Elisabeth Lederer's portrait, impounded in Vienna and returned in 1948

On 26 November 1938, an Austrian office for the protection of monuments, the Zentralstelle für Denkmalschutz, impounded a portrait of Elisabeth Lederer in place at her family’s Vienna home, Bartensteingasse 8. Sotheby’s provenance records the step, the first of two official acts against the painting that it lists.

Gustav Klimt painted it between 1914 and 1916, an oil on canvas of 180.4 by 130.5 centimetres. Sotheby’s says Elisabeth’s parents, August and Serena Lederer, commissioned it in 1914 and acquired it in 1916. It shows their daughter and is titled Bildnis Elisabeth Lederer, or Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer.

On 10 December 1939 the Landesgericht Wien, the Vienna regional court, seized the portrait, and it was deposited with a Vienna firm, Kirchner & Co. In the same year, Sotheby’s lot essay says, Elisabeth petitioned to have Klimt recognised as her father. The essay calls this “a life-saving fiction”, and says her mother joined the petition. The sources do not say what became of the petition.

The seizure ended on 30 September 1948, and Sotheby’s records that the portrait was restituted to Elisabeth’s brother, Erich Lederer, then living in Geneva. The sources read for this entry do not say who applied for its return or which body decided it, so those details are left open. The essay adds that the portrait had been kept apart from other Klimts owned by the Lederers. Those had been stored at Schloss Immendorf and were lost in a fire at the end of the war.

From Erich Lederer the painting passed to the Serge Sabarsky Gallery in New York by 1983. The collector Leonard A. Lauder acquired it in December 1985. On 18 November 2025 Sotheby’s offered it in New York as lot 8, the first time it had appeared at auction.

Sotheby’s reports a total price of $236.4 million. The Art Newspaper gives $236.3 million with fees, on a hammer price of $205 million, and says it went to a telephone bidder. Neither source names the buyer. Sotheby’s calls it the most valuable Klimt ever sold and the highest price for a work of modern art at auction.