Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I

The picture is a square canvas, 140 by 140 centimetres (55 1/8 inches each way) according to both the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Neue Galerie, worked in oil with silver and gold. A woman in a form-fitting sheath is set so far into her surroundings that it is not clear whether she stands or sits in an armchair covered in spirals. The Klimt Foundation's database says the sitter is turned into a "sparkling jewel", a "disembodied apparition". Only her face, hair, neckline and hands escape the pattern. The English Wikipedia article, citing Whitford, says the painted flesh makes up less than a twelfth of the picture.

The Neue Galerie, which owns it, describes jewel-like areas that resemble semi-precious stones set among layers of gold and silver, a gold ornament that circles her face like a halo and a cloak studded with her initials "AB" raised in low relief. The museum adds that her clasped hands are arranged to hide a disfigured finger she was self-conscious about, that the diamond choker at her throat was a wedding present from her husband and that the black and white trim at the lower left edge recalls Wiener Werkstatte furniture from Klimt's studio. The Klimt Database records that the frame was based on a design by Josef Hoffmann.

The picture has carried several names. Klimt's contemporaries called such works "mosaic pictures". The Neue Galerie timeline says it was retitled in Vienna in 1941. The Neue Galerie and Lisa Silverman give the new title as Woman in Gold (Frau in Gold), the English Wikipedia article gives Dame in Gold and the Lexikon der Provenienzforschung calls it the so-called Goldene Adele. This record uses the title of the Neue Galerie and the Klimt Database, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, and treats the numeral as part of the name. The numeral matters: a second full-length portrait of the same woman, painted in 1912, is a different canvas in a different style and has a different owner.

Ferdinand Bloch was born on 16 July 1864 in Jungbunzlau (now Mlada Boleslav), the youngest of six children of the sugar manufacturer and banker David Bloch. The Lexikon der Provenienzforschung, compiled by the Austrian Commission for Provenance Research, records that he entered the family firm in 1881, took charge of it in 1892 and built it into one of the largest sugar companies in Europe. Adele Bauer was born in Vienna on 9 August 1881, the seventh child of Moriz Bauer, a director of the Wiener Bankverein. They married in December 1899 when he was 35 and she was 18, the Klimt Database says; the Neue Galerie's timeline gives 19 December and the Stadttempel and says they had met at the 1898 wedding of her sister Therese to his brother Gustav. The couple had no children. From 9 February 1917 both couples used the double name Bloch-Bauer.

They lived in Vienna at Schwindgasse 10 and later at Elisabethstrasse 18 in the first district. The sources do not agree on the date of the move: the Klimt Database says Ferdinand bought the house in 1919, the Lexikon says the couple had an apartment there from 1922 and the Neue Galerie timeline says 1920. In 1909 Ferdinand bought Schloss Jungfernbreschan (Panenske Brezany) north of Prague, where they lived part of the time and kept part of the collection, and after the First World War both took Czechoslovak citizenship. They collected Biedermeier painting including Waldmuller, Viennese porcelain of the classicist period and sculpture, as well as Klimt.

The Klimt Database says the couple used their standing to run a salon where Vienna's intellectual and artistic elite met, with guests including Gustav Mahler, Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig and Richard Strauss, and that Adele supported social democrats financially. Her own handwritten will of 19 January 1923 fits that picture: it leaves 50,000 Czechoslovak crowns each to the Vienna workers' association Kinderfreunde and to the society Die Bereitschaft, and asks that her Vienna and Jungfernbreschan libraries go to the Vienna People's and Workers' Library.

Lisa Silverman, writing for the Shared History project of the Leo Baeck Institute as published by the German Federal Agency for Civic Education, reads the commission as part of a wider pattern in which wealthy Viennese Jews supported avant-garde artists, in part as a way of defining a place in Austrian society decades after legal equality in 1867, while antisemitism persisted. She also reports Maria Altmann's childhood memory of her aunt as a sickly, chain-smoking woman who was elegant and haughty and always looking for intellectual stimulation. That is one niece's recollection, reported at second hand, and nothing else in the sources consulted confirms or contradicts it.

The commission is documented in the sitter's own hand. In a letter of 22 August 1903 written from Elbekosteletz and now in the Austrian National Library, Adele wrote that "originally, us children wanted to give a joint present, but we have since discarded this idea", and, in the passage the Klimt Database quotes in a second translation, that her husband "subsequently decided to have my portrait painted by Klimt, who, however, can only set to work this coming winter." The Neue Galerie says the portrait was first intended as a wedding anniversary present for her parents and that Klimt, notoriously slow, did not finish it in time. The museum's 2006 press release says he worked on it for three years and its 2015 exhibition page says four. The Klimt Database says it is unclear why the family had to wait so much longer.

The recipient of the letter is described differently in the two sources that use it. The Klimt Database calls Julius Bauer a friend and a journalist, and the Neue Galerie timeline calls him Adele's brother. The Klimt Database's biography states that Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer commissioned the first portrait of his wife in 1903.

