Portrait d'Adele Bloch-Bauer I

Klimt worked on this portrait for years, finishing it in 1907 at the height of his gold period in Vienna. Adele Bloch-Bauer was the wife of a wealthy Jewish sugar industrialist, and she is the only person Klimt painted twice. He almost dissolves her into a field of gold and silver leaf, worked with tiny spiralling eyes and squares, until the flat glittering pattern nearly swallows the living woman. Only her face, shoulders and hands stay fully real, floating in all that metal. What happened to the picture afterward is as gripping as the surface. When the Nazis took Vienna, they seized the Bloch-Bauer property in 1941, and the portrait ended up in the state gallery, presented as an Austrian treasure under the plain nickname the Woman in Gold. Adele's niece, Maria Altmann, who had fled to California, spent years suing Austria to get the family's Klimts back, and finally won in 2006. That same year the portrait sold for a reported 135 million dollars, then the highest price ever paid for a painting, and it went to the Neue Galerie in New York, where it hangs now.