New York. A portrait of painter Gustav Klimt set a record for a work of modern art on Tuesday by selling for $236 million at auction, in which a fully functional solid gold toilet – a satire on the ultra-rich – fetched $12.1 million.
The toilet, the work of Maurizio Cattelan – the provocative Italian artist known for gluing a banana to a wall – was auctioned Tuesday night at Sotheby’s in New York. The initial bid for the 101-kilogram 18-karat gold work was around $10 million.
“Whatever you eat, a $200 lunch or a $2 hot dog, the results are the same, when it comes to the toilet,” Cattelan once said, noting that the piece, titled Americasatirizes superwealth.
Sotheby’s, for its part, described the work as an “incisive commentary on the collision between artistic production and commodity value.”
He Portrait of Elisabeth Ledererby Klimt, sold after a 20-minute bidding war, also becoming the most expensive work of art ever sold by Sotheby’s worldwide. The portrait was one of the few by the Austrian artist to survive World War II intact. It shows the young daughter of one of Klimt’s clients and was kept separate from his other paintings that burned in a fire in an Austrian castle.
▲The artist Maurizio Cattelan, creator of Americasaid his piece satirizes superwealth.Photo taken from Sotheby’s website
The piece was part of the collection of billionaire Leonard A. Lauder, heir to cosmetics giant The Estée Lauder Companies who died earlier this year.
The toilet, which had been owned by an anonymous collector, was one of two that Cattelan created in 2016. The other was on display in 2016 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, which offered to lend it to US President Donald Trump when he asked to borrow a Van Gogh painting. The piece was then stolen while on display at Blenheim Palace, the country mansion where Winston Churchill was born, in England.
Two men were convicted of stealing the toilet, but it is unclear what they did with it. Investigators have no knowledge of its whereabouts, but believe it was probably dismantled and melted down.
America was displayed at Sotheby’s headquarters in New York in the weeks leading up to the auction.