Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II (1912 CE)

Five years after he encased Adele Bloch-Bauer in gold, Gustav Klimt painted her again. Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II, completed in 1912, shows the same woman standing tall against a field of patterned color rather than mosaic glitter. She wears a wide black hat and a pale dress with a blue sash; her figure rises like a column through a room that seems to dissolve into flowers, panels, and an almost dreamlike East Asian landscape. Where the earlier painting turned her into an icon, this one lets her look as a living person—elegant, reserved, and a little melancholic. It is the only time Klimt is known to have painted the same sitter twice in full length, and the contrast between the two canvases is one of the most striking turns in his career.

From a Sugar Fortune to a Second Sitting

Adele Bauer was born in Vienna on 9 August 1881, the youngest daughter of banker Moritz Bauer. In 1899, at eighteen, she married Ferdinand Bloch, a wealthy sugar industrialist seventeen years her senior; the couple later used the hyphenated name Bloch-Bauer. They belonged to the city’s Jewish cultural elite. Adele hosted a salon, read widely, and became an important patron. Ferdinand commissioned the first portrait in 1903 as a gift connected to her parents; Klimt finished that golden image in 1907. Around 1912 he painted her again. Adele was by then in her early thirties, childless after two infant losses, and already a figure of some gravity in Viennese society. She died of meningitis on 24 January 1925 at the age of forty-three. Ferdinand fled Austria after the Anschluss in 1938. Both portraits, together with other Klimt works from their collection, were seized by the Nazis.

Rumors of Friendship, a Will, and a Niece Who Would Not Let Go

People have long wondered whether Adele and Klimt were lovers. He had a reputation for intimacy with models; she sat for him over years and was the only woman he painted twice in this formal way. Her niece Maria Altmann later said her own mother treated the idea as improper, while a sister suspected an affair. What can be said with certainty is that the Bloch-Bauers were among Klimt’s most important patrons and that Adele’s will asked her husband to leave “my 2 portraits and 4 landscapes by Gustav Klimt” to the Austrian State Gallery after his death. The pictures belonged legally to Ferdinand, who named relatives as heirs. After the war the Belvedere in Vienna treated the works as its own. Decades later Altmann, living in Los Angeles, fought the Austrian state through American courts and Austrian arbitration. In January 2006 a panel ruled that five Klimt paintings, including both Adele portraits, must be returned. The struggle became one of the defining restitution cases of the postwar era and later inspired the film Woman in Gold, even though that film centers on the golden first portrait.

Color, Patronage, and a City on the Edge

The second portrait belongs to the moment when Klimt stepped away from the gold and silver of his so-called Golden Period toward a looser, more saturated decorative language. Critics have described the later Adele as a “grande dame” set in a jewel-toned interior that is almost abstract—blocks of pink, green, and purple, floral motifs, and an upper register of riders and village architecture that recall Japanese prints and Chinese screens. The painting records both a personal relationship and a social world: Jewish patronage at the height of fin-de-siècle Vienna, just before that world was destroyed. Adele is no longer an idol in a shrine. She stands in fashionable dress against a backdrop that advertises cultivated taste and international curiosity. Together the two portraits form a rare pair in Klimt’s oeuvre—one work of mythic surface, one of color, pattern, and a more modern sense of the figure in space.

Oil, Scale, and a Vertical Presence

The painting is oil on canvas. It measures 190 by 120 centimeters, or 75 by 47 inches—a tall, relatively narrow format that emphasizes Adele’s upright stance. Klimt builds the surface with visible, often broken brushwork rather than the metal leaf that dominates the 1907 portrait. The dress is comparatively simple; the energy of the picture lives in the surrounding ornament, which shifts from domestic pattern at the bottom to a distant, almost narrative landscape at the top.

Technical study in recent years, including work connected with a loan to the Belvedere, has treated the canvas as a late Klimt in which color and decorative structure take over from gold. The scale is large enough to command a wall, yet intimate enough that the face and hat remain the emotional center.

From the Family Apartment to an Anonymous Buyer

The portrait hung in the Bloch-Bauer home until the Nazi seizure. After the war it entered the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere and stayed there until the 2006 restitution to Maria Altmann and the other heirs. In November 2006 Christie’s in New York sold it at auction for nearly 88 million dollars; the buyer was Oprah Winfrey. She later lent the work, including a long-term loan to the Museum of Modern Art in New York beginning in 2014 and a temporary reunion with the first portrait at the Neue Galerie. In the summer of 2016 Winfrey sold it privately, reportedly for about 150 million dollars, to an unidentified Chinese buyer in a deal associated with dealer Larry Gagosian. Since then the painting has appeared on loan through HomeArt, a Hong Kong–linked advisory, including at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in 2022 and as a “Special Guest” at the Belvedere in Vienna from November 2023 to February 2024. It remains in private hands.