Klimt began in the winter of that year. The Klimt Database counts about 100 meticulous detail studies, and the English Wikipedia article says he prepared more extensively for this picture than for any other. In July 1906, according to a Galerie Miethke card cited by the Klimt Database, the couple bought sixteen sketches from the dealer, and the Neue Galerie timeline says some were preparatory for the portrait. A charcoal study dated 1903 is at the Jewish Museum in New York, according to the Google Art Project record reproduced on Wikimedia Commons, and the Neue Galerie owns a charcoal sheet dated 1903-04 that shows Adele seated in an armchair resting her temple on her right hand. Klimt completed the canvas in 1907.

What Ferdinand paid is not recorded in any source consulted for this record. The only indication of scale is indirect. When the arbitration court of 2006 discussed whether a tax motive could explain Gustav Bloch-Bauer's 1925 probate statement about who owned the Klimts, it noted that the Republic had not contradicted its statement that the heir's financial position and the "relatively low value of the painting at that time" made it possible to essentially rule out tax evasion as a motive. The singular "painting" in the English translation may refer to the Klimts generally, and the remark concerns relative value in the 1920s, not a price.

Klimt went to Italy twice in 1903. In May he saw Venice and Ravenna, and from 28 November to 10 December he returned to Ravenna, travelling with the Secession painter Maximilian Lenz and going on to Padua, Florence, Pisa, Mantua and Lake Garda, the Klimt Database records. Lenz kept a diary, published by Wilhelm Dessauer in 1933, and wrote that "Klimt was truly shaken. He did not say a word, but it was plain to see." In his correspondence with Emilie Floge in early December Klimt himself, the Database reports, called the mosaics he studied in San Vitale "of incredible splendor", and the Database elsewhere translates the phrase as "mosaics of a splendor unheard of". The Klimt Database and the Neue Galerie, on its collection page and in its 2006 press release, both connect this visit to the portrait, and the Neue Galerie names the sixth-century mosaic of the Empress Theodora.

That is a documented link between a journey and a style, but the sources are careful about its limits. The Klimt Database lists a wider group of sources for the golden period: Byzantine mosaics, late nineteenth-century painting (including Hans Makart, Fernand Khnopff and the Pre-Raphaelites) and traditional Japanese art. It adds that Orthodox icons, which have always joined painted saints to metal frames, "may have served as an inspiration" for this picture. The Belvedere, in a 2026 essay on Klimt's gold, names Byzantine mosaics, medieval gold grounds, Japanese lacquer and East Asian art. The Belvedere's essay "Who Was Gustav Klimt?" adds that he grew up surrounded by arts and crafts, that his father was an engraver and that he and his brother Ernst both attended the Vienna School of Applied Arts.

The Belvedere's essay makes a further argument that bears on this picture: after the Renaissance, a painting was supposed to be a window, and real gold works against that, because it shines, reflects light and stresses the flat surface. Klimt, it says, reversed this on purpose. It dates his first large-scale use of real gold leaf to Judith I of 1901, notes that he later added silver and platinum and describes a technique that used gold leaf but also gold dust and fine gold powder bound in oil and applied with a brush, with different grounds so that the metal looks smooth, grainy, matte, shiny or raised. That is a description of Klimt's practice across his golden period, not an analysis of this canvas. The Neue Galerie, for this canvas, names gold and silver only.

The Klimt Database draws a social reading from the technique: by treating a banker's daughter in the idiom once reserved for sacred and royal figures, Klimt presented the rising bourgeoisie in a way earlier reserved for the nobility. It is an argument by the database's authors, not a statement by the artist or the patron, and no text in which either says what the gold was to mean was found for this record.

The form-fitting dress is covered with eye shapes set inside golden triangles, and the Neue Galerie calls them "all-seeing eye motifs". The Neue Galerie's 2006 press release adds that the open-eye and almond shapes have sexual connotations and that Adele was "the only woman portrayed twice by Klimt in a full length portrait", and it says it has long been speculated that she and Klimt had an affair and that the picture contains visual clues about it. The press release attributes none of this to a named scholar.

The English Wikipedia article reports that the art historian Elana Shapira describes symbols suggestive of erotica in the background and gown, including triangles, eggs, eyes and almonds, and that Frank Whitford identifies Byzantine, Egyptian, Mycenaean and Greek sources, saying of the eyes on the dress that they are "Egyptian". Those are the claims of two named writers, passed through a tertiary source, and a reader who wants to cite them should go to Whitford's 1990 book and Shapira's 2016 book, both named in the Wikipedia bibliography. The sitter's initials are not an interpretation: the Neue Galerie says "AB" is raised in low relief on the cloak.

The phrase "Eye of Horus" does not appear in the Neue Galerie page, the press release, the Klimt Database entries or in Whitford as quoted. Wikipedia reports Whitford as calling the eyes "Egyptian" and nothing more specific, and his book was not seen. No scholar in the sources consulted ties the motif to the Horus eye specifically, and no letter, notebook or interview in which Klimt explains the eyes has been found for this record. The absence of an explanation from the maker is a finding, and no source consulted explains the eyes more specifically than as eyes in triangles that Whitford calls Egyptian.

