A look at the Neue Galerie’s fascinating Gustav Klimt collection

The story begins with Adele Bloch-Bauer, the youngest child of Mauritz and Jeanette Bauer. Adele was a member of a wealthy banking family who, by wedding Ferdinand Bloch, married into a sugar refining fortune. The the Bloch-Bauers formally joined their names in 1917, following the death of the Bauer family’s last male descendent.

Adele and Ferdinand purchased this impressive maisonette after World War I. Located just off the Ringstrasse, Vienna’s premier street, The Bloch-Bauer home held regular salons hosting the city’s artists, writers and intellectuals, and was where Ferdinand hung his art collection, which included Imperial Viennese porcelain, Biedermeier paintings, modern sculpture and, most significantly, works by Gustav Klimt.

No one knows when exactly Klimt met Adele and Ferdinand, but they became some of Klimt’s most important patrons, while he became a close friend of the family. There were rumors, completely unsubstantiated, that Adele and Klimt may have been lovers. What is clear is that Ferdinand commissioned Klimt to paint a portrait of his wife in 1903—a painting that took four years to complete.

This drawing is one of several preparatory sketches Klimt made of Adele as he embarked on creating her portrait. What’s notable about this rendering is that the shape and direction of Adele’s face found its way into the finished painting.

The same year he undertook Ferdinand’s commission, Klimt visited Ravenna, Italy, home to the Basilica of San Vitale and its magnificent 6th-century mosaics of Byzantine Emperor Constantine and his wife, Empress Theodora. This detail showing Theodora makes it plain that Klimt became influenced by its use of gold and highly decorative motifs as he proceeded with Adele’s portrait.

Klimt completed his painting of Adele in 1907, and it’s generally regarded as the high point of his Golden Period, which included his iconic composition, The Kiss. The awkward position of Adele’s hands are due to Adele’s concealment of her disfigured right hand, about which she was very self-conscious. Critics were divided in their opinion of the work, with one hailing it as an “idol in a golden arc,” while another dismissed it as “more brass than Bloch.”

Pleased by Klimt’s portrait of Adele, Ferdinand commissioned another. Completed in 1912, it represented the only time Klimt painted the same subject twice. It’s also a good example of his later style, which introduced a bouquet-like palette of colors.

This landscape was one of four that Ferdinand owned in addition to the portraits of his wife.

The Nazis annexed Austria in 1938 and immediately resorted to confiscating Jewish property in Vienna and elsewhere. They filed fraudulent claims of tax evasion against Ferdinand, impounding his property to secure alleged tax debts that ran to nearly a quarter of a million reichsmarks. A lawyer appointed to aid in the expropriation of Ferdinand’s assets arranged to sell the portrait of Adele to Vienna’s Belvedere Museum. He did so—and pocketed the proceeds—knowing full well that before her premature death in 1925, Adele had left her portrait to the same museum in her will.

After the war, the Belvedere kept the portrait of Adele, citing her bequest. However, Ferdinand had never officially probated Adele’s will. In 1999, Austrian journalist Hubetus Cznernin unearthed the will and related documents that proved the Belvedere didn’t have rightful claim to the portrait. In 2000, Adele’s niece Maria Altmann sued for repatriation of the painting. The case was being heard in a Los Angeles court, a venue contested by Austrian officals. The United States Supreme Court ruled in 2004, however, that the suit could proceed as filed. In 2006, an arbitration panel in Austria conceded that Altmann was the true owner of the painting.

Later in 2006, cosmetics mogul Ronald S. Lauder (seen on the far right), purchased Adele Bloch-Bauer I for the then record sum of $135 million before donating it to the Neue Galerie.

In 2015, the remarkable story of Klimt’s portrait of Adele was dramatized by Hollywood with Helen Mirren in the role of Maria Altmann.