Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I is an oil painting on canvas, with gold leaf, by Gustav Klimt, completed between 1903 and 1907. The portrait was commissioned by the sitter's husband, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, a Viennese and Jewish banker and sugar producer. The painting was stolen by the Nazis in 1941 and displayed at the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere. The portrait is the final and most fully representative work of Klimt's golden phase. It was the first of two depictions of Adele by Klimt—the second was completed in 1912; these were two of several works by the artist that the family owned.
Adele died in 1925; her will asked that the artworks by Klimt be eventually left to the Galerie Belvedere, although these works belonged to Ferdinand, not her. Following the Anschluss of Austria by Nazi Germany, and due to the Nazi persecution of Jews, Ferdinand fled Vienna, and made his way to Switzerland, leaving behind much of his wealth, including his large art collection. The painting was stolen by the Nazis in 1941, along with the remainder of Ferdinand's assets, after a false charge of tax evasion was made against him. The lawyer acting on behalf of the German state gave the portrait to the Galerie Belvedere, claiming he was following the wishes Adele had made in her will. Ferdinand died in 1945; his will stated that his estate should go to his nephew and two nieces.
In 1998 the Austrian investigative journalist Hubertus Czernin established that the Galerie Belvedere contained several works stolen from Jewish owners in the war and that the gallery had refused to return the art to their original owners or to acknowledge a theft had taken place. One of Ferdinand's nieces, Maria Altmann, hired the lawyer E. Randol Schoenberg to make a claim against the gallery for the return of five works by Klimt. In 2006 after a seven-year legal claim, which included a hearing in front of the Supreme Court of the United States, an arbitration committee in Vienna agreed that the painting, and others, had been stolen from the family and that it should be returned to Altmann. She sold it the same year for $135 million, at the time a record price for a painting to the businessman and art collector Ronald Lauder to place the work in the Neue Galerie, the public New York–based gallery he co-founded.
Background
Gustav Klimt
was born in 1862 in Baumgarten, near Vienna in Austria-Hungary. He attended the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts before taking on commissions with his brother, Ernst, and a fellow-student Franz von Matsch from 1879. Over the next decade, alongside several private commissions for portraiture, they painted interior murals and ceilings in large public buildings, including the Burgtheater, the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the ceiling of the Great Hall at the University of Vienna.Klimt worked in Vienna during the Belle Époque, during which time the city made "an extreme and lasting contribution to the history of modern art". During the 1890s he was influenced by European avant-garde art, including the works of the painters Fernand Khnopff, Jan Toorop and Aubrey Beardsley. In 1897 he was a founding member and president of the Vienna Secession, a group of artists who wanted to break with what they saw as the prevailing conservatism of the Viennese Vienna Künstlerhaus. Klimt in particular challenged what he saw as the "hypocritical boundaries of respectability set by Viennese society"; according to the art historian Susanna Partsch, he was "the enfant terrible of the Viennese art scene, was acknowledged to be the painter of beautiful women". By 1900 he was the preferred portrait painter of the wives of the largely Jewish Viennese bourgeoisie, an emerging class of self-made industrialists who were "buying the innovative new art that state museums rejected", according to the journalist Anne-Marie O'Connor.
From 1898 Klimt began to experiment with the style in what became known as his Byzantine or Golden period, when his works, stylistically influenced by Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts movement, were gilded with gold leaf. Klimt had begun using gold in his 1890 portrait of the pianist Joseph Pembauer, but his first work that included a golden theme was Pallas Athene. The art historian Gilles Néret considers that the use of gold in the painting "underlines the essential erotic ingredient in ... view of the world". Néret also states that Klimt used the gold to give subjects a sacred or magical quality.
Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer
was from a wealthy Jewish Viennese family. Her father was a director of the Wiener Bankverein, the seventh largest bank in Austria-Hungary, and the general director of the Oriental Railway. In the late 1890s Adele met Klimt, and may have begun a relationship with him. Opinion is divided on whether Adele and Klimt had an affair. The artist Catherine Dean considered that Adele was "the only society lady painted by Klimt who is known definitely to be his mistress", while the journalist Melissa Müller and the academic Monica Tatzkow write that "no evidence has ever been produced that their relationship was more than a friendship". The author Frank Whitford observes that some of the preliminary sketches that Klimt made for The Kiss showed a bearded figure which was possibly a self-portrait; the female partner is described by Whitford as an "idealised portrait of Adele". Whitford writes that the only evidence put forward to support the theory is the position of the woman's right hand, as Adele had a disfigured finger following a childhood accident.Adele's parents arranged a marriage with Ferdinand Bloch, a banker and sugar manufacturer; Adele's older sister had previously married Ferdinand's older brother. Ferdinand was older than his fiancée and at the time of the marriage in December 1899, she was 18 and he was 35. The couple, who had no children, both changed their surnames to Bloch-Bauer. Socially well-connected, Adele brought together writers, politicians and intellectuals for regular salons at their home.