The affair is a separate dispute with named positions. The English Wikipedia article reports that Catherine Dean wrote that Adele was "the only society lady painted by Klimt who is known definitely to be his mistress", while Melissa Muller and Monika Tatzkow wrote that "no evidence has ever been produced that their relationship was more than a friendship". The Neue Galerie says only that it has "long been speculated". The Los Angeles Times of 17 January 2006 wrote that historians have suggested she was "probably the artist's lover". The Klimt Foundation database entries consulted do not raise the question at all. This record takes no position.

Silverman reads the portrait differently again. She argues it engages the stereotype of the Jewish woman as seductive and dangerous, the belle juive of central European fiction, and she reports that antisemitic critics paid Klimt the doubtful compliment that he could hide the ugliness of his patrons' wives. That is her argument about reception and stereotype, not evidence about Klimt's intention, and the essay cites no document in which Klimt or the Bloch-Bauers say they had it in mind.

The first public showing was at the Mannheim Jubilee Exhibition, held from May to October 1907 for the city's 300th anniversary. The catalogue listed Klimt as showing "3 mosaic pictures", which photographs of the rooms identify as The Three Ages of Woman, Portrait of Fritza Riedler and this portrait. The Klimt Database quotes the Pester Lloyd of 20 July 1907 saying the Viennese did not yet know them. The English Wikipedia article reports that many critics in Mannheim reacted badly, calling the pictures "mosaic-like wall-grotesqueries", "bizarre" and "absurdities".

In Vienna the portrait hung in the Klimt Room of the 1908 Kunstschau, on a long wall facing the Fritza Riedler portrait, with The Kiss and The Three Ages of Woman on the narrow sides. The Klimt Database attributes the phrase "idol in a scintillating temple shrine" to Berta Zuckerkandl, and its bibliography lists her Kunstschau review in the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung of 6 June 1908, though the Database does not tie the phrase to that page. The English Wikipedia article calls the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung reviewer unnamed, so the attribution is a point on which the sources differ. The Neue Galerie timeline records that one critic derided the picture as "more brass than Bloch"; the English Wikipedia article names that critic as Eduard Potzl and adds in a footnote that the art historian Julie M. Johnson states the writer was Karl Kraus.

The Klimt Database says the Kunstschau also showed that Klimt was commercially successful: the Ministry of Culture and Education bought The Kiss for 25,000 crowns, Viktor Zuckerkandl paid 5,000 crowns for Poppies in Bloom and Eduard Ast 8,000 crowns for Danae. The Database converts these to euros (25,000 crowns as about 155,700 euros) without saying what method produced the conversion, so the euro figures are not used here. The Database lists no sale of this portrait, and the English Wikipedia article says it was hung afterwards at the Bloch-Bauer residence in Vienna.

The frame is a small piece of evidence about how the picture was meant to be seen. The Klimt Database says it was based on a design by Josef Hoffmann, the architect who planned the 1908 Kunstschau, and the English Wikipedia article calls it gold-leafed. The sources consulted do not say whether the frame now on the picture is the 1907 frame, when it was last treated or whether it was separated from the canvas in the Belvedere years.

A photograph of Adele by Friedrich Viktor Spitzer, taken in 1906, was published in 1908 in the Photographische Rundschau together with portraits of Klimt, Hermann Bahr and Sonja Knips, according to the Klimt Database, which is the earliest reproduction of the sitter that the sources consulted record.

The sources record only a handful of occasions on which the portrait left the family's rooms between 1907 and 1938. The Neue Galerie says the Klimt paintings originally hung in Adele's private apartment in the Vienna house, and the Klimt Database calls the room the "Klimt Room". The Neue Galerie timeline says that after her death on 24 January 1925 her bedroom, with the Klimt paintings, was kept as a shrine to her memory. The Lexikon and the Klimt Database both give the date of death as 24 January 1925 and the Neue Galerie timeline gives meningitis at the age of forty-three. The date is a point on which the sources differ slightly: the arbitration award's summary of the claimants' case gives 24 January and a letter quoted in the same award gives 25 January.

The occasions it left were these. The Klimt Database records that in 1919 the two portraits and four landscapes were lent to the Osterreichische Staatsgalerie, now the Belvedere, and returned in early 1920. The Lexikon records that Ferdinand lent seven paintings, including both portraits, to the Klimt memorial exhibition at the Secession in 1928, and the Neue Galerie timeline says the portrait went to the Austria in London exhibition in 1934 and to the Paris exposition of 1937. The Lexikon says the Paris show, the Exposition d'Art Autrichien at the Jeu de Paume in May and June 1937, included three Klimt paintings from the Bloch-Bauer collection. The Neue Galerie timeline and Silverman both say Ferdinand gave Adele's diamond necklace to his niece Maria when she married Fritz Altmann in 1937, and the timeline gives the wedding as 9 December. The timeline says the necklace was confiscated by the Gestapo in June and Silverman says Goering took Maria's jewellery for his wife Emmy, while the Neue Galerie's page says the choker ended up with Goering when the Nazis seized the Bloch-Bauer collection; the sources do not reconcile these accounts.

