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Art & Design|Sotheby’s Lands a Leonard Lauder Art Collection Worth More Than $400 Million
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/arts/design/sothebys-leonard-lauder-collection.html
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The collector’s trove of 55 works, including Klimt, Matisse and Munch, will be auctioned in November.
Sept. 15, 2025, 5:00 p.m. ET
In what may provide a jolt to a weakened art market, Sotheby’s has won a Leonard Lauder collection valued at more than $400 million, to sell this fall, the auction house announced on Monday.
The trove of 55 works includes important museum-quality prizes by artists such as Gustav Klimt, Henri Matisse and Edvard Munch that made Lauder, the cosmetics magnate who died in June, one of the world’s leading collectors.
“He’s a once in a generation not just collector but philanthropist in the arts,” Charles Stewart, Sotheby’s chief executive, said in a telephone interview. “I think we’re going to make history with this collection. It will be something talked about for a long time.”
Among the treasures coming up in two November sales are Klimt’s vibrant “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer” (1914-16), estimated to sell for more than $150 million, accounting for more than a third of the collection's total estimate. It was recently lent to the National Gallery of Canada, and is one of only two full-length portraits left in private hands.
There are also two striking Klimt landscapes: “Blooming Meadow,” created in 1906 at the height of the artist’s career (estimated at $80 million to $100 million), and “Forest Slope in Unterach,” painted in 1917 during the artist’s final summer stay at Lake Attersee in Austria and never before at auction (estimated at more than $70 million to $90 million).
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