Seized by Nazi officials, who confiscated the Lederer’s vast collection of Klimts after Austria’s annexation in 1938, the portrait resurfaced into the market in the early 1980s. It was then that it entered the private holdings of the billionaire heir to the Estée Lauder cosmetics fortune, Leonard A Lauder, who died in June 2025. Hidden for decades from public view, the portrait has, in a sense, been biding its time, waiting to return to the spotlight. Whatever the price tag, the mysterious work is poised finally to reveal its secrets. Its extraordinary story blurs fact and symbolism into a richly charged visual tapestry whose intrigue extends into and outside the painting’s surface.
‘Culturally complex details’
Undertaken in the opening years of World War One, the portrait’s prismatic exaltation of Lederer – the daughter of August and Serena Lederer, one of Vienna’s wealthiest Jewish families – can be read as the last glorious gasp of the Golden Age from which it emerged. At first glance, the elaborate array of deceptively ornamental East Asian-influenced motifs – that orbit the young woman in a dazzling timeless stage of celestial blue – and the implosive calm of her dark eyes transport us from the accelerating turmoil of European history, transcending time and place. The audacity of gold on which Klimt previously relied has not so much disappeared as been transmuted, in a kind of reverse alchemy, into a fearlessness of vibrant, evocative colour that borders on the boldness of Expressionism.
Look closer and the portrait bristles with teasing and culturally complex details. Within the design of Elisabeth’s elaborate robe and gown, Klimt has woven an enchanting conspiracy of shapes. These echo the contours of symbols and forms drawn eclectically from East Asian art and from the world of microscopic medical imagery that was just coming into sharper focus within the scientific circles in which Klimt moved in Vienna. The dragons on her robe are reminiscent of Qing Dynasty textiles, where such creatures represent cosmic authority and the divinely sanctioned authority of the emperor. Their slow, circling movement around Elisabeth’s thighs, rising from stylised waves, gives her an almost mythic presence as a tamer of the elements and supernatural beasts. By immortalising Elisabeth’s beauty in such mythic terms, Klimt is not simply flattering his patrons. He is, in effect, reinventing Botticelli’s Birth of Venus for a new age.
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But there’s more. Offsetting this grand, imported iconography from East Asia are subtler shapes that call to mind the infinitesimal biomorphic forms with which Klimt became preoccupied while attending lectures on cell theory and anatomy delivered by his friend Emil Zuckerkandl, the Chair of Anatomy and Pathology at the University of Vienna, in 1903. A closer look at Elisabeth’s intricate garments reveals a scatter of ovoid and concentric circles that can easily be dismissed as mere floral decoration. These soft, looping amorphous forms and cell-like motifs rhyme richly with similar shapes that appear in several of Klimt’s earlier works, where writers have linked their presence to the artist’s growing interest in embryology, haematology, and the structures of early life.