In 1936 Ferdinand gave Schloss Kammer am Attersee III to the Osterreichische Galerie, now the Belvedere. The arbitration court found that the gift was made in fulfilment of his late wife's request and of his promise in the probate proceedings, and it recorded that the gallery's letter of thanks called it a "dedication" by Adele and Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer. That gift, and the exchange that later involved it, is the thread that links the 1923 will to the events of 1941.

Everything that followed turns on one sentence in a will. Adele wrote it by hand on 19 January 1923, naming her husband sole heir and her brother-in-law Gustav Bloch-Bauer, a lawyer, as executor. The arbitration court of 2006 gave the sentence in English as: "I ask my husband after his death to leave my two portraits and the four landscapes by Gustav Klimt to the Austrian State Gallery in Vienna". In the same paragraph she asks him to leave her libraries to the Vienna People's and Workers' Library. The German verb is bitte, I ask. Her money gifts to the two Vienna associations are drafted as bequests, and in the clause for the alternative heir she binds him to pay them and to hand over the paintings and the library at once, a contrast Welser and Rabl stressed and the court noted.

After her death Gustav told the probate court, in the words the court quotes, that the heir would "faithfully fulfill said requests, though they do not have the binding nature of a testamentary disposition", and that "the Klimt paintings are not the property of the testatrix, but rather of the testatrix's widower". The court reasoned that because the executor categorised it so, very probably by agreement with Ferdinand, the spouses had probably talked it over earlier.

Two readings of that sentence then divided the parties. The Republic, through the Finanzprokuratur, argued in the 2005 arbitration that Adele had herself bought the Klimts and owned them, that her will was therefore a valid reversionary legacy and that Ferdinand's promise in the probate was in any case a promise to donate. The heirs argued that the sentence was a non-binding request, that the pictures were Ferdinand's and that Austrian law at the time presumed property acquired during a marriage to belong to the husband. In 1999 the Austrian Art Restitution Advisory Board had sided with the first reading: its decision of 28 June 1999 says the Republic's title to the Klimt paintings came from the will or from Ferdinand's acknowledgment of it, both long before the Nazi period.

The 2006 court sided with the second reading, on grounds it set out at length. The first was the wording: "I ask". The second was the executor's statement, which the court thought was very probably made with Ferdinand's agreement. It categorised the request as non-binding and the paintings as the widower's, and the court found no plausible reason why he would say so untruthfully. The third was ownership. The court found more reason to think the paintings were Ferdinand's than Adele's, but not strong probability either way, and it applied the presumption in the Austrian civil code of the time that property acquired during a marriage belonged to the husband, because Adele's ownership could not be shown to be strongly probable. It did not treat as decisive Adele's own letter speaking of a landscape "which I purchased from Klimt's estate", the gallery's inventory entry for this portrait ("Dedication, Adele Bloch-Bauer") or statements in exhibition catalogues. It rejected one suggested explanation for the executor's statement, that Ferdinand wished to shield his dead wife from speculation about her relationship with Klimt, as "highly constructed" and "very far-fetched". Its conclusion on this point was that any acquisition by the Republic "cannot be based on Adele Bloch-Bauer's will as title".

Austrian lawyers published opposing opinions, Welser and Rabl for the claimants in a book called Der Fall Klimt and Krejci, whose view the Republic adopted, in Der Klimt-Streit, and the court said it assessed both in depth. Their disagreement turns on points of Austrian civil law that this record does not try to adjudicate. What the file shows is that the sentence, in its wording and its place in the will, was read one way by the Advisory Board in 1999 and the other way by the arbitration panel in 2006, and that the Republic had agreed to be bound by the panel's result.

The United States Supreme Court, summarising the complaint in 2004, gives 12 March 1938 as the day of the Anschluss and says Ferdinand, who was Jewish and had supported efforts to resist annexation, fled and eventually settled in Zurich. The Lexikon der Provenienzforschung says he was persecuted both for his Jewish origin and as a supporter of the Dollfuss-Schuschnigg regime, that his property was secured and tax-evasion proceedings were opened against him and that he went first to Czechoslovakia and then to Switzerland. The claimants in the 2005 arbitration said the Vienna-Wieden tax authorities opened the proceedings on 27 April 1938 as an excuse to confiscate his property, and that in the course of them the lawyer Dr Fuhrer was appointed temporary administrator of the estate and ordered to liquidate and make appropriate use of the "Bloch-Bauer collection". The Neue Galerie timeline dates the appointment to 1939. The Lexikon identifies him as the lawyer Erich Fuhrer, a member of the NSDAP and the SS, and the Supreme Court also calls him Erich and the Neue Galerie timeline Eric; the arbitration award gives his first name as Friedrich.

