Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer: Seized by Nazis in 1938, Restituted in 2006, Sold for $135 Million

Klimt Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer complete guide DeckArts Berlin Nazi restitution $135M

Last updated: · By Stanislav Arnautov · Berlin

Quick answer

Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II (1912): the second of two gold portraits Klimt made of Adele Bloch-Bauer, wife of the Viennese sugar industrialist Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer. The first portrait (1907) was seized by the Nazi regime in 1938, restituted to the Bloch-Bauer heirs in 2006, and sold for $135 million to Ronald Lauder — the highest price ever paid for a painting at that time. Adele Bloch-Bauer died in 1925, aged 43, before either portrait left Vienna. At the Osterreichische Galerie Belvedere (Portrait I) and the Neue Galerie New York (Portrait I after 2006). DeckArts Portrait of Adele II single from ~$140. On navy or forest green.

Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II (1912) is the second of two extraordinary gold portraits that Klimt made of the same woman: Adele Bloch-Bauer, the most cultivated and intellectually engaged member of the Viennese Jewish bourgeoisie at the turn of the 20th century. The story of the two Adele portraits is one of the most dramatic biographical and legal narratives in the history of art: Nazi theft; 68 years of state possession in Austria; a landmark international restitution case; a $135 million sale; and the specific fact that Adele Bloch-Bauer herself died in 1925, aged 43, before any of this happened and before either portrait left Vienna. External references: Belvedere Vienna — Gustav Klimt; Metropolitan Museum of Art. DeckArts Berlin from ~$140.

Adele Bloch-Bauer: The Woman Behind the Gold

Adele Bauer was born on 9 August 1881 in Vienna, the daughter of Moriz Bauer, director of the Wiener Bankverein (the Vienna Bank Union), and Therese Bauer. She was educated far beyond the standard for women of her class and period: she read widely in French and German literature, attended lectures at the University of Vienna (which formally admitted women only from 1897 onward), and engaged with the Viennese cultural and intellectual tradition — with Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic circle, with Gustav Mahler’s musical world, and with the Wiener Werkstätte’s design programme — as an active participant, not a passive patron.

In 1899, at the age of 17, Adele Bauer married Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, a sugar industrialist 25 years her senior. Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer was by that time one of the wealthiest men in the Austro-Hungarian Empire: his sugar-beet processing enterprises spanned Bohemia and Moravia; his Vienna palace on the Elisabethstraße was one of the most celebrated private art collections in the city. Adele became the collection’s active curator and Ferdinand’s cultural partner; the Bloch-Bauer salon on the Elisabethstraße was one of the most important gathering points of Viennese intellectual and artistic life in the early 20th century.

Adele Bloch-Bauer met Gustav Klimt through the Viennese art world in approximately 1900–1901. She became one of his most important patrons and one of his closest friends; she was also, according to the widely accepted biographical account, his lover for some period of their relationship. The exact nature and duration of the relationship is not fully documented in surviving sources, but Klimt’s journals and letters (many of which were destroyed or lost) and the volume of time he spent in the Bloch-Bauer household during the 1901–1912 period support the interpretation of a deeply personal connection that went beyond a standard patron-artist relationship. Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer was either unaware of the relationship or chose not to acknowledge it; the specific dynamics of the Bloch-Bauer household’s relationship with Klimt remain partially opaque.

Adele Bloch-Bauer died on 24 January 1925 in Vienna, from meningitis, aged 43. Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer survived her by 20 years; he fled Vienna in 1938 after the Nazi annexation of Austria, was stripped of his Austrian citizenship and his property (including the portraits), and died in Zurich in 1945. He never recovered any of his property in his lifetime.

