10-Minute Challenge: Klimt’s Woman in Gold

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“This is our Mona Lisa,” Renée Price, the director of the Neue Galerie in Manhattan, told me last week as we stood in front of this shimmering 119-year-old portrait of the Viennese socialite Adele Bloch-Bauer.

Adele has held court on the second floor of this mansion-turned-gallery on the Upper East Side for the past 20 years:

She looks comfortable here, still in her original 55-inch-wide frame, recessed into the wall. But her journey to this spot was anything but easy, one that Hollywood turned into a 2015 movie. (Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds in a courtroom thriller — what’s not to like?)

Her cheeks are flush. Her lips are full. Her eyes are wide.

She gazes … at? … past? … through? … you.

Adele Bloch-Bauer, seen here in this photo a few years after the portrait, was a socialite, a salon hostess and a member of Jewish high society in turn-of-the-century Vienna.

Her husband was Ferdinand Bloch, 17 years her senior, whom she wed in a strategic union of two wealthy Austrian families. (Her sister Therese married Gustav, Ferdinand’s brother.)

“I don’t think it was a love match,” Ms. Price said, but “they tried to make it work.”

In 1903, Ferdinand commissioned one of the finest artists at the time to paint his wife as an anniversary present for her parents. He turned to this guy:

Gustav Klimt was a bad boy. He was an artistic rebel and leader of the Vienna Secession, a movement to break away from more traditional artistic style. He carried on multiple affairs, fathering many children — he allegedly wore nothing under his painting smock. He ate whipped cream and cake for breakfast each morning. He lived with his mother and sisters, supporting them after his father, a gold engraver, and a brother, also an artist, both died in 1892. In the late 1890s, he began taking portrait commissions.

Having your portrait painted by Klimt could be risky — rumors would spread that you were sleeping together, and those rumors followed Adele but were never confirmed. (Ms. Price doesn’t think an affair happened.) But a portrait by Klimt was also a status symbol: an expensive piece of work painted by one of the most avant-garde artists in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, during his so-called golden phase.

Vienna was in a golden age as well — even with antisemitism on the rise. Sigmund Freud was interpreting dreams; Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg were disrupting the musical mainstream; Ludwig Wittgenstein was questioning the limits of language; Klimt and Egon Schiele were painting the erotic.

Klimt painted this in 1901:

It portrays the biblical story of Judith, a Jewish widow who saves her city after seducing and beheading General Holofernes with his own sword. (If that face reminds you of Adele, some art historians would agree.)

In 1903, Klimt traveled to Ravenna, Italy. There, he studied the sixth-century Byzantine mosaics at the Basilica of San Vitale:

Thousands of tiny tiles in wild greens, oranges and golds fill the church.

He was particularly struck by a section depicting the Byzantine empress Theodora and her entourage:

The gold mosaic tile surrounds her head like a saint’s halo. Jewels cover her crown and chest.

Klimt called these 1,400-year-old mosaics a revelation. The gold elevated these flat mortals into shimmering — seemingly eternal — figures. It reacts to light in ways paint can’t.

Scholars think this became an inspiration for the commission he was just beginning.

***

Back in Vienna, Klimt and Adele spent countless hours together in his studio. He made hundreds of sketches of her in various poses:

After several years of work, the portrait was unveiled in 1907. “It made Adele, at twenty-six, an instant celebrity,” according to the book “The Lady in Gold,” by Anne-Marie O’Connor.

“I think he wanted to impress her and the family and just, you know, let it rip,” Ms. Price said.

Klimt has eliminated traditional perspective and the horizon line. Look closely, and Adele’s face and torso leap forward. Step back and the gold overwhelms everything, blurring any notion of a strict foreground or background:

Adele is swimming in gold. There’s silver and platinum in there, too. There are parts made with gesso and plaster that raise off the surface, her initials embedded within:

(It takes seeing the painting in person to fully appreciate the shimmer of gold leaf and the texture of the surface.)

The patterns reference a world history of symbols.

The swirls, possibly inspired by Mycenaean metalwork (roughly 1500 B.C. in Greece), frame the edges of the chair she’s resting on:

The swaths of speckled gold are inspired by Japanese lacquerware and folding screens:

(Klimt collected Japanese art and objects.)

Long, thin eye-like symbols, similar to the Egyptian eye of Horus …

… form a kind of river on her dress:

The more oval-shaped feminine forms dance with the more rectangular masculine ones, Ms. Price said.

“It’s just a sea of ornaments,” Ms. Price said.

The only thing resisting a total golden takeover? This green patch at the bottom left, where your eyes might drift if they need a rest:

Closer to the center of the piece, the unusual positioning of Adele’s hands hides a crooked finger she was self-conscious of:

It adds to Adele’s distinctive, evocative presence within “a painted mosaic,” as a journalist at the time described the work.

***

Around this time, a young Austrian named Adolf Hitler — hoping to become an artist — was rejected from the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, once in 1907 and again in 1908.

Adele died of meningitis in 1925. Thirteen years later, Hitler annexed Austria. Ferdinand was still alive, living with the portrait of his wife, when the Nazis came calling. They seized the art, and Ferdinand fled to Switzerland.

“Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” became, simply, “Lady in Gold.” The Nazis stripped any mention of Adele or her Jewish identity from the work. It hung in the Belvedere Palace in Austria for the next 65 years.

In 1998, under a new art restitution law in Austria, documents were discovered showing that in his will Ferdinand left the paintings to his nephew and two nieces. (The couple tried to have children, but none survived. Miscarriages, a stillbirth and an infant death were devastating for the couple.) Maria Altmann, one of the nieces, had fled the Nazis 60 years earlier and ended up in California. She sued to get the works back. In 2006, after years of legal fighting that involved the Supreme Court, Ms. Altmann won. “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” left Austria for New York.

It was purchased by Ronald Lauder for $135 million to hang in the Neue Galerie, where it’s been on public display since.

“It really does inspire many people,” Ms. Price said. “We have young artists who sit here and sketch it. It’s an icon.”

There was a long pause. She looked at me, and then back at Adele.

“Bet she never dreamt she’d be in New York City.”

This is an installment in our series of experiments on art and attention. If you liked this one, you may like these past exercises: a finished, unfinished portrait; a sudden rain over a bridge; a unicorn tapestry; some buckets from Home Depot; and a Whistler painting.

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