The Lexikon summarises what became of the property. After the Reich Protectorate was set up on 16 March 1939 the regime also expropriated the castle at Jungfernbreschan, which Reich Protector von Neurath used and, in 1941 and 1942, so did his deputy Reinhard Heydrich. The porcelain, valued at half a million Reichsmark, was auctioned in Vienna in June 1941. Six pictures, a sculpture and a tapestry went to the Sonderauftrag Linz for the planned Fuhrer museum and were restituted in 1949 and 1950, and the Osterreichische Galerie took four Klimt paintings between 1941 and 1943. The Supreme Court, again describing the complaint's allegations, says the sugar company was "Aryanized" and the Vienna house taken over. The Neue Galerie says the Nazis seized five Klimt paintings from the home in 1938, and its 2006 press release says they were stolen. Those are the museum's words.

The Klimts then passed through Dr Fuhrer's hands, and the arbitration award records the sequence, which the Republic's submission called basically undisputed. In 1941, as administrator, he "executed" Adele's will by giving Adele Bloch-Bauer I and Apple Tree I to the Austrian Gallery, then called the Modern Gallery. In return he received from the gallery Schloss Kammer am Attersee III, the picture Ferdinand had given in 1936, and sold it to Gustav Ucicky, a son of Klimt, for 6,000 Reichsmark according to the claimants. In 1942 he sold Birch Forest to the City of Vienna's collection for 5,000 Reichsmark, again on the claimants' figures. In 1943 he sold Adele Bloch-Bauer II to the gallery, a payment the court thought was in effect a release from tax execution, and he kept Houses in Unterach for himself. The English Wikipedia article puts the 1941 transfer in December and says a note with the paintings claimed the will as authority.

The arbitration court characterised the exchange of 1941 with care. It noted that the will, taken as a legacy, was not yet due while Ferdinand lived, and it inclined to the view that the two pictures were surrendered on the strength of the will alone and that Fuhrer "simply extorted" Schloss Kammer III from the gallery. Its evidence included the gallery's own later language: Dr Garzarolli, the gallery's director in 1948, wrote that Fuhrer "demanded it back and it was handed over" and, elsewhere, that it "had to be handed over to him". The Supreme Court's 2004 opinion adds, as an allegation in the complaint, that the articles of the Austrian journalist reported the 1941 receipt of the first portrait to have been accompanied by a letter from Fuhrer signed "Heil Hitler".

The title is part of the object's history, and the sources disagree about it. The Neue Galerie timeline says that in 1941 the Belvedere published a book describing the picture as an "awe-inspiring portrait of a woman covered with a shimmering crust of gold" and that it was retitled Woman in Gold, and that in 1943, when the Nazis staged a Klimt retrospective at the Secession, it was renamed Portrait of a Lady with Gold Background; the second Adele portrait was bought a month later and retitled Portrait of a Lady. The Neue Galerie's own collection page says that in Vienna the portrait was renamed "Woman in Gold" to conceal the sitter's identity. Silverman writes that the Nazis gave it the new title Die Frau in Gold to hide its Jewish origin. The English Wikipedia article says the gallery gave it the title Dame in Gold for the same purpose.

Those are three accounts of one event, with a different agent in each (the Nazis, the gallery, unnamed actors in Vienna). None of them cites the book, the catalogue or an inventory entry by shelf mark, and this record has not seen the Belvedere's own files. The arbitration court, which did see the gallery's inventory list, reports that it describes the portrait as "Dedication, Adele Bloch-Bauer", which is a statement of how it was acquired and not a retitling.

The Supreme Court records an allegation that the Belvedere's publications represented the first portrait as having been donated to the museum in 1936 when it had in fact been received in 1941. The Neue Galerie timeline goes further and says that in 1960, after Fritz Novotny became director, the Belvedere's provenance records for the Bloch-Bauer portraits were falsified to show acquisition before the invasion. The timeline does not say who made the changes. That is the Neue Galerie's statement, and the other sources consulted neither confirm nor contradict it. The Neue Galerie timeline also says the files Hubertus Czernin found in 1998 showed that the Belvedere was aware it possessed looted art, and the Supreme Court recites the allegation that gallery officials knew neither Adele nor Ferdinand had donated the pictures. Both are accounts of what the journalist found and not independent readings of the Belvedere's files.

Ferdinand died in Zurich on 13 November 1945. His last will, written in 1945, left his whole estate to a nephew and two nieces. The English Wikipedia article gives the month as August and says the will made no reference to the pictures, and the Neue Galerie timeline says autumn. The Klimt Database names the heirs as the nieces Louise Baroness Gutmann and Maria Altmann and the nephew Robert Bentley. The arbitration court says Ferdinand never wrote a word about the paintings in his very short and very general will, and that a will drawn up in 1942 contains no instructions about them either, though he then believed all his Viennese assets were lost.

