Klimt's Adele Bloch-Bauer I: The 1907 Gold Portrait Stolen by the Nazis and Returned to a Niece in 2006

Aug 17

10 min read

Updated: 6 days ago

Gustav Klimt's 1907 portrait of the Viennese society hostess Adele Bloch-Bauer is, by reception and by sale price, the single most consequential painting Klimt ever made. The picture is oil and gold leaf and silver on canvas, one hundred and thirty-eight by one hundred and thirty-eight centimetres — a near-perfect square — and shows Adele Bloch-Bauer, then twenty-five years old and one of Vienna's leading literary salon hostesses, seated in a low gold throne against a wallpaper field of gold-leaf eyes, triangles, and Mycenaean spirals, wearing a vertical gold-tiled column of a dress so highly stylised that the figure's body is almost completely subsumed into the pattern. Adele's face, hair, and hands — the only fully naturalistic elements in the picture — float at the upper third of the canvas, lit from a notional source at the upper left, the dark hair piled high and her hands clasped delicately in front of her at the waist with the right hand crossed over the slightly stiffened left wrist. The painting took Klimt three years to complete (he began the preparatory drawings in late 1903), and the finished oil-and-gold composition is the central work of his Goldene Periode — his Golden Phase. The same painting, ninety-nine years later, would be sold for US$135 million in June 2006 to the Neue Galerie in New York, a record price for any work of art at the time.

Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907. Oil, gold, and silver on canvas, 138 × 138 cm. The central work of Klimt's Golden Phase. The painting was commissioned by the Czech-Austrian sugar magnate Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer in 1903 as a thirty-second birthday gift for his wife Adele; Klimt made over a hundred preparatory drawings of the sitter between 1903 and 1907; the finished portrait was hung in the music room of the Bloch-Bauer apartment at Elisabethstraße 18 in central Vienna until 1938, when it was looted from the apartment by the SS within forty-eight hours of the German Anschluss of Austria. The painting was on display in a Vienna museum from 1948 until 2006, when it was returned to Adele's niece Maria Altmann following an eight-year US Supreme Court case.

Vienna 1903-07: the commission and the salon

Klimt was forty-one in late 1903, the year he began the preparatory drawings for the Adele Bloch-Bauer portrait. He had been the dominant figure of the Vienna Secession — the breakaway artists' association he had co-founded with Josef Hoffmann, Koloman Moser, and Otto Wagner in 1897 — for six years. He had completed the controversial Faculty Paintings for the University of Vienna ceiling between 1900 and 1903 (rejected by the university committee, eventually destroyed by SS arson in 1945); he had finished the Beethoven Frieze for the fourteenth Secession exhibition in 1902; he had begun the long affair with Emilie Flöge that would last the rest of his life. The Adele Bloch-Bauer commission came from Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, a Czech-Austrian sugar industrialist twenty-two years older than his wife Adele and one of Klimt's most reliable patrons. Ferdinand commissioned the portrait in 1903 as a thirtieth-birthday present for Adele, who would not actually turn thirty until 1911 (Klimt took years to finish his major works; the commission was given in 1903 with the understanding that the picture would be ready when ready).

Klimt, The Kiss, 1907-08 — Gustav Klimt, The Kiss (Der Kuss), 1907-08. Oil and gold leaf on canvas, 180 × 180 cm. Painted in the same year the Bloch-Bauer portrait was completed and signed; the two paintings are the central works of Klimt's Golden Phase and the canonical evidence of his technique for fusing slow-dried oil paint with hammered gold-leaf foil applied directly to the canvas surface. The Kiss is itself the subject of a separate Zocine art-history reading; The Kiss and the Adele Bloch-Bauer portrait together are the most-reproduced images of the Vienna Secession and the most-quoted Austrian paintings of the twentieth century.

Adele was no ordinary commission. She was, by 1903, one of the leading figures of fin-de-siècle Vienna's intellectual society — her literary salon at the Bloch-Bauer apartment on Elisabethstraße 18 in central Vienna, two blocks west of the Hofoper, was attended by Gustav Mahler, Alma Mahler, Stefan Zweig, Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Felix Salten, the composer Anton Webern, the architect Adolf Loos, and Klimt himself. Adele was widely (though never publicly confirmed) believed to have been Klimt's lover; the relationship between them, if it existed, was unusually long-running by Klimt's standards (he was famously serial). Klimt made more than a hundred preparatory drawings of Adele between late 1903 and the final composition in 1906-07 — small pencil-and-crayon studies showing her in dozens of attempted poses, draperies, hand positions, and expressions. Several of the surviving studies (in Albertina and other Vienna collections) are themselves considered important Klimt works. The finished oil-and-gold portrait was delivered in 1907 and hung from the autumn of that year in the music room of the Bloch-Bauer apartment.