The Two Portraits: 1907 and 1912

Klimt made two monumental oil-on-canvas portraits of Adele Bloch-Bauer, separated by five years in their completion dates and dramatically different in their formal programmes:

Portrait I (1907, “Woman in Gold”): 138 × 138 cm. Oil, silver, and gold leaf on canvas. The painting is almost entirely covered in gold leaf and gold paint — the figure’s dress, the background, and the decorative programme merge into a single flat golden field from which the face and hands emerge as the only areas of naturalistic flesh tones. The decorative programme draws from multiple iconographic sources: Egyptian hieratic imagery, Byzantine mosaic gold grounds, Indian Mughal miniature ornament, and the Japanese Rinpa school’s decorative gold-ground painting tradition. The Portrait I is the most concentrated expression of Klimt’s “golden phase” (approximately 1899–1910) and the most specifically Byzantine-influenced work in his oeuvre.

The commission: Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer commissioned the portrait in 1903; Klimt worked on it for approximately four years (1903–1907), making more than 100 preparatory drawings. This is one of the longest and most extensively prepared commission processes in Klimt’s career. The final work’s specific quality — the face and hands emerging from the flat gold ground with an almost icon-like presence — is the result of the four years’ working-through of the relationship between the specific naturalistic face (Adele’s face, observed from life over years of proximity) and the most completely abstract and non-naturalistic gold decorative programme Klimt ever produced.

Portrait II (1912): 190 × 120 cm. Oil on canvas. The Portrait II is radically different from Portrait I in its formal programme: the gold has largely retreated. Adele stands in a dress of pale blue, white, and rose against a background of loosely painted coloured patches — orange, yellow, light green, and cream — that create a decorative floral or abstract garden setting without depicting any specific environment. The figure is presented in three-quarter view, the face turned three-quarters toward the viewer. The figure’s dress has a specific flatness — the loose, sweeping lines of the Wiener Werkstätte reform dress aesthetic that Adele championed in her own dress. The Portrait II is Klimt’s most colour-saturated and most Post-Impressionist portrait — less Byzantine icon, more Fauve-adjacent colour field.

The DeckArts “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II” single (~$140) reproduces Portrait II — the 1912 colour version with its vivid colour field background rather than the flat gold ground of Portrait I. This is the technically more varied and more accessible of the two portraits for domestic display: the warm colour field background (orange, rose, cream patches) advances from warm white or navy walls in a way that the Portrait I’s flat gold–gold relationship (gold art on warm wall) does not. View Portrait of Adele II at DeckArts →

Nazi Seizure 1938: The Mona Lisa of Austria

On 12 March 1938, German forces crossed the Austrian border and the Anschluss was declared: the annexation of Austria into the Third Reich. Within hours, the Austrian Nazi Party began the systematic seizure of Jewish-owned property, art collections, businesses, and real estate. Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer fled Vienna on 12 March 1938, the day of the Anschluss, leaving behind his Elisabethstraße palace, his Jungfer Brezan estate in Bohemia, and his entire art collection — including both Klimt portraits of Adele.

The portraits were seized by the Austrian Nazi regime (the Reichsstatthalter’s cultural office) and allocated to the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna — where they became the centrepieces of the museum’s Austrian art collection and the most celebrated works in the institution. Portrait I in particular became the most iconic image in Austrian national cultural identity: it appeared on postage stamps, on promotional materials for Austrian tourism, on the covers of art books, and in every major exhibition of Austrian fin-de-siècle art. The Austrian government and the Belvedere referred to it publicly as “the Mona Lisa of Austria.”

Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer died in Zurich on 13 November 1945, without having recovered any of his property. His will left his estate (including the legal claims to the seized works) to his three nieces and nephews: Maria Altmann, Robert Bentley, and Luise Gattin. None of them were able to pursue the claims effectively during the decades of post-war Austrian resistance to art restitution.

The Restitution of 2006: Maria Altmann vs Austria

Maria Altmann (18 February 1916 – 7 February 2011) was Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer’s niece — the daughter of his sister Therese. She had fled Vienna in 1938 with her husband Fritz Altmann, and had settled in Los Angeles, where she ran a clothing boutique. In 1998, a law reform in Austria created the first formal mechanism for the restitution of Nazi-seized art from Austrian state collections. Altmann engaged the attorney E. Randol Schoenberg (grandson of the composer Arnold Schoenberg, who had himself fled Nazi Vienna) to pursue a claim for the five Klimt works still held by the Austrian state: Portrait I, Portrait II, Birch Forest, Apple Tree I, and Houses in Unterach on the Attersee.

