Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I

Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I is Klimt's most celebrated painting and the apex of his Golden Phase. Adele Bloch-Bauer was the wife of Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, a wealthy Bohemian sugar industrialist and one of Klimt's most generous patrons. The portrait took three years to complete, from approximately 1904 to 1907, and required an extraordinary number of preparatory drawings — over a hundred survive. Klimt used actual gold and silver leaf alongside oil paint to achieve the shimmering mosaic surface, drawing on Byzantine art he had studied in Ravenna in 1903. The Neue Galerie in New York now holds the painting, but its route there is one of art history's most prominent restitution cases: the work was confiscated by the Nazi regime after Austria's annexation in 1938, and the Bloch-Bauer family spent decades attempting to reclaim it. The Austrian government returned it in 2006 to Adele's niece Maria Altmann, who sold it to Ronald Lauder for the Neue Galerie for approximately 135 million dollars — then the highest price ever publicly paid for a painting. The portrait's aesthetic influence is immeasurable: the Byzantine-modernist synthesis it embodies became iconic for the entire Art Nouveau and Secession movements.

Oil, gold leaf, and silver leaf on canvas. The support is densely worked with actual precious-metal leaf pressed into the ground alongside painted passages. Geometric ornamental units — spirals, triangles, and eye motifs — cover the figure's garment and the throne-like chair, worked in varying metallic tones. The sitter's face and hands emerge from the gold ground in warm, naturalistically painted flesh tones.