The gold leaf: Byzantine sources for a Viennese face

The gold-leaf technique of the Adele portrait is, like the gold of Klimt's Kiss painted in the same year, the result of a specific 1903 trip Klimt took to Ravenna with his brother Georg (a metalsmith) to study the Byzantine mosaics at the Basilica of San Vitale, the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, and the Basilica of Sant'Apollinare Nuovo. The Ravenna mosaics — sixth-century Byzantine images of Empress Theodora, Emperor Justinian, and Saint Apollinare on flat fields of gold tesserae — were the direct visual source of the Golden Phase. Klimt was struck, on the Ravenna visit, by how the gold ground in a mosaic image flattens the picture surface and removes the figure from naturalistic space — and by how the cumulative shimmer of thousands of small gold tesserae creates an effect of devotional weight that no painted surface had previously achieved in the Western canon.

Klimt, Tree of Life (cartoon for the Stoclet Frieze), 1905-09 — Gustav Klimt, Tree of Life (Lebensbaum) — design cartoon for the central panel of the Stoclet Frieze, 1905-09. Tempera, watercolour, gold paint, silver paint, and gold leaf on paper, dimensions vary. Held in a Vienna collection. The Stoclet Frieze was Klimt's largest single Golden Phase commission — the mosaic-style decoration of the dining room of the Palais Stoclet, a private mansion in Brussels built between 1905 and 1911 by the Vienna Secession architect Josef Hoffmann for the Belgian industrialist Adolphe Stoclet. The cartoon shows Klimt's working method during the Adele Bloch-Bauer years: schematised swirling spirals, repeated triangle and eye motifs against a gold ground, naturalistic faces emerging only at key compositional points. The same vocabulary appears in the Bloch-Bauer portrait.

Back in Vienna in late 1903 Klimt began experimenting with the technique that would define the Adele portrait: a multi-layer surface in which slow-dried oil paint was used for the figure's flesh (face, hair, hands) and the gold-leaf foil (hammered into sheets thinner than a tenth of a millimetre and applied with a fine brush over a red-clay base) was used for the background and the dress. The dress in the Adele portrait is built up in dozens of small gold-leaf squares, rectangles, and circles, each one cut and laid by hand and then partially overpainted with translucent oil glazes to push the brightest gold into the deeper layers and bring out the patterned eye and triangle motifs at the surface. The total quantity of gold in the painting is estimated at over three ounces of high-purity gold leaf; the silver detailing — visible at close inspection in the lower-left of the composition — is approximately one ounce of silver leaf. The picture is, in literal terms, a painting that contains its own bullion value.

Vienna 1938: the SS at the Bloch-Bauer apartment

Adele Bloch-Bauer died in January 1925 at the age of forty-three of complications from meningitis. Her will, prepared a year earlier in late 1923 with her husband's lawyer, asked Ferdinand to leave the six Klimt paintings in the Bloch-Bauer collection (the two Adele portraits — there is a second portrait, Adele Bloch-Bauer II of 1912, also Klimt — and four landscape paintings) to the Austrian State Gallery on his eventual death. Ferdinand was still alive thirteen years later when Germany annexed Austria in March 1938. The Bloch-Bauer family were prominent and visibly assimilated Jews — Ferdinand was president of the Vienna Sugar Refiners' Association — and within forty-eight hours of the German Wehrmacht's entry into Vienna on the morning of 12 March 1938, SS officers had entered the Bloch-Bauer apartment at Elisabethstraße 18, sealed the rooms, and confiscated everything moveable. Ferdinand escaped to Zurich a few days later via Czechoslovakia; he died in Switzerland in November 1945 without ever recovering any of his possessions.

Klimt, Danaë, c. 1907-08 — Gustav Klimt, Danaë, 1907-08. Oil on canvas, 77 × 83 cm. Painted in the same Golden Phase years as the Adele Bloch-Bauer portrait and The Kiss. The painting shows the mythological Danaë (the mother of Perseus in Greek myth, impregnated by Zeus disguised as a shower of gold) curled in a foetal position with her right thigh in the foreground and a stream of small gold rectangles flowing down between her thighs from the upper-left of the canvas. The picture is one of Klimt's most directly erotic Golden Phase works and, like the Adele Bloch-Bauer portrait, demonstrates the technical procedure of using slow-dried oil for the flesh and hammered gold-leaf foil for the patterned ground.