The legal process took eight years and involved a landmark case before the United States Supreme Court. The key legal issue: Austria argued that U.S. courts had no jurisdiction over the Austrian government; the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Republic of Austria v. Altmann (2004) that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act applied retroactively and that U.S. courts did have jurisdiction. The case was subsequently referred to Austrian arbitration. In January 2006, the three-person arbitration panel ruled unanimously that all five Klimt works should be returned to Altmann and the other Bloch-Bauer heirs. Austrian President Heinz Fischer publicly called the arbitration result “a great loss for Austria.”

The five Klimt works left the Belvedere Vienna in February 2006. Maria Altmann was 89 years old. The return of the Adele portraits had taken 68 years. See: Belvedere Vienna — Gustav Klimt Collection.

$135 Million: The 2006 Sale

After the restitution, Maria Altmann decided to sell Portrait I (the gold portrait). She received multiple private approaches before accepting an offer from Ronald Lauder — heir to the Estée Lauder cosmetics fortune, collector, and founder of the Neue Galerie New York (a museum specifically dedicated to early 20th-century Austrian and German art, opened 2001 in a mansion on Fifth Avenue, New York). The sale price: $135 million — the highest price ever paid for a painting at private sale at that time (June 2006), and the highest price ever paid for a Klimt.

The $135 million figure is the most specifically biographical element of the Portrait I’s story: a painting seized from a Jewish family for zero compensation by a Nazi regime, held by the Austrian state for 68 years as a national cultural symbol, and sold for $135 million upon its return to the heirs. The multiplication: the Austrian government had, at various points during the 1998–2006 proceedings, offered to purchase Portrait I from Altmann for approximately €100 million, which Altmann declined. The gap between the Austrian state’s valuation and the private market valuation was the same gap as between the seizure’s zero compensation and the market’s highest-ever price for a painting.

Portrait I is now permanently installed in the Neue Galerie New York at 1048 Fifth Avenue. Portrait II was sold at auction at Christie’s New York on 8 November 2006 for $87.9 million. The two portraits together realised approximately $223 million — from an original seizure value of zero.

Klimt and Adele: The Biographical Relationship

The biographical relationship between Klimt and Adele Bloch-Bauer — the nature and duration of which is partially documented and partially reconstructed from Klimt’s preparatory drawings, his journals, and the accounts of contemporaries — is the most specific biographical programme of the Portrait I and the most relevant context for understanding the four years (1903–1907) that Klimt spent on Portrait I’s more than 100 preparatory drawings.

The documented aspects: Klimt visited the Bloch-Bauer household regularly from approximately 1901 until Adele’s death in 1925. He corresponded with Adele (surviving letters are limited in number; many were destroyed or lost). He made more than 100 preparatory drawings for Portrait I — an extraordinary number for a single portrait commission, far exceeding his standard practice. The drawings trace the process of resolving the relationship between the specific naturalistic face and the abstract gold decorative programme — a four-year visual engagement with the specific problem of how to paint a living person he knew well in the most abstract visual programme he had yet employed.

The film “Woman in Gold” (2015, directed by Simon Curtis, with Helen Mirren as Maria Altmann and Ryan Reynolds as Randol Schoenberg) dramatised the restitution story and brought the biographical narrative of the Adele portraits to a global popular audience. The film is historically accurate in its broad outlines (the Supreme Court case, the arbitration, the 2006 restitution) and dramatised in its specifics. See: Klimt: Complete Biography.

Klimt’s Gold: 23.75-Karat Leaf and the Byzantine Inheritance

Klimt’s use of gold leaf in his painting — the defining technical and material quality of his Golden Phase (approximately 1899–1910) — derives from a specific biographical experience: his 1903 journey to Ravenna, Italy, where he encountered for the first time the Byzantine mosaic tradition in the churches of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo and San Vitale. The specific quality of Byzantine gold-ground mosaic that Klimt brought back from Ravenna and applied to his own painting: the use of flat, non-perspectival gold ground as the art’s primary space — not atmospheric space modelled in paint but literal gold surface as the space in which figures exist. The figures do not inhabit a receding three-dimensional space; they exist on the gold surface’s plane.