The Vienna lawyer Dr Gustav Rinesch handled the recovery. The Lexikon and the heirs' version in the arbitration say Ferdinand instructed him from Switzerland, and the Supreme Court, summarising the complaint, says Robert Bentley retained him in 1947. The award summarises the correspondence in detail. On 28 September 1945 Rinesch asked the gallery for its cooperation with the replacement of the scattered collection, listing Apple Tree and Birch Forest by name in one version of the attached list of items. On 19 January 1948, now aware that three Klimts were at the gallery, he asked what its attitude would be if his client claimed restitution. The gallery's director Dr Garzarolli replied on 16 February that it had a claim to the outstanding pictures from Adele's legacy. On 2 April 1948 he asked the Federal Office for the Protection of Historical Monuments to refuse export permits for some nineteenth-century paintings held by Karl Bloch-Bauer so as to ease their purchase or exchange, and added: "please adopt a delaying strategy for tactical reasons." On 10 April 1948 Rinesch and Garzarolli reached the agreement that the court later treated as decisive. Rinesch confirmed it in writing on 12 April, acknowledging that the two portraits and Apple Tree were already in the gallery's possession and agreeing to the handover of Houses in Unterach, which Karl Bloch-Bauer had recovered from Fuhrer. The next day he wrote to the Monuments Office that he expected the authorities to apply the protection law in an "obliging manner".

The Albertina's director, Otto Benesch, had written on 12 November 1948 that several hundred Klimt drawings were presented for export, that he allowed the export but asked for sixteen as a donation and that he had regarded those sheets as the Albertina's property since, the more so because Klimt drawings stood low in market value (the Board's German, paraphrased here). The 1999 Advisory Board read that letter as clear documentary proof of a link between the export permit and the gift, and recommended the return of the sixteen drawings. On 13 July 1949 Rinesch argued that the heirs "would certainly have had the leverage to prevent the performance of the legacy" and had refrained, and on 21 July Garzarolli supported release of the heirs' other objects "as a major exception".

The arbitration court weighed what all this showed about the five paintings. It found that none of the five was the subject of an export application and, with the exception of Birch Forest, which the City of Vienna handed over on a request from Rinesch, that none was the subject of an express restitution request; it also found no documentary evidence that Rinesch was explicitly threatened with refusal of an export permit for them. It also found that he used the paintings "so to speak as weapons for negotiation", that the heirs, who were not lawyers, were relatively easy to convince that they were bound and that a federal minister had called the connection between giving up the paintings and the export procedure "obvious" in answer to a parliamentary question. Its conclusion was that it could be assumed "that the pressure of the pending or imminent export proceedings was responsible to a large extent for the concession/acknowledgment by Dr. Rinesch".

Austria's Art Restitution Act, passed on 4 December 1998 and amended since, most recently in 2023, aimed at returning to the original owners or their successors collection objects that came to the federal state through or because of the Nazi regime and had not yet been restituted. The act has a first element that the court of 2006 later applied: objects that were restituted, then passed to the Republic without payment after 8 May 1945 in a procedure under the export prohibition law. The English Wikipedia article adds that the government opened its archives to provenance research at the same time.

The journalist Hubertus Czernin was, according to the English Wikipedia article, the first journalist given access to the Austrian Gallery's records. The Neue Galerie timeline says he found documents showing that Ferdinand had not donated the paintings and published a series of articles in the newspaper Der Standard in 1998. The Supreme Court, summarising the complaint, says the series reported that the Gallery's publications had represented the first portrait as donated in 1936 when it was received in 1941. Czernin's book on the case, Die Falschung, appeared in Vienna in 1999, according to the Klimt Database and the Lexikon der Provenienzforschung. He died on 10 June 2006, according to the English Wikipedia article, nine days before the Neue Galerie announced it had acquired the portrait.

Maria Altmann claimed six paintings, the five later arbitrated plus the portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl. On 28 June 1999 the Advisory Board, with one abstention, recommended the return of sixteen Klimt drawings from the Albertina and a group of porcelain from the Museum of Applied Arts, and declined to recommend the paintings: the Republic's title, it held, came from the will or Ferdinand's acknowledgment of it, long before the Nazi period, and no restitution or export procedure had ever concerned the paintings. The Belvedere's own provenance page records that the committee advised against restitution of the five Klimts from the Bloch-Bauer collection, "which have subsequently been restituted".

Altmann then sued in Austria. The Supreme Court records that Austrian court costs rise with the value of the claim, that the court partly waived them but would still have required roughly 350,000 dollars and that when the government appealed even that partial waiver she withdrew and sued in California. Other sources give other figures for the fee: the Neue Galerie timeline says over 1.5 million dollars at 1.2 percent of the litigated value, and the English Wikipedia article says 1.75 million euros. The sources do not reconcile these figures.

