Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I

A portrait for a Viennese family

Adele Bloch-Bauer was a wealthy, cultured woman of Vienna, who held a salon frequented by artists, writers and politicians. Her husband, the sugar industrialist Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, commissioned Gustav Klimt to paint her portrait. Klimt worked on it for about three years and completed it in 1907, at the height of his Golden Period, the same year he painted The Kiss.

It is the only person Klimt painted twice in full-length portraits; the second portrait of Adele, in a very different style, was completed in 1912.

A face in a sea of gold

Adele sits in an armchair, but the chair, her dress and the background merge into a single shimmering surface of gold and silver leaf, decorated with patterns. Only her face, shoulders and hands are painted naturalistically, emerging from the gold like a precious stone in a setting.

Detail 1Zoom to detail

The hands

Adele's hands are clasped together near her face in a nervous, twisted gesture. It has been suggested that she was hiding a deformed finger, an injury from childhood, though this is not certain. The gesture adds tension and intimacy to the decorative splendour.

Detail 2Zoom to detail

Eyes, spirals and squares

The dress is covered with motifs inspired by ancient Egypt, Byzantium and Mycenae: Egyptian eyes, spirals, triangles, and the initials of Adele. The background includes rectangles and squares in different shades of gold. Klimt used real gold and silver leaf and raised gesso to give the surface its relief.

Detail 3Zoom to detail

Detail 4Zoom to detail

Seized and returned

Adele died in 1925, and her will asked her husband to leave her portraits to the Austrian State Gallery after his death. But in 1938, when Nazi Germany annexed Austria, Ferdinand, who was Jewish, fled, and his property was seized. The portrait entered the Belvedere, where it was renamed The Lady in Gold to hide the Jewish identity of the sitter.

After the war it remained in Vienna. In the 1990s Adele's niece Maria Altmann, living in Los Angeles, sued the Austrian government for its return. In 2004 the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the case to proceed, and in 2006 an arbitration panel in Austria ruled in her favour. The story was told in the 2015 film Woman in Gold.

The Neue Galerie

In 2006 the painting was bought by Ronald Lauder for the Neue Galerie in New York for a price reported at 135 million dollars, then a record for a painting. It measures 138 by 138 centimetres and hangs on the first floor of the Neue Galerie.