The Klimt paintings in the apartment were taken in two stages. The Adele Bloch-Bauer I — the gold portrait — was identified by the SS officer Erich Führer, a Vienna lawyer working for the Reichsstatthalter Arthur Seyß-Inquart's office, as a candidate for the planned Linz Führermuseum (Hitler's never-built personal museum at his birthplace in northern Austria). The painting was ostensibly "sold" by the absent Ferdinand for a token sum to the Austrian State Gallery in November 1941, then moved to the Belvedere Palace in Vienna where it would hang as the centrepiece of the gallery's twentieth-century rooms for the next fifty-eight years. The other five Klimt paintings from the Bloch-Bauer collection followed similar paths — "sold" under SS coercion to Austrian state and private collections, never returned after the war, displayed without restitution claims through the entire post-war Austrian republic period. The Adele Bloch-Bauer I was rehung in 1948 at the Belvedere under the new title "Goldene Adele" — "Golden Adele" — without any mention of the Bloch-Bauer family in its wall label.

Maria Altmann 1998-2006: the eight-year case

Maria Altmann was Adele Bloch-Bauer's niece — daughter of Adele's sister Therese, born in Vienna in 1916, married in 1937 to the opera singer Fritz Altmann, escaped from Austria with Fritz in late 1938 through Cologne to Liverpool and then to Los Angeles, naturalised as an American citizen in 1945. She was eighty-two in 1998 when the Austrian investigative journalist Hubertus Czernin published a series of articles in the Vienna newspaper Standard demonstrating that the entire post-war Austrian state had been knowingly maintaining ownership of Klimt paintings (including the Adele Bloch-Bauer portraits) that had been looted from Jewish families during the Anschluss. Czernin's articles drove the Austrian parliament to pass, in early 1998, the Federal Law on the Restitution of Artworks from Austrian Federal Museums — a statute requiring the Austrian state to investigate and (where appropriate) return looted Jewish art from its public collections. The first Austrian government response to the Bloch-Bauer claim was a refusal: a federal commission examined the file in 1998-99 and concluded that the 1925 Adele Bloch-Bauer will, which had asked Ferdinand to leave the Klimts to the Austrian State Gallery, constituted a valid bequest and that no restitution was due.

Klimt, Judith I, 1901 — Gustav Klimt, Judith and the Head of Holofernes (Judith I), 1901. Oil on canvas with hammered-gold-leaf frame designed by the artist's brother Georg, 84 × 42 cm. The transitional painting between Klimt's pre-Secessionist late-academic style and the full Golden Phase that would produce the Adele Bloch-Bauer portrait six years later. Judith is shown in three-quarter view with her right hand resting on the severed head of the Assyrian general Holofernes (visible at the lower edge of the composition) and her gold-and-jewelled choker tight at the throat. The painting is one of Klimt's earliest experiments in using gold leaf for a contemporary-modelled face and was a structural precursor to the Adele Bloch-Bauer portrait.

Maria Altmann, then in her early eighties and living in Los Angeles, hired a Los Angeles attorney named E. Randol Schoenberg (grandson of the composer Arnold Schoenberg, also a Bloch-Bauer family friend) and sued the Republic of Austria in United States federal court. The case turned on a question of US sovereign immunity: could a private citizen sue a foreign government in US courts for property looted before the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 was enacted? The case went up to the US Supreme Court in February 2004, where the Court ruled 6-3 in Republic of Austria v. Altmann that the FSIA applied retroactively to pre-1976 expropriations. The Austrian government, faced with the prospect of having to defend the case in California state courts (where local procedural law was certain to be unsympathetic), agreed in May 2005 to submit the underlying restitution claim to binding arbitration before three Austrian judges. The arbitration panel announced its decision in January 2006: the Adele Bloch-Bauer I and four of the other five Klimt paintings looted from the Bloch-Bauer apartment in 1938 were to be returned to the Bloch-Bauer heirs.

June 2006: the most expensive painting in the world

The Adele Bloch-Bauer I left the Belvedere in March 2006 in a sealed packing case and was shipped to Los Angeles via El Al cargo. Maria Altmann put the painting up for sale at Christie's New York in mid-2006. The buyer was Ronald Lauder — the cosmetics-fortune heir, US ambassador to Austria 1986-87, and founder of the Neue Galerie in Manhattan, the small private museum on the Fifth Avenue at 86th Street that he had opened in 2001 to specialise in early twentieth-century German and Austrian art. The June 2006 sale price was US$135 million, a record at the time for any single painting (since exceeded by several Picassos and by the 2017 sale of the Salvator Mundi attributed to Leonardo). Lauder placed the painting on permanent display in the second-floor gallery of the Neue Galerie, where it has hung continuously since July 2006 with a brief world-tour interval in 2015-16 around the release of Simon Curtis's biographical film Woman in Gold, starring Helen Mirren as Maria Altmann and Ryan Reynolds as Schoenberg.

