by Tünde Csendes
It made international headlines in November 2025 when a late portrait by Gustav Klimt was sold for 236.4 million dollars – nearly 78 billion forints – at auction. The sale made the painting the second most expensive artwork ever sold, after the Salvator Mundi attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, and the most expensive modern painting in history. Hungarian media outlets likewise vied to highlight the staggering price, the drama of the bidding war, and yet another record in the global art market. What went largely unnoticed, however, was that the sitter of the portrait – properly speaking Erzsébet Léderer, not Elisabeth Lederer – had deep roots in Győr. She was more than a ‘Viennese young lady’: as the daughter of a major Hungarian industrialist, she set out from the banks of the Mosoni-Danube (Győr) into the inner circles of the Central European art world. This is not a matter of forced local patriotism, but a historical fact.
Erzsébet Lederer’s father, Ágoston Ledererx, was no ordinary industrialist. The owner of several Austrian factories and the director and principal shareholder of the Győr Distillery and Refinery, he stood at the centre of the city’s industrial transformation. His career unfolded at a moment when Győr deliberately set out to reinvent itself – through conscious urban policy and far-reaching structural change – from a merchant town into a modern industrial city.
Founded in 1884, the distillery offered little promise at the outset. It hovered on the edge of collapse, one more fragile enterprise in an era of uneven industrial expansion. Its survival depended on Lederer’s capital and technical expertise, but equally on the dense web of business connections he forged between Vienna and Győr, reinforced by German, Austrian, and Czech networks. Under his leadership, what had once been little more than a provisional, quasi-industrial operation was gradually transformed into a modern large-scale plant – an essential piece of industrial infrastructure that would, for decades, rank among the city’s most stable and reliable employers.
As a board member, Lederer was involved in the management of several railway and industrial joint-stock companies; as chairman, he presided over the city and county savings banks. During the forty-one years of what contemporaries came to call the “Lederer era,” spirits production in Győr flourished, largely owing to his sustained commitment. He modernised the distillery, brought its commercial operations onto a secure footing, and still found the capacity to play a role in the founding and development of the Hungarian Wagon and Machine Factory – an enterprise that would remain Győr’s largest industrial employer well into the late twentieth century. The local press reported hundreds of charitable donations made by the family. In the pages of Győr’s newspapers, Lederer’s name came to signify an “ethical and financial guarantee” – a form of authority that extended beyond the marketplace into the sphere of social welfare and the maintenance of civic institutions.
Győr’s industrial development in the second half of the nineteenth century was far from a spontaneous process. Its economic structure was reshaped above all by Jewish entrepreneurs who, from the 1850s onward, brought capital, technology, and a modern business culture to the region. They established the city’s leading food-processing and engineering plants, laid the foundations of the textile industry, and created both the oil factory and that of matches. By the turn of the century, this entrepreneurial stratum had produced the first stable, multi-generational industrial base of Győr’s capitalism. By 1910, 46.8 percent of the city’s population earned its living from industry, making Győr the most industrialised city in Hungary. Ágoston Lederer played a decisive role in this structural transformation. At the same time, it was precisely this economic reconfiguration that created the social and cultural conditions enabling his daughter, Erzsébet, to move into the innermost circles of Viennese modernism – and ultimately into the world of Gustav Klimt.
An Empire Born in a Rented Workshop
Ágoston Lederer’s life can only be understood by looking closely at the family background from which he emerged. The family story did not begin with palaces or art collections, but in a rented workshop in northern Bohemia. Ignatz Lederer was born in 1820, at a time when the movement, marriage, and livelihoods of Jewish families were still tightly constrained by law. He married in a synagogue and was laid to rest in the Jewish section of Vienna’s Central Cemetery. These details suggest that religious affiliation mattered to him, even if there is no surviving evidence of formal communal leadership or public religious roles.
Taking advantage of the economic freedoms granted by Joseph II’s Edict of Tolerance, Ignatz began his entrepreneurial ventures in the Czech-Moravian region. In 1859 he obtained an industrial licence for a small rented distillery in Leipa (today Česká Lípa), followed in 1867 by another in Jungbunzlau (today Mladá Boleslav). What began as a modest family enterprise later became the foundation of the Jungbunzlauer Spiritus und Chemische Fabrik AG, registered in Prague in 1895 – an industrial concern that would be followed by the establishment of additional factories and would provide Ignatz’s sons with a secure economic base.
Ignatz was not merely an entrepreneur, but an innovator attentive to the technical possibilities of his time. He moved beyond the traditional production of potato spirits and shifted toward higher-quality alcohol distilled from sugar beet, exploiting the agricultural resources of the region with unusual foresight. He also found uses for the by-products of distillation, such as potash, which were absorbed by industries ranging from glassmaking to soap production. In doing so, he demonstrated a form of industrial pragmatism – and environmental awareness – that was well ahead of its time. The rapid expansion of these ventures brought swift material advancement to the family. Yet contemporary accounts also suggest that Ignatz retained a sense of social responsibility: he was known to support the local poor on a regular basis. What emerged from this combination of technical ingenuity, economic discipline, and social embeddedness was not merely a successful business, but the foundations of an industrial dynasty whose reach would soon extend far beyond its modest beginnings.
