Адель Блох-Бауэр II

This is the second time Klimt painted Adele Bloch-Bauer, a Vienna hostess and patron he knew well. He finished it in 1912, standing her upright in a tall column of a picture, quieter and less gilded than the famous golden first portrait. Then history came for it. After Germany annexed Austria in 1938, the Nazis looted the Bloch-Bauer collection, and this canvas ended up hanging in a state museum in Vienna, which held onto it for decades after the war. Adele's niece, Maria Altmann, spent years in the courts, all the way to the United States Supreme Court, and in 2006 the family finally got five Klimts back, this one among them. It was sold at auction, bought by Oprah Winfrey, and later sold on again in 2016, reportedly for about 150 million dollars. The whole fight was dramatised in the film Woman in Gold.