A Gustav Klimt portrait has sold for $236.4m, a record for a modern art piece.

Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer sold after a 20-minute bidding war at Sotheby’s in New York on Tuesday.

The painting helped save the life of its Jewish subject from the Nazis during World War II.

The 6-foot-tall (1.8-metre) portrait, painted over three years between 1914 and 1916, depicts the daughter of one of Vienna’s wealthiest families adorned in an East Asian emperor’s cloak.

It is one of two full-length portraits by the Austrian artist that remain privately owned. The work was kept separate from other Klimt paintings that burned in a fire at an Austrian castle.

The painting depicts the Lederer family’s life of luxury before Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938. The Third Reich looted the Lederer

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