On 7 June 2004 the Supreme Court decided Republic of Austria v. Altmann, in an opinion by Justice Stevens with concurrences by Justices Scalia and Breyer and a dissent by Justice Kennedy. The syllabus states the holding narrowly: the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 applies to conduct, like the alleged wrongdoing here, that occurred before 1976 and before the United States adopted the restrictive theory of sovereign immunity in 1952. The question before the Court was immunity, and it set out the facts as the complaint alleged them. The English Wikipedia article says the Court "determined that the paintings had been stolen", which neither the syllabus nor the passages of the opinion read for this record say. The effect was that Altmann could proceed against Austria in a United States court, and in 2005 both sides agreed to put the dispute to Austrian arbitrators.

The arbitration agreement was signed in May 2005 (the Los Angeles Times of January 2006 dates it to March, and the award's own date is used here). The claimants were Maria Altmann, Francis Gutmann, Trevor Mantle and George Bentley, represented by E. Randol Schoenberg and Dr Stefan Gulner, and Dr Nelly Auersperg, who was represented separately; the respondent was the Republic of Austria, represented by the Finanzprokuratur. Dr Auersperg signed but did not take part further, saying she would abide by the ruling. The panel was Dr Andreas Nodl, Professor Walter H. Rechberger and Professor Peter Rummel as chairman. The agreement set two questions: whether and how Austria had acquired ownership of the paintings between 1923 and 1949 or later, and whether the conditions of the 1998 Act for returning them without payment were met. A sixth painting, the Zuckerkandl portrait, went to a separate proceeding before the same court.

Both sides had agreed to accept the findings as final, and the court was explicit about its limits: it was "neither authorized nor qualified to carry out historical investigations and research of its own" and decided on the documents and arguments the parties submitted, under Austrian law. At the oral hearing on 5 September 2005 the parties ruled out a settlement after the Republic said it could not accept the heirs' renewed offer, under which Austria would buy both portraits and release the other three paintings.

The award is dated 15 January 2006 and was signed by all three. It held, first, that the Republic acquired ownership of the five paintings through the settlement with Dr Rinesch in 1948, and not through the will. It held, second, that the conditions of the 1998 Act for return without payment were met, on the ground that, in the court's words, it could be assumed that the pressure of the export proceedings was largely responsible for the 1948 concession. It held that the second element of the Act, which concerns objects lawfully acquired by the Republic that had earlier been the subject of a Nazi-era transaction, was not fulfilled. It ordered the Republic to bear the costs. The court described the first element as politically motivated compensation for what is now seen as the duress of the export proceedings, and it held the 1948 settlement itself incontestable in civil law, so that the return rests on the statute and on the court's reading of the export pressure and not on a finding that the Republic's title was void. The Los Angeles Times reported the ruling on 17 January 2006, saying it had become public on the Monday, 16 January, and that a formal announcement was expected in Austria the next day. The Neue Galerie timeline and the Lexikon give 15 January for the ruling, and the English Wikipedia article on Maria Altmann gives 16 January, which is the day the result became public.

The Times quoted Wilfried Seipel, director of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, telling the Austrian Press Agency that "a precious asset of the Austrian Gallery has been lost" and the decision "should be accepted", and Altmann, then 89, saying "It's about time" and "I would not want any private person to buy these paintings", because it would have been her aunt's wish that they be seen. The Times added that for Austrians, even those who thought the court right, the paintings' move across the Atlantic symbolised the loss of a piece of national heritage. The Lexikon says a repurchase by the Republic was not achieved and the pictures were restituted. The paintings left Austria in March 2006 according to the English Wikipedia article on Altmann, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art showed the five from 4 April to 30 June 2006, crediting this portrait to the Estate of Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer.

On 19 June 2006 the Neue Galerie announced that it had agreed to acquire the portrait. The press release quotes the museum's president and co-founder Ronald S. Lauder: "This is a once-in-a-lifetime acquisition, and a defining moment for the Neue Galerie." The museum's director, Renee Price, said the painting was as important to the Neue Galerie "as the Mona Lisa is to the Louvre". The release does not give a price. Al Jazeera, citing American media reports, gave the price as 135 million dollars, said the New York Times quoted Altmann's lawyer as saying the painting was sold by Altmann and her family, and said it was thought to be the highest price paid for a painting, against a previous record of 104.1 million dollars for Picasso's Boy with a Pipe. Altmann was quoted as saying that "Mr Lauder has a great understanding of Austria and a great love for Klimt". ARTnews, in January 2007, and Hyperallergic, in 2017, both call it a reported 135 million dollars, and Silverman gives it as fact.

It was a private sale negotiated directly, not an auction, so there was no hammer price, no buyer's premium and no published estimate. The only price on record is a reported figure of 135 million United States dollars, which none of the sources consulted has had confirmed by the museum or by the sellers. ARTnews interviewed the buyer and the sellers' adviser. Lauder said the question was how much it would take to buy the painting without going to auction, and that "it took about three seconds." Steven Thomas of Irell and Manella, the Los Angeles firm that advised the heirs after the ruling, said the deal took several weeks of discussions, that the family "did not put a price on the painting", that seven to ten serious international collectors and three to five museums had shown interest, that none of the competing collectors was Austrian and that offers for all five paintings had come from private collectors or investor groups who did not intend permanent public display. He declined to discuss how the price was set. ARTnews quotes the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's director, Michael Govan, saying in June 2006 that he was sad the portrait would not stay in Los Angeles but pleased it would be on view in an American museum. Lauder sold three Schiele works from the Neue Galerie's collection at Christie's in November 2006 to help finance the purchase, which made 39.2 million dollars together, according to ARTnews.