One of the Monarchy’s Most Remarkable Collector Couples
In the second half of the nineteenth century, large-scale population movements unfolded from the Czech-Moravian lands toward Vienna, a pattern the Lederer family likewise followed. By the time of Ignatz Lederer’s death in 1896, he was already living in Vienna. He was convinced that the industrial empire he had built could become truly profitable and internationally embedded only in the imperial capital. This Czech–Moravian–rooted, Vienna-centred, multi-branch entrepreneurial background provided the economic foundation from which Ágoston Lederer’s later career in Győr would emerge, and on which – building consciously – he married Serena Sidonia Pulitzer in 1892. The wedding ceremony was conducted according to Jewish rite by the chief rabbi of Győr.
The Lederers lived in Vienna’s inner city, while at the same time holding substantial land property and industrial interests in Győr. Their home became one of the centres of artistic life around the turn of the century. By this point, Ágoston Lederer ranked among the thousand wealthiest businessmen of the fifty-million-strong Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. His family possessed considerable experience in the spirits and chemical industries; he himself acquired his professional training in Vienna and further refined his expertise through study trips abroad.
The marriage proved to be of outstanding significance both socially and economically. Serena Sidonia Pulitzer, who came from Makó (town in South Hungary – ed.) after whose cousin the Pulitzer Prize was later named, brought a dowry equivalent to approximately €1.3 million today – around half a billion forints – into the union. This capital enabled Ágoston Lederer to become the principal shareholder of the Győr distillery mentioned above, which he subsequently directed for forty-one years. In 1911 the family moved from Vienna to Győr, where Lederer also acquired Hungarian citizenship and where the family remained throughout the war. Trained as both an economist and a chemist, the industrial magnate became one of the multimillionaires of the early twentieth century. The factory still stands today, operating under the name Győri Szeszgyár és Finomító Zrt. Yet the name of its former director has largely faded from collective memory.
The Lederer couple distinguished themselves not only through their wealth but also through their passion for art. Ágoston and Serena belonged to the most enthusiastic art collectors of the Monarchy: they regularly attended auctions in Paris, London, and Berlin, where they sometimes made purchases for astonishing sums. Ágoston was particularly devoted to Italian late Renaissance and early Baroque art. He possessed an exceptional collection of sixteenth-century bronzes – one that remained a rarity even among Vienna’s leading art patrons of the period.
Serena’s interests, by contrast, were oriented toward the modern age. She was a regular visitor to – and purchaser at – exhibitions of the Wiener Werkstätte, became an enthusiastic supporter of the art of the Vienna Secession, and embraced all that defined turn-of-the-century Viennese modernity. Her extravagant dresses were designed by the era’s celebrated fashion creator Emilie Flöge, while her intellectual outlook was shaped by Freud’s ideas. In other words, she embodied everything that at the time constituted the intellectual and visual centre of Viennese high society. It is therefore hardly surprising that their children grew up immersed in this world. Erzsébet pursued sculpture, while Erik followed his parents’ passion for art as a collector. Against this background, it is little wonder that the daughter of a major industrialist from Győr could gain access to the innermost circles of Viennese modernism.
Friendship, Art, and the Birth of an Iconic Portrait
Around the turn of the century, the Lederer couple became acquainted with the increasingly influential Austrian painter Gustav Klimt. In 1897, together with several fellow artists, Klimt made a highly visible break with the conservative Künstlerhaus and founded the movement known as the Wiener Secession. The aim of the group was to free itself from the constraints of official academic art and to create space for modern forms, new aesthetics, and international artistic currents. It was within this vibrant, forward-looking milieu that the art-loving Lederer couple encountered Klimt – and it was from here that the path eventually led to Erzsébet Lederer becoming one of the painter’s most significant portrait subjects.
The Lederer couple thus maintained a close and cordial relationship with the young and highly talented Gustav Klimt, who around the turn of the century rapidly became one of the celebrated figures of Viennese social life. Klimt worked across a wide range of subjects, but he became especially renowned for portraying the distinguished women of his era, among them Serena Lederer. Her full-length portrait was exhibited in 1901 at the Secession’s 10th exhibition and within a short time became one of Klimt’s most widely recognised works.
