SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Earlier this week at the Sotheby's art auction in New York, a portrait painted by Gustav Klimt sold for a record-breaking price.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: The Klimt, Julian, is yours. Congratulations.
(CHEERING)
DETROW: Fees included, the painting cost an anonymous bidder $236.4 million, which makes it the most expensive work of modern art ever sold at auction. Beneath the price tag, the painting, called "Portrait Of Elisabeth Lederer," has a heroic backstory. To hear more about it, we are joined by Wagner College art history professor Laura Morowitz. Welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
LAURA MOROWITZ: Thank you so much. My pleasure.
DETROW: I want to get into the backstory in a moment, but let's just start with the artist, Gustav Klimt, for people who don't hang modern art in their dorm rooms, which I think is actually a large chunk of our listenership. What should they know about his work and his overall place in the art world?
MOROWITZ: Gustav Klimt is probably the most important turn of the century Viennese artist. He was really a maverick in his own day. Klimt is a kind of bridge between the 19th and the 20th century. And although he wasn't particularly popular in the United States until about the 1960s, he has become, really, I think, one of the most sought out and iconic artists. Many, many people will be familiar with his golden period, works like "The Kiss" and many of the portraits which are hanging in museums all around the world.
DETROW: And the painting just sold, "Portrait Of Elisabeth Lederer." Just the art itself - what is the value and the importance of this work?
MOROWITZ: Well, the work is not only a beautiful representation of a work from Klimt's later period. It was done between 1914 and 1916, and Klimt will die in 1918 - he will have a stroke - so it belongs to the later period of Klimt's work. But as a document of history, it's also very, very fascinating.
DETROW: Yeah.
MOROWITZ: The backstory is pretty remarkable. Elisabeth Lederer, who was the daughter of August and Serena Lederer, were the most important collectors of Gustav Klimt's work. That alone would be significant and would place the work in a really special category.
DETROW: But this goes beyond that because it's not an exaggeration to say that this painting helps save somebody's life.
MOROWITZ: It's actually quite accurate to say that. Elisabeth had been married, actually, to a Nazi. He was not a very good husband, either. And he divorced Elisabeth in 1934, so she was left extremely vulnerable. And when the Nazis marched in and annexed Austria during the Anschluss in 1938, she was really in a very, very dangerous situation. As we know, if you were Jewish in Vienna in this period, you were very, very likely to be deported.
And she did something extremely clever, and it did save her life. She got her mother to sign a affidavit saying, in fact, that she was the daughter not of her actual father, August Lederer, but rather the product of an affair with Gustav Klimt. This rendered her what the Nazis called Mischling, or a part Jew. She was therefore able to stay in Vienna, and this essentially probably saved her life.
DETROW: So I want to come back to the price tag, though - $236 million. Did that surprise you?
MOROWITZ: You know, it's really hard to say. It's so foreign and abstract for me. Most art historians and researchers are not - usually not the people who are purchasing art, and so, you know...
DETROW: You don't have $236 million?
MOROWITZ: I don't. I don't. I don't even have a $2 million painting. So, you know, to me, when you get above $100 million, it's all so abstract anyway. I guess I'm not totally surprised to the extent that the monetary value of Klimt's works have been rising. And because this particular work really is astonishingly important, it's beautiful - you know, if you look at the portrait, she looks so vulnerable, and she has these beautiful, sort of dark black eyes and is standing surrounded by these light colors and these jade greens and purples. So it's beautiful.
And then it has this remarkable history of being part of this collection from this noted family of collectors and then, you know, also becoming this linchpin in the story of this woman's life. So to that extent, I guess I'm not surprised, but I really don't know what it means when works go to that level. I don't know how you could put any price tag on something so valuable like that.
DETROW: That's Laura Morowitz, an art history professor at Wagner College. Thank you so much.
MOROWITZ: Thank you.
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