Klimt’s ‘Adele Bloch-Bauer’: now on view at LACMA!

 

Museum Associates/Agence France-Presse – Getty Images

Gustav Klimt's 1907 portrait "Adele Bloch-Bauer I." 

Lauder Pays $135 Million, a Record, for a Klimt Portrait

CAROL VOGEL

New York Times | June 19, 2006

A dazzling, gold-flecked 1907 portrait by Gustav Klimt has been purchased for the Neue Galerie in Manhattan by the cosmetics magnate Ronald S. Lauder for $135 million, the highest sum ever paid for a painting.

The portrait, of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the wife of a Jewish sugar industrialist and the hostess of a prominent Vienna salon, is considered one of the artist's masterpieces. For years, it was the focus of a restitution battle between the Austrian government and a niece of Mrs. Bloch-Bauer who argued that it was seized along with four other Klimt paintings by the Nazis during World War II. In January all five paintings were awarded to the niece, Maria Altmann, now 90, who lives in Los Angeles, and other family members.