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A rare Gustav Klimt portrait with a remarkable survival story just shattered records at auction
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Gustav Klimt's portrait of Elizabeth Lederer sold for, get this, $236.4 million after a 20-minute bidding war at Sotheby's in New York on Tuesday
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setting a new record as the second most expensive piece of modern art ever sold at auction. You see it there
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The six-foot-tall portrait was painted between 1914 and 1916, and its history is just as extraordinary as its price tag
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Follow me here. When Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938, the Lederer family's vast art collection was looted
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but their portraits were left behind, deemed too Jewish to be worth selling
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That's according to the National Gallery of Canada. Elizabeth Lederer survived by claiming that Klimt, who wasn't Jewish, was her father
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With help from her former brother-in-law, a high-ranking Nazi official, she obtained documents stating she descended from the artist
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a lie that protected her and allowed her to remain in Vienna until her death in 1944
