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Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (also called The Lady in Gold or The Woman in Gold) 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 Gustav Klimt was born in 1862 in Baumgarten, near Vienna in Austria-Hungary. He attended the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts (German: Kunstgewerbeschule Wien) 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 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, [and] 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 (1898). The art historian Gilles Néret considers that the use of gold in the painting "underlines the essential erotic ingredient in ... [Klimt's] 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 Adele 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 and the Head of Holofernes; 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 (Beech Forest). The painting Preparation and execution In .... Discover the Laurie Lico Albanese popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Laurie Lico Albanese books.