Klimt | Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I

About Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I by Gustav Klimt

Klimt spent three years on this portrait, finishing it in 1907. Adele Bloch-Bauer was the wife of a Viennese sugar industrialist and the only sitter Klimt ever painted twice. The canvas is worked in oil, silver and gold leaf, and she emerges from the ornament almost reluctantly — face, shoulders and hands rendered in soft flesh tones, everything else dissolved into a field of spirals, triangles and the stylised Egyptian eyes that recur throughout his Golden Period.

The painting's later history is as well known as the image. It was seized from the family by the Nazis in 1938 and hung in Vienna's Belvedere as Woman in Gold — the Jewish sitter's name stripped from her own portrait. It stayed there for nearly sixty years.

Adele's niece Maria Altmann, who had escaped Austria in 1938, brought a restitution claim in her eighties. It reached the United States Supreme Court, and in 2006 an Austrian arbitration panel returned the painting to the family. It sold later that year for US$135 million, then the highest price ever paid for a painting.

Own a hand-painted Adele Bloch-Bauer I

What holds this picture together is a collision of two completely different ways of painting. Adele's face, shoulders and those famously nervous hands are modelled in soft, conventional flesh tones with real depth behind them. Everything else — the dress, the chair, the room, the air — is flat pattern pressed right up to the picture surface. She reads as a living person trapped in a mosaic, and the whole effect depends on those two registers staying distinct. Printing renders both at exactly the same flatness and the tension goes. Painted by hand in oils, the face recovers its depth and she steps forward from the gold again.

• A range of sizes — choose yours above. The original is square, and the composition sits best in a square or near-square format.
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