part of the collection of Estée Lauder heir Leonard A. Lauder, who died earlier this year. Across the sale, artworks met or exceeded their high estimates, including an Edvard Munch painting at $35.1 million.
The sale so far has marked a triumphant night for the top end of the art market, which has been experiencing a slowdown for more than two years.
During the contemporary sales, following the Lauder collection, the most unusual lot of the night will be the 220-pound, 18-karat gold toilet by the conceptual artist and enfant terrible Maurizio Cattelan. The opulent sculpture, titled “America,” is a sibling to the infamous version, which was exhibited in the Guggenheim as a working toilet and later stolen from Winston Churchill’s birthplace, Blenheim Palace, and never found. In a first, the starting bid for “America,” which has been in private hands since 2017, was ideated as a moving target according to the current value of its weight in gold; bidders will start from there.
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