Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I 1907 CE

Completed in 1907, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I shows Adele Bloch-Bauer at about twenty-six: dark hair swept up, flushed cheeks, red lips, a diamond choker at the throat, hands clasped in an odd, almost protective gesture. Everything around the living flesh — dress, chair, wall, even the air — is a field of gold and silver pattern. The painting is often called The Woman in Gold or The Lady in Gold. It is the summit of Klimt’s so-called Golden Phase and one of the defining images of Vienna around 1900.

The first impression is luxury. The second is strangeness. Adele does not sit in a room so much as she inhabits a flat, glittering surface. There is no clear horizon. It is uncertain whether she is seated or standing. Her body and the decoration seem to belong to the same substance. That tension — a real woman inside a secular icon — is what has kept the portrait in the public imagination for more than a century.

From a wedding gift that arrived too late

Adele Bauer was born in Vienna on 9 August 1881, the daughter of bank and railway director Moritz Bauer. In 1899 she married the sugar industrialist Ferdinand Bloch, seventeen years her senior. The two families were already linked by marriage; they later used the double name Bloch-Bauer. Adele became a well-known salon hostess. Guests included composers, writers, and journalists. 

The couple collected art; Ferdinand also commissioned the most fashionable painter in the city. In the summer of 1903 Ferdinand asked Klimt to paint his wife. The portrait was first meant as an anniversary present for Adele’s parents. Klimt worked slowly. The gift was never ready in time. Adele herself mentioned the commission in a letter of 22 August 1903: her husband had decided that Klimt should portray her, but the artist would only begin in winter.

Work stretched from 1903 to 1907. In December 1903 Klimt visited the Church of San Vitale in Ravenna and saw the sixth-century mosaics of Justinian and Theodora. The gold ground and the hieratic, jewel-like figures became the model for his Golden Phase — this portrait, The Kiss, and several other works. More than a hundred preparatory drawings survive. The finished canvas was first shown at the Internationale Kunstausstellung in Mannheim in 1907 and again at the Kunstschau in Vienna in 1908.

Adele died of meningitis on 24 January 1925, aged forty-three. Ferdinand fled Austria after the Anschluss in 1938 and died in exile in Zurich in 1945. Those two deaths, and the political catastrophe between them, decided the later fate of the picture.

The hidden finger, the borrowed necklace, and a sting in the reviews

Klimt’s sittings were long. Adele was self-conscious about a deformed finger and held her hands so that it would not show. That awkward clasp is still one of the portrait’s most memorable details. Around her neck she wears the diamond choker Ferdinand had given her as a wedding present — the same jewel Klimt had already painted in Judith I (1901). Some scholars have suggested that Adele also posed for Judith I and perhaps for the woman in The Kiss. That remains conjecture.

Rumours of a love affair between painter and sitter have followed the work for generations. No document proves it. What is certain is that the Bloch-Bauers were pleased: they gave Klimt a second full-length commission, finished in 1912 as Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II. Adele is the only person Klimt is known to have painted twice at that scale.

When the 1907 portrait went on view, praise and mockery arrived together. Berta Zuckerkandl called it an idol in a scintillating temple shrine. Another critic coined the pun “mehr Blech als Bloch” — more brass (cheap metal, and by implication money) than Bloch. The nickname Woman in Gold came later, and under darker circumstances: after 1938 the Nazis stripped the Jewish name from the label so the sitter would disappear behind the glitter.

Maria Altmann, Adele’s niece, later remembered her aunt as elegant, tall, dark, thin, politically aware, and not especially warm — a woman with a long gold cigarette holder and a slinky white dress. That private memory sits at an angle to the golden idol Klimt invented.

Why this canvas became the emblem of a whole era

The portrait belongs to the Vienna Secession and to Jugendstil, but it is more specific than a style label. Klimt had been trained in decorative painting. After Ravenna he treated the portrait as a kind of modern mosaic: a living face set into metal, pattern, and symbol. The gold flattens space and lifts Adele out of ordinary drawing-room time. Viewers have read the work as a society portrait, as a secular icon, and as a map of erotic signs — eyes, triangles, eggs, spirals — scattered across the dress and ground.

Culturally it stands at a crossroads. It records the wealth and taste of Vienna’s Jewish bourgeoisie just before that world was destroyed. It also became, after restitution, a symbol of the long fight to return art looted under the Third Reich. Hollywood turned that second life into the 2015 film Woman in Gold, with Helen Mirren as Maria Altmann. For the Neue Galerie in New York the painting is openly called the museum’s Mona Lisa: a single image that carries both Klimt’s decorative genius and the twentieth century’s violence.

How the surface was built

Klimt built the picture as a hybrid of portrait painting and goldsmith’s work. The support is a square canvas measuring 140 × 140 cm (55⅛ × 55⅛ inches). Face, shoulders, arms, and hands are modelled in oil with conventional flesh tones. Almost everything else is covered with gold leaf and silver leaf, laid over the canvas and, in places, over gesso — a chalk or gypsum paste that raises bracelets, ornamental ridges, and the initials A and B slightly off the surface so they catch the light like relief.

The architect Josef Hoffmann designed the gold-leafed frame, tying the painting to the Wiener Werkstätte’s idea that picture and setting should form one object. At the lower right Klimt signed the work GUSTAV / KLIMT / 1907. Because the metal leaf reflects and the gesso casts tiny shadows, the surface changes as a viewer walks past it. Reproductions flatten that shimmer. The missing horizon and the dense patterning push Adele forward, as if she were emerging from the wall rather than sitting back in a room.

From a Vienna apartment to Fifth Avenue

From 1907 until the autumn of 1938 the painting belonged to Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer and hung in the couple’s Vienna residence among other Klimts, drawings, and a celebrated porcelain collection. After the Anschluss Ferdinand’s assets were seized. In 1941 the portrait was transferred to the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere. Officials pointed to Adele’s 1925 will, which had wished the Klimts to go to the Austrian Gallery after her husband’s death, but Ferdinand — not Adele — was the legal owner. In exile he named his nieces and nephew as heirs. The museum showed the work as Dame in Gold, without the Jewish family name. Ferdinand died in Zurich in 1945; Austria kept the pictures for decades.

A new restitution law in 1998, together with research by the journalist Hubertus Czernin, reopened the case. Maria Altmann and the lawyer E. Randol Schoenberg sued. The dispute reached the U.S. Supreme Court in Republic of Austria v. Altmann (2004). The parties then agreed to arbitration in Vienna, and in January 2006 the panel awarded five of six contested Klimts to the heirs. The portrait was exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art before Ronald S. Lauder bought it in June 2006 for 135 million dollars — then the highest price ever paid for a painting — for the Neue Galerie in New York. Altmann required that it remain on public view.

Since then the work has been the centrepiece of the Neue Galerie at 1048 Fifth Avenue, acquired through the generosity of Ronald S. Lauder, the heirs of the estates of Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer, and the Estée Lauder Fund.