A Gustav Klimt portrait painting sold Tuesday for $236 million, a record for a modern art piece, at an auction where a solid gold, fully functional toilet satirizing the ultrarich also fetched $12.1 million.

The toilet, by Maurizio Cattelan — the provocative Italian artist known for taping a banana to a wall — went up for auction Tuesday evening at Sotheby's in New York. The starting bid for the 223-pound, 18-karat-gold work was about $10 million.

Cattelan has said the piece, titled "America," satirizes superwealth.

"Whatever you eat, a $200 lunch or a $2 hot dog, the results are the same, toilet-wise," he once said. Sotheby's, for its part, calls the commode an "incisive commentary on the collision of artistic production and commodity value."

This image provided by Sotheby's shows Gus

See Full Page