Klimt, Beethoven Frieze: The Hostile Powers, 1902 (detail) — Gustav Klimt, Beethoven Frieze: The Hostile Powers (Die feindlichen Gewalten), 1902. Casein, gold and silver paint, pencil, and crayon on plaster, total wall length approximately 34 metres. Created for the fourteenth Vienna Secession exhibition in spring 1902 as Klimt's contribution to a Gesamtkunstwerk display centred on Max Klinger's polychrome Beethoven sculpture. The Frieze was on the walls for only the duration of the exhibition (April-June 1902), then dismantled and stored; it was reassembled in the Vienna Secession building in 1986 and is now on permanent display. The Hostile Powers panel — the giant ape-headed monster Typhon at the centre, the three Gorgons at the left, the figures of Sickness, Madness, Death, Lasciviousness, Unchastity, Excess, and Gnawing Grief at the right — is the structural precursor of the gold-and-figure-on-pattern technique that would define the Adele Bloch-Bauer portrait five years later.

Maria Altmann died in February 2011 at the age of ninety-four in Los Angeles. The Schoenberg family used a portion of the legal fee from the Altmann case to establish what is now the Schoenberg Institute for Music and Restitution at the University of California Los Angeles. Hubertus Czernin, the Austrian journalist whose 1998 reporting drove the parliamentary law that made the restitution possible, died in 2006 at the age of fifty before the case had concluded; the Bloch-Bauer family asked the Christie's auction catalogue to dedicate the sale to his memory. The Adele Bloch-Bauer I — at the Neue Galerie in New York since 2006, a free-standing painting in a small dedicated room, with a wall label that for the first time in seventy-eight years tells the full story of Adele, of Ferdinand, of the Bloch-Bauer salon, of the 1938 SS confiscation, of the eight-year US legal case, and of the 2006 restitution — is now perhaps the single most documented painting in the history of restitution law.

Key takeaways

Gustav Klimt's 1907 Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I is oil, gold leaf, and silver on canvas, 138 × 138 cm. It is the central work of Klimt's Golden Phase and the most-reproduced Austrian painting of the twentieth century after his own The Kiss (1907-08). The painting contains over three ounces of high-purity gold leaf and approximately one ounce of silver leaf.
The picture was commissioned by Adele's husband, the Czech-Austrian sugar industrialist Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, in 1903; Klimt made over 100 preparatory drawings of the sitter; the finished portrait was delivered in 1907 and hung in the music room of the Bloch-Bauer apartment at Elisabethstraße 18 in central Vienna, where Adele kept the leading literary salon of fin-de-siècle Vienna (Mahler, Zweig, Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal, Adolf Loos, Webern, Klimt himself).
The gold-leaf technique derives directly from Klimt's 1903 trip with his metalsmith brother Georg to study the Byzantine mosaics at Ravenna. The flat gold ground and the figure-against-pattern composition are direct borrowings from the sixth-century mosaics at San Vitale, the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, and Sant'Apollinare Nuovo.
Adele died of meningitis in 1925 at forty-three; her 1923 will asked Ferdinand to leave the six Klimts in the Bloch-Bauer collection to the Austrian State Gallery. Ferdinand was still alive in March 1938 when the German Anschluss occurred. Within 48 hours SS officers under Erich Führer had sealed the apartment and confiscated all moveable property. Ferdinand escaped to Zurich; he died in Switzerland in November 1945 without recovering anything.
The Adele Bloch-Bauer I was "sold" under SS coercion to the Austrian State Gallery in November 1941 and hung at the Belvedere Palace in Vienna from 1948 as "Goldene Adele" — Golden Adele — without any mention of the Bloch-Bauer family in its wall label. The other five Klimt paintings from the collection followed similar paths.
Maria Altmann (Adele's niece, b. Vienna 1916, escaped 1938 to Los Angeles) sued the Republic of Austria in US federal court in 1999 with attorney E. Randol Schoenberg (grandson of the composer). The US Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Republic of Austria v. Altmann (2004) that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 applied retroactively; Austria submitted the underlying claim to binding arbitration in January 2006; the arbitration panel returned the Adele Bloch-Bauer I and four of the other five Klimts to the Bloch-Bauer heirs.
Ronald Lauder (cosmetics heir, ex-US ambassador to Austria, founder of the Neue Galerie in Manhattan) bought the painting for US$135 million in June 2006 — a record at the time for any single work of art. The painting has hung continuously at the Neue Galerie at 1048 Fifth Avenue since July 2006, with the first wall label in seventy-eight years to tell the full Bloch-Bauer story.
The Austrian journalist Hubertus Czernin's 1998 Standard articles drove the Austrian parliament to pass the Federal Law on the Restitution of Artworks from Austrian Federal Museums (1998), the statute under which the Bloch-Bauer restitution and dozens of other looted-art cases since have been resolved. Czernin died in 2006 at fifty before the case concluded; the Christie's auction catalogue dedicated the sale to his memory.