Gustav Klimt painting auction: Portrait breaks modern art record - most expensive artworks ever sold
A portrait by Gustav Klimt has broken the record for the most expensive piece of modern art - here’s what it went for.
A portrait painting by renowned artist Gustav Klimt has become the most expensive piece of modern art, after selling for a whopping $236.4 MILLION. The picture, a portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, helped save the life of its Jewish subject during the Holocaust and sold after a 20-minute bidding war at Sotheby’s, in New York.
Painted over three years between 1914 and 1916, the image depicts the daughter of one of Vienna’s wealthiest families adorned in an East Asian emperor’s cloak.
In an attempt to save herself, Ms Lederer made up a story that Klimt was her father. And with help from her former brother-in-law - a high-ranking Nazi official - she convinced the Nazis to give her a document stating that she descended from the artist. As a result, she was allowed to remain in Vienna safely until she died in 1944.
Klimt, who was not Jewish, spent years working meticulously on her portrait. He passed away in 1918.
Most expensive pieces of art ever sold
- $450.3 million: Salvator Mundi, by Leonardo da Vinci
- $300m: Interchange, by Willem de Kooning
- $250m: The Card Players, by Paul Cézanne
- $236.3m: Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, by Gustav Klimt
- $210m: Nafea Faa Ipoipo (When Will You Marry?), by Paul Gauguin
- $200m: Number 17A, by Jackson Pollock
- $183.8m: Wasserschlangen II, by Gustav Klimt
- $186m: No 6 (Violet, Green and Red), by Mark Rothko
- $180m: Pendant portraits of Maerten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit, by Rembrandt
- $179.4m: Les Femmes d'Alger ("Version O"), by Pablo Picasso
While some private sales of artworks may never be revealed to the public, these are current top 10 of recorded art sales.