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Klimt paintings from the Leonard A. Lauder Collection
Gustav Klimt: Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, 1916, The Leonard A. Lauder Collection
© Klimt Foundation, Vienna
Gustav Klimt: Flowering Meadow, 1908, The Leonard A. Lauder Collection
© Klimt Foundation, Vienna
Gustav Klimt: Unterach on the Attersee, 1916, The Leonard A. Lauder Collection
© Scala Florence
American entrepreneur and art collector Leonard A. Lauder, who passed away in June 2025, began building his own art collection at an early age. He was particularly interested in Cubism, with artists such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris. His collection also included three Klimt paintings, which are now to be auctioned together with other exquisite works of art at Sotheby's New York on November 18, 2025. The three works are Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer (1914-16), Flower Meadow (1908), and Unterach on the Attersee (1916).
In addition to the two landscapes, which illustrate Klimt's shift toward fragmentary floral mosaics on the one hand and his mastery of flattening and abstracting an entire landscape on the other, the auction of the portrait is of particular significance. It is a portrait of the daughter of the collector couple August and Serena Lederer. They were among Gustav Klimt's most important art patrons. Their extensive collection was expropriated in 1938 and a large part of it—including Klimt paintings—was stored in Immendorf Castle in Lower Austria. During the devastating fire on May 8, 1945, these works were destroyed by the flames and were thus irretrievably lost. The Klimt Foundation, in cooperation with the MAK, recently dedicated an exhibition to this topic.
The paintings—especially the portrait—are expected to fetch record auction prices.
Sources:
sothebys.com: Leonard A. Lauder. Collector
artnet.com: Katya Kazakina: Leonard Lauder’s $400 Million Collection Lands at Sotheby’s, 15.09.2025