Serena was deeply devoted to the painter’s work and quite literally spent fortunes to have Klimt’s paintings and drawings adorn the salon of her Viennese home. Her enthusiasm for art went so far that one of Klimt’s most provocative and best-known works – the 24-metre-long Beethoven Frieze – found a home, at least temporarily, in Serena Lederer’s salon. This gesture perfectly illustrates the extent to which the family became one of the most important patrons of Viennese modernism. It was from this close personal and artistic relationship that the portrait later emerged which today ranks as the second most expensive painting ever sold at auction – and whose sitter was the daughter of a major industrialist from Győr.
Schiele and the Lederer Family: An Artistic Friendship Rooted in Győr
Thanks to their close relationship with Klimt, the Lederer family also became acquainted with the young and extraordinarily talented Egon Schiele, whom Klimt introduced to them explicitly as a close friend. Schiele quickly gained the family’s trust: he worked with the eldest son, Erik Lederer, in painting lessons and accompanied his first steps on the artistic path as a mentor. The year 1911 marked a turning point. That was when the Lederer couple moved to Győr, and Schiele lived as a guest in the family’s home for an entire year. This period became an important chapter in Schiele’s oeuvre as well: it was then that he painted the now-famous depiction of the Kecskelábú Bridge in Győr and produced several portraits of Erik. The Klimt–Schiele–Lederer connection represents a rare example of a major industrial family from Győr becoming an integral part of the intellectual and artistic milieu of the Viennese avant-garde.
At the time of his death in 1936, Ágoston Lederer was living in Vienna’s Innere Stadt, on one of its most prestigious streets, in close proximity to the parliamentary quarter, the Justizpalast, and the Hofburg. This address clearly signalled his integration into Vienna’s high-financial and upper-bourgeois elite and underscored that his family resided at the very social and cultural centre of the Monarchy’s capital.
The Wiener Salonblatt commemorated him in the following terms: “As a serious collector, he attended every major auction held in Paris, London, or Berlin, and at these events there also appeared, at the side of the calm and distinctly intelligent gentleman, an impressively beautiful lady whose dark, shining eyes captivated everyone. Over the course of several decades, the couple came to be known as such devoted collectors that they became infallible experts.”
In 1938, the Anschluss struck the Lederer family as a catastrophe. The Jungbunzlau company was “Aryanised” by the National Socialists, and the family’s entire property was confiscated. That same year, Serena – completely dispossessed and holding Hungarian citizenship – fled to Hungary, where she died in 1943. Their daughter Erzsébet, whose non-Jewish husband abruptly divorced her after the Anschluss, also arrived in Hungary stripped of her possessions and survived her mother by only one year. The two sons, Erik and Fritz, escaped abroad in 1938. Erik settled in Geneva with his wife, where until his death in 1995 he made the restitution of his parents’ property the central aim of his life – an endeavour that ultimately proved impossible. The Lederer couple’s Klimt collection was transported by the Nazis to a castle in Lower Austria. Before their withdrawal from Austria, on 8 May 1945, the castle in which the artworks and paintings were stored was mined and set on fire.
In the domestic press, however, much of this went largely unnoticed. Coverage tended to stop at the price and at highlighting Erzsébet’s survival of the Holocaust, while little attention was paid to her connection to Győr – to the fact that she was the child of one of the city’s most important industrial dynasties. It is as if the Hungarian story behind the portrait remained invisible, as if the Jewish industrialists who drove Győr’s modernisation had never inscribed their names into the city’s history. Yet it was precisely these entrepreneurs who, through their work, set Győr on an industrial path and sustained the city’s development until the Second World War. And the figure who connected this network to Vienna, integrated it, and elevated it to national significance was Ágoston Lederer – whose daughter became the central figure of the world-record-breaking artwork. It is almost as if the portrait had no Hungarian dimension, as if it did not belong to the same historical narrative whose endpoint today is a Klimt masterpiece sold at a Sotheby’s auction.
Yet this is worth stating plainly: this portrait is also a Hungarian story. Klimt’s record-breaking painting may have been created in Vienna, but its roots reach deep into the soil of Győr as an industrial city. The full-length portrait is not merely a masterpiece of art history; it is also the visual trace of a Hungarian Jewish ascent – a social and economic trajectory shaped by a generation of entrepreneurs. It belongs to a period in which Jewish and non-Jewish businessmen jointly forged the modern character of Győr, and in which the city’s industry laid claim to a place not only within Hungary, but on Europe’s economic map.
The Klimt record, therefore, is more than an art-market sensation. It is the remembrance of a woman rendered within the highest register of artistic prestige – and, through her, the re-emergence of a city, a family, and a vanished economic and cultural world from which she came.
x In the Hungarian local press, he is usually referred to as Ágoston Léderer; however, his official name is Ágoston Lederer.
Source: János Honvári: A Brief History of Hungarian Industry, Glória Kiadó, 1995.
English translation by Tünde Csendes
This article is a version reproduced with permission from Telex online media outlet.
See also: Ágoston Léderer’s extraordinary achievements