A portrait by Austrian artist Gustav Klimt has fetched a record for a modern art piece, at an auction where a solid gold, fully functional toilet satirising the ultrarich also went under the hammer.

Six bidders battled for 20 minutes over the Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, which Klimt painted between 1914 and 1916, before it was sold for $US236 million ($363 million), a record at Sotheby's worldwide.

The piece depicts the daughter of Klimt's main patron dressed in a white imperial Chinese dress, standing before a blue tapestry with Asian-inspired motifs.

Sotheby's did not disclose the identity of the buyer.

The toilet, by Maurizio Cattelan — the provocative Italian artist known for taping a banana to a wall — also went up for auction on Tuesday evening at Sotheby's in New York and fe

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