The couple shared a love of art and patronised several artists, collecting primarily nineteenth-century Viennese paintings and modern sculpture. Ferdinand also had a passion for neoclassical porcelain, and by 1934 his collection was over 400 pieces and one of the finest in the world.
In 1901 Klimt painted Judith I; the art historian Gottfried Fliedl observes that the painting is "widely known and interpreted as Salome". Adele was the model for the work and wore a heavily jewelled deep choker given to her by Ferdinand, in what Whitford describes as "Klimt's most erotic painting". Whitford also writes that the painting displays "apparent evidence of ... cuckoldry". In 1903 Ferdinand purchased his first Klimt work from the artist, Buchenwald.
The painting
Preparation and execution
In mid-1903 Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer commissioned Klimt to paint a portrait of his wife; he wished to give the piece to Adele's parents as an anniversary present that October. Klimt drew over a hundred preparatory sketches for the portrait between 1903 and 1904. The Bloch-Bauers purchased some of the sketches he had made of Adele when they obtained 16 Klimt drawings. In December 1903, along with fellow artist Maximilian Lenz, Klimt visited the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna where he studied the early-Christian Byzantine gold ground mosaics of Justinian I and his wife, Empress Theodora. Lenz later wrote that "the mosaics made an immense decisive impression on ... . From this comes the resplendence, the stiff decoration of his art". Klimt later said that the "mosaics of unbelievable splendour" were a "revelation" to him. The Ravenna mosaics also attracted the attention of other artists who provided illustrations of the work, including Wassily Kandinsky in 1911 and Clive Bell in 1914.Klimt undertook more extensive preparations for the portrait than any other piece he worked on. Much of the portrait was undertaken by an elaborate technique of using gold and silver leaf and then adding decorative motifs in bas-relief using gesso, a paint mixture consisting of a binder mixed with chalk or gypsum. The frame for the painting, covered in gold leaf, was made by the architect Josef Hoffmann. Klimt finished the work by 1907.
Description
The painting measures ; it is composed of oil paint and silver and gold leaf on canvas. The portrait shows Adele Bloch-Bauer sitting on a golden throne or chair, in front of a golden starry background. Around her neck is the same jewelled choker Klimt included in the Judith painting. She wears a tight golden dress in a triangular shape, made up of rectilinear forms. In places the dress merges into the background so much so that the museum curator Jan Thompson writes that "one comes across the model almost by accident, so enveloped is she in the thick geometric scheme". Peter Vergo, writing for Grove Art, considers that the painting "marks the height of ... gold-encrusted manner of painting".Adele's hair, face, décolletage and hands are painted in oil; they make up less than a twelfth of the work and, in Whitford's opinion, convey little about the sitter's character. For Whitford the effect of the gold background is to "remove Adele Bloch-Bauer from the earthly plane, transform the flesh and blood into an apparition from a dream of sensuality and self-indulgence"; he, and Thomson, consider the work to look more like a religious icon than a secular portrait. O'Connor writes that the painting "seem to embody femininity" and thus likens it to the Mona Lisa, while for Müller and Tatzkow, the gold gives the effect that Adele appears "melancholy and vulnerable, unapproachably aloof and yet rapt".
Both the current holder of the portrait—the Neue Galerie New York—and the art historian Elana Shapira describe how the background and gown contain symbols suggestive of erotica, including triangles, eggs, shapes of eyes and almonds. Also present are decorative motifs on the theme of the letters A and B, the sitter's initials. Whitford identifies influences of the art of the Byzantine, Egypt, Mycenae and Greece, describing that "the gold is like that in Byzantine mosaics; the eyes on the dress are Egyptian, the repeated coils and whorls Mycenaean, while other decorative devices, based on the initial letters of the sitter's name, are vaguely Greek".