Altmann had said in January 2006 that she would not want a private person to buy the pictures. The Neue Galerie's release quotes her in June as saying it fulfilled her wish that the pictures be seen by a large American audience and that the portrait of her aunt would "remain on permanent view in such a worthy museum", and the museum agreed that the picture would carry a note crediting the heirs' generosity. The Neue Galerie says the picture has been on permanent view since, "adhering to the wishes of the family".

The other four went to auction. Christie's sale of Impressionist and Modern Art in New York on 8 November 2006 realised 491,472,000 dollars. The Christie's release, as reproduced by the publication The Art Wolf, gives these prices for the four Klimts, which are Christie's results inclusive of premium by its usual practice (the Art Wolf copy does not say so, but ARTnews's figure of about 78 million before premium for the first lot confirms it for that lot): Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II, lot 54, 87,936,000 dollars against an estimate of 40 to 60 million; Birch Forest, lot 51, 40,336,000 against 20 to 30 million; Apple Tree I, lot 53, 33,056,000 against 15 to 25 million; and Houses at Unterach on the Attersee, lot 52, 31,376,000 against 18 to 25 million. The four together came to 192,704,000 dollars and all buyers were listed as anonymous. ARTnews adds that for Adele II a telephone bidder handled by Christie's Guy Bennett entered the bidding at 74 million and won with a final bid of around 78 million before the premium. The hammer prices of the other three are not given in the sources consulted. ARTnews counts the five together at more than 327 million dollars and says the heirs chose Christie's partly because of Altmann's friendship with its Americas chairman Stephen Lash.

For scale, the same ARTnews article reports that the previous auction record for a Klimt was 29.1 million dollars in 2003, that a Klimt painting sold in 1984 for 981,646 dollars and that the Museum of Modern Art sold The Park for 500,000 dollars in 1978. The Klimt Database records the Ministry buying The Kiss in 1908 for 25,000 crowns. In 1948 the Albertina's director called Klimt drawings low in market value, in the letter in the 1999 Advisory Board file. Peter Schjeldahl, quoted by ARTnews from a New Yorker column of July 2006, wrote of the Neue Galerie purchase "Is she worth the money? Not yet." Simon de Pury, quoted in the same article, said that "it is a brilliant coup", and Jane Kallir of the Galerie St. Etienne said she was "in no way, shape, or form surprised" by the reported price.

Hyperallergic reported in 2017, citing Bloomberg, a private resale of Adele II in 2016 for about 150 million dollars. The seller and buyer named in that report, and the price, are unconfirmed in the sources consulted.

The portrait went on view at the Neue Galerie in New York on 13 July 2006 as part of the exhibition of the five Bloch-Bauer paintings, which ran until 18 September 2006, and has since stayed on permanent view in the museum's Klimt Gallery. In 2015 the museum devoted an exhibition of about fifty works to the painter and the sitter, "Gustav Klimt and Adele Bloch-Bauer: The Woman in Gold", from 2 April to 7 September 2015, timed with the release of the film. In 2016 and 2017 the Klimt Database's bibliography lists a Neue Galerie exhibition on Klimt and the women of Vienna's Golden Age, and Hyperallergic reports that the two Adele portraits hung together there.

The 2015 film Woman in Gold, directed by Simon Curtis, stars Helen Mirren as Maria Altmann and Ryan Reynolds as Randol Schoenberg. Altmann died on 7 February 2011, aged 94, so she did not see it. The English Wikipedia article on the film reports that critics in Austria and Germany pointed to departures from the record, among them Olga Kronsteiner in Der Standard, who wrote that it was the journalist Czernin and not Schoenberg who found the decisive documents and told Altmann, and Thomas Trenkler in Kurier, who said Austria had never had a time limit for restitution claims as the film suggests. The same article notes that Chief Justice Rehnquist dissented in the Supreme Court and did not support Schoenberg as the film shows; the Court's published dissent, written by Justice Kennedy, is joined by the Chief Justice and Justice Thomas, which bears that out. The critics' other claims have not been checked here against the court transcript or the archive.

As of 8 October 2026 the Neue Galerie's website says its galleries are closed and will reopen on 12 November 2026 with a 25th anniversary exhibition running to 11 January 2027, and that the portrait is featured in it. The shop and cafe have resumed regular hours. The museum's page does not say why the galleries are closed. The sources consulted give no technical examination of the canvas, no published condition report and no insurance value, and the Neue Galerie does not publish an open image interface for the painting that this record has found.