The specific gold leaf Klimt used: 23.75-karat gold leaf (a standard European gold leaf specification, with a trace alloy for workability) and silver leaf for specific cool-toned areas. The gold is applied directly to the painting’s surface using traditional gilding adhesive (oil gilding size), then tooled and burnished to produce specific surface textures. In Portrait I, Klimt further painted over and within the gold leaf to add decorative elements in oil paint. The relationship between flat gold ground and painted oil elements is the specific material programme of Portrait I’s visual world.

DeckArts’ reproduction of the Portrait of Adele II uses UV archival photopolymer inks — not gold leaf — to reproduce the portrait’s specific colour programme. The Portrait II’s colour field background (orange, rose, cream patches) is reproduced in ASTM I lightfastness inks on Grade-A Canadian maple. The warm amber grain of the Canadian maple substrate provides a material kinship with the warm amber quality of Klimt’s gold-leaf ground without attempting to replicate the physical gold. See: Klimt: Complete Biography; Klimt Tree of Life: UNESCO Stoclet Frieze.

Klimt’s Life: Vienna 1862–1918

Gustav Klimt was born on 14 July 1862 in Baumgarten, a working-class suburb of Vienna, the second of seven children of Ernst Klimt, a gold engraver from Bohemia, and Anna Finster. His father’s craft — gold engraving, the precise working of metal surfaces to produce decorative linear patterns — is the most specific biographical origin of Klimt’s adult artistic obsession with gold surfaces and the precise elaboration of decorative programmes within gold fields.

Klimt studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Arts and Crafts) in Vienna from 1876, where he trained in decorative painting, fresco technique, and architectural ornament. His early career (1880s) was as a successful commercial decorator: he and his brother Ernst Klimt (who died in 1892) produced ceiling frescoes for the major public buildings of the Ringstraße’s expansion programme, including the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Burgtheater. This early career as a decorative painter is the technical foundation of Klimt’s mature style: the ability to produce large-scale coherent ornamental programmes in fresco and paint, with precise control of surface decoration across vast areas.

In 1897, Klimt was a founding member of the Vienna Secession, the Austrian equivalent of the international Art Nouveau movement, which took as its motto “To every age its art, to every art its freedom” (Ver Sacrum). The Secession’s programme was the rejection of the academic and historicist art of the Vienna Kunstlerhaus in favour of a new art that synthesised fine and decorative art, painting and craft, and international avant-garde influence with specifically Viennese cultural identity. The Secession’s most celebrated publication was Ver Sacrum; its most celebrated building is the Secession Building (1897–1898, designed by Joseph Maria Olbrich) on the Naschmarkt in Vienna, whose dome of gilt laurel leaves Klimt participated in designing.

Klimt never married. His companion of 27 years was Emilie Flöge (1874–1952), co-owner with her sisters of the Schwestern Flöge fashion salon (Wiener Werkstätte-associated reform dresses) in Vienna; Klimt and Emilie Flöge spent every summer at Attersee in the Austrian Alps, where Klimt painted the lake landscape and Emilie modelled the reform dresses she designed. Klimt’s last words before his death on 6 February 1918 (of a stroke complicated by influenza) were reportedly “Hol’ die Emilie” — “Fetch Emilie.” Their relationship was never formally resolved into marriage; its full nature was known only to them. He died aged 55. See: Klimt: Complete Biography.

Portrait of Adele II for Home Decor

The Portrait of Adele II (1912) is the most specifically colour-rich of the DeckArts Klimt works and the most Post-Impressionist in its visual programme: the warm colour field background (patches of orange, rose, cream, and yellow) behind the pale blue-white Wiener Werkstätte dress creates a specific warm-chromatic field from which the figure emerges. For domestic display, this colour field makes the Portrait of Adele II more versatile than Portrait I (whose flat gold-on-gold programme is more demanding in terms of wall colour): the Portrait II’s warm colour field advances from both warm white (warm-on-warm) and navy (warm-from-cool).

