Given Tuesday’s $236.4 million sale of Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer at Sotheby’s, the highest price ever for a work of modern art, I’ll do my monthly news story a week early. The Klimt portrait, two Klimt landscapes, and other treasures were from the collection of Leonard Lauder, the billionaire, philanthropist, and art collector who died this past June at 92. After 20 tense minutes of bidding, the full-length portrait from between 1914 and 1916, depicting the 20-year-old daughter of Vienna’s richest industrialist, went to a phone bidder. The world auction record is $450.3 million, set in 2017 for Salvator Mundi, partly painted by Leonardo da Vinci
The tuxedoed and balletic auctioneer Oliver Barker took bids. The event, which is on YouTube, is a study in bidding psychology and in Barker’s talent as a coaxer. Bidding starts at $130 million. It’s supposed to be at $2 million intervals. One bidder tries a $1 million jump. Barker accepts but asks for a $5 million increase, trying to thin the floor and phones of bargain hunters and skinflints. The richest and most committed bidders comply. They’re using shock-and-awe tactics, hoping to persuade others to bow to an imagined reality of one obsessed billionaire bidder wanting the Klimt so badly that he’ll bust the bank to get it.
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