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Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I

Oil and gold leaf on canvas (1907) by Gustav Klimt. Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, wife of the Viennese sugar magnate Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer. One of the most elaborate works of Klimt's Golden Phase, featuring gold leaf, Byzantine mosaic patterns, and Egyptian eye motifs. Seized by the Nazis in 1941; restituted to the Bloch-Bauer heirs in 2006 after a landmark arbitration; sold to Ronald Lauder for $135 million (then a world record) and now at the Neue Galerie New York.

Scholarly Significance

Klimt's most celebrated portrait and the centerpiece of the Austria v. Altmann repatriation case. The full custody_history models Nazi looting, decades of contested possession, and landmark 2006 restitution.

Notes

  • ·Adele Bloch-Bauer (1881–1925) was the wife of Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, a Jewish sugar industrialist and patron of Klimt.
  • ·In her 1923 will, Adele requested that Ferdinand donate the Klimt paintings to the Austrian state after his death; her wish was never legally binding.
  • ·After Austria's Anschluss with Germany in 1938, Ferdinand fled; the Nazis confiscated his property and the paintings were transferred to the Belvedere.
  • ·Austria refused restitution claims from the Bloch-Bauer heirs for decades, citing Adele's will.
  • ·Maria Altmann (Adele's niece) filed suit in US federal court; the US Supreme Court ruled in Republic of Austria v. Altmann (2004) that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act applied retroactively.
  • ·Arbitration panel in Vienna (2006) awarded all five Klimt paintings to the Bloch-Bauer heirs.
  • ·The portrait sold to Ronald Lauder and the Neue Galerie New York for $135 million — world record at the time.
  • ·The case was dramatized in the film 'Woman in Gold' (2015) starring Helen Mirren.
  • ·A second portrait of Adele (Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II, 1912) was restituted and sold at Christie's for $87.9 million (2006).