Gustav Klimt portrait painting sells for record $236 million at New York auction
A portrait of Gustav Klimt sold Tuesday for $236 million, a record for a work of modern art, at an auction where a fully functional solid gold toilet, satirizing the ultra-rich, also went for $12.1 million.
The toilet, made by Maurizio Cattelan – the provocative Italian artist known for gluing a banana to a wall – was put up for auction Tuesday evening at Sotheby’s in New York. The starting bid for the 223-pound, 18-karat gold work was around $10 million.
Cattelan said the article, titled “America,” satirizes super-wealth.
“Whatever you eat, a $200 lunch or a $2 hot dog, the results are the same, toilet-wise,” he once said. Sotheby’s, for its part, calls the chest of drawers “an incisive commentary on the collision between artistic production and market value.”
Sotheby’s via AP 
Klimt’s “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer” sold earlier in the night after a 20-minute bidding war, also becoming the most expensive work of art ever sold by Sotheby’s worldwide. The piece attracted bids from at least six collectors before finally being sold.
This portrait is one of the few by the Austrian artist to have survived the Second World War intact. It depicts the young daughter of one of Klimt’s patrons and was separated from his other paintings which burned in a fire in an Austrian castle.
The piece was part of the collection of billionaire Leonard A. Lauder, heir to cosmetics giant The Estée Lauder Companies. He died earlier this year.
In 2024, a portrait of a young woman by Klimt that was long thought lost was sold at auction in Vienna for $32 million. The painting “Portrait of Fräulein Lieser” was one of Klimt’s last works before his death in 1918.
Klimt worked primarily in Vienna in the early 1900s and is perhaps best known for “The Kiss.”
Photo from AP file 
The toilet, which belonged to an anonymous collector, was one of two toilets created by Cattelan in 2016. The other was exhibited in 2016 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, which ostensibly offered to loan it to President Trump when he asked to borrow a Van Gogh painting. The piece was later stolen while on display in England at Blenheim Palace, the country mansion where Winston Churchill was born.
Two men were convicted of stealing the toilet, but it’s unclear what exactly they did with the toilet. Investigators don’t know where it is, but believe it was likely broken and melted.
“America” was exhibited at Sotheby’s headquarters in New York in the weeks leading up to the auction.
