Klimt’s Women
At the Neue Galerie in New York through January 16
The women painted by Gustav Klimt in Vienna at the height of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s golden age, from 1900 to 1918, were part of a very art-conscious bourgeoisie. Some were avid collectors of his work; others were interested in art as a modernizing force. Many of them were Jews. When the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938, modernist art like Klimt’s was deemed “decadent,” and the collections of Jewish families, who were forced into exile or concentration camps, were “Aryanized,” or essentially stolen, by officials or corrupt dealers.
Klimt only painted one woman twice in full-length: Adele Bloch-Bauer. The Bloch-Bauers were a wealthy industrialist and banking family, and Adele was well-known for holding salons, where she would entertain progressive political thinkers, musicians (such as Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss) and artists, most of them from Klimt’s circle. The portraits by Klimt of Adele were commissioned by her husband, Ferdinand; there were rumors of an affair between the painter and subject—such rumors were common with Klimt—but they were never substantiated. When Adele died of meningitis in 1925 at the age of 44, her bedroom, with it’s six Klimt paintings, was kept as a shrine. Ferdinand fled to Switzerland in 1938 (he died there in 1945), and his collection ended up in the hands of the postwar Austrian government. After a protracted legal struggle, Maria Altmann, an heir of Adele Bloch-Bauer living in Los Angeles, was finally awarded the Klimt paintings in 2006, and that same year Ronald Lauder, the billionaire son of Austrian Jewish refugees, bought the celebrated Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (aka the Woman in Gold) for $135 million at auction and installed it in the Neue Galerie in New York. Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II was sold for $88 million and is part of an unnamed private collection.
Now for the first time the two Bloch-Bauer portraits will be hung together at the Neue Galerie, along with 10 other sensuous and sumptuous Klimt masterpieces, 40 drawings, photographs and works of decorative art from fin de siècle Vienna. The exhibit, “Klimt and the Women of Vienna’s Golden Age, 1900–1918,” runs through January 16, 2017. Here is a preview of the treasures on view.
