Adele Bloch-Bauer II

Adele Bloch-Bauer II, painted in 1912, is the second and final portrait Klimt made of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the wife of his principal patron Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer. Where the first portrait (1907) subsumed the sitter almost entirely into Byzantine gold ornament, this later work represents a significant shift: the background is populated by swirling, colourful textile patterns derived from East Asian and Viennese fashions of the period, but Adele herself is painted with greater physical specificity and a more relaxed pose. By 1912 Klimt had moved beyond the strict Gold Phase, incorporating influences from Henri Matisse's colour experiments and the Wiener Werkstätte's applied art designs. The dress and background fabrics reference kimono patterns and the decorative vocabulary that the Wiener Werkstätte had developed under Josef Hoffmann, Klimt's close collaborator. The painting was among those confiscated by the Nazi regime in 1938 and was eventually restituted to the Bloch-Bauer heirs in 2006 along with four other Klimt works. It was subsequently sold at Christie's New York for approximately 87.9 million dollars. The contrast between the two Adele portraits encapsulates the arc of Klimt's development across his most productive decade.

Oil on canvas with a more varied and colourful palette than Adele I. The background is covered with flattened textile-like patterns in multiple colours — pinks, greens, oranges — rather than the gold ground of the first portrait. The figure is rendered with slightly more spatial presence, her form emerging from the decorative ground with greater physical conviction.