On warm white: The orange, rose, and cream of the background advance from warm white as a warm-warm chromatic event: the most welcoming and most domestically warm installation. Above the bedroom bed, above the living room reading chair, or in the hallway on warm white. The figure’s pale dress creates a cool event within the warm field: a balanced warm-cool programme at domestic scale.

On navy: The warm background colours (orange, rose, cream) advance from navy dark at warm-from-cool chromatic contrast. The most dramatically beautiful Portrait of Adele II installation: warm Post-Impressionist colour field from cool dark, in the same chromatic register as The Kiss’s gold from navy. Above the bedroom bed or living room feature wall on navy.

Best positions:

  • Above the bedroom bed at 165–175 cm on warm white or navy: the most intimate and most biographically resonant Klimt bedroom primary. Adele died at 43; the portrait left Vienna 68 years later for $87.9 million. Above sleep: the most specific and most unjust art story above the most intimate domestic position.
  • Above the living room reading chair or as a secondary accent at 155–165 cm: Adele’s intellectual programme (Freud’s circle, Mahler’s world, the Wiener Werkstätte, the Vienna Secession) above the domestic reading position.
  • Hallway end wall at 155–165 cm on warm white: the bilateral threshold figure above the domestic bilateral threshold.

View Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II at DeckArts →

Four Complete Portrait of Adele II Programmes

Programme 1: The Navy Bedroom Above Bed (~$140)
Navy above-bed feature wall (floor to ceiling) + Portrait of Adele II single (~$140) at 165–175 cm centre above the bed (safety wire mandatory) + warm cream linen bedding + aged brass 2700K bedside lamps. The warm colour field from navy dark: orange, rose, and cream advancing from cool dark above the sleeping position. “Adele died at 43 before the portrait left Vienna. It was seized by the Nazis. The restitution took 68 years. It sold for $87.9 million.” Total art: ~$140. See: Best Wall Art for a Bedroom 2026.

Programme 2: The Art Nouveau Living Room Accent (~$280)
Warm white walls + The Kiss single (~$140) above the bedroom bed at 165–175 cm (gold from warm white; 27 years with Emilie; last words “Fetch Emilie”) + Portrait of Adele II single (~$140) above the living room reading chair or desk at 155–165 cm (the warm colour field from warm white; Adele’s intellectual programme; the 68-year restitution). Two Klimt biographical programmes: the personal romance above sleep; the intellectual patron above reading. Total art: ~$280. See: Art Nouveau Home Decor 2026.

Programme 3: The Full Klimt Living Room (~$590)
Navy primary sofa wall + Klimt Tree of Life triptych (~$310) at 155–165 cm above the sofa (gold spirals from navy dark; UNESCO Brussels Stoclet Frieze) + Portrait of Adele II single (~$140) on the adjacent wall at 155–165 cm + The Kiss single (~$140) above the bedroom bed or hallway. Three Klimt biographical programmes in the complete Klimt domestic programme: the axis mundi above the gathering space; the patron’s portrait beside it; the personal romance above the intimate position. Total art: ~$590. See: Klimt Tree of Life: Complete Guide.

Programme 4: The Art Nouveau Hallway Threshold (~$140)
Warm white hallway end wall + Portrait of Adele II single (~$140) at 155–165 cm above a narrow console table + one narrow ceramic vessel (warm cream or rose glaze) + directed 2700K wall sconce. The Viennese intellectual patron at the domestic threshold: every arrival and departure is a passage past Adele Bloch-Bauer’s warm colour field. “She died at 43. She never knew the portrait would be stolen. She never knew it would sell for $87.9 million. She never knew it would leave Vienna.” Total art: ~$140. See: Wall Art for a Hallway 2026.

FAQ

Who was Adele Bloch-Bauer?

Adele Bloch-Bauer (9 August 1881 – 24 January 1925) was the wife of the Viennese sugar industrialist Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, one of the most cultivated members of the Viennese Jewish bourgeoisie, and a central figure in the intellectual and cultural life of fin-de-siècle Vienna (Freud’s circle, Mahler’s world, the Wiener Werkstätte, the Vienna Secession). Gustav Klimt painted two monumental portraits of her (1907 and 1912). She died of meningitis in 1925, aged 43, before either portrait left Vienna. Both portraits were seized by the Nazi regime in 1938, held by the Austrian state for 68 years, and restituted to her heirs in 2006 following the landmark Supreme Court case Republic of Austria v. Altmann. Portrait I sold for $135 million (2006, Neue Galerie New York); Portrait II sold for $87.9 million (2006, Christie’s). Belvedere Vienna. DeckArts Portrait of Adele II single from ~$140.

What happened to the Klimt Portrait of Adele after the Nazis seized it?

The portrait was seized by the Austrian Nazi regime on or shortly after 12 March 1938 (Anschluss day) and allocated to the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna. For 68 years it was the centrepiece of the Belvedere’s collection, publicly displayed as “the Mona Lisa of Austria,” appearing on Austrian postage stamps and in every major exhibition of Austrian art. Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer (Adele’s husband) died in Zurich in 1945 without recovering it. In 2006, following the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Republic of Austria v. Altmann (2004) and the subsequent Austrian arbitration, all five Klimt works were returned to the Bloch-Bauer heirs. Portrait I (gold portrait) sold for $135 million to Ronald Lauder for the Neue Galerie New York; Portrait II sold for $87.9 million at Christie’s New York. DeckArts Portrait of Adele II single from ~$140.

What is the difference between Portrait of Adele I and Portrait of Adele II?

Portrait I (1907, 138 × 138 cm): almost entirely covered in 23.75-karat gold leaf — the figure’s dress, the background, and the decorative programme merge into a single flat golden field. Byzantine mosaic influence; Klimt’s most concentrated Golden Phase work. Four years’ preparation (1903–1907), 100+ preparatory drawings. Now at the Neue Galerie New York. Portrait II (1912, 190 × 120 cm): dramatically different in formal programme; gold has largely retreated. Adele stands against a warm colour field of orange, rose, yellow, and cream patches in a pale blue Wiener Werkstätte reform dress. More Post-Impressionist colour; more Fauve-adjacent. Less Byzantine icon; more vivid colour field portrait. DeckArts reproduces Portrait II. Sold at Christie’s New York 2006 for $87.9 million. Belvedere Vienna. DeckArts from ~$140.

How did Klimt use gold leaf in his paintings?

Klimt used 23.75-karat gold leaf (applied over oil gilding size) and silver leaf as primary materials in his Golden Phase paintings (approximately 1899–1910). The technical influence: his 1903 visit to Ravenna’s Byzantine mosaics in Sant’Apollinare Nuovo and San Vitale, where he encountered flat gold-ground iconic space for the first time. The Ravenna gold grounds use gold mosaic surface as the primary space of the composition — not atmospheric perspective but flat gold plane on which figures exist. Klimt transferred this Byzantine flat gold-ground programme to oil painting: the gold leaf is applied directly to the canvas, then tooled, burnished, and painted over with oil paint for decorative elements. His father was a gold engraver — the childhood experience of gold surface work is the most direct biographical origin of the adult artistic programme. DeckArts Portrait of Adele II from ~$140. See: Klimt: Complete Biography.

Article Summary

Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II (1912, 190 × 120 cm, oil on canvas) is the second of two monumental portraits Klimt made of Adele Bloch-Bauer (1881–1925), the most culturally engaged member of the Viennese Jewish bourgeoisie at the turn of the 20th century and a central figure in the intellectual world of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Seven biographical facts that make the Adele portrait story permanently inexhaustible: (1) Adele died of meningitis in 1925, aged 43, before either portrait left Vienna and before any of the following events occurred; (2) both portraits were seized by the Austrian Nazi regime on 12 March 1938 (Anschluss day), for zero compensation, and allocated to the Belvedere Vienna as “national cultural property”; (3) for 68 years, Portrait I was publicly displayed as “the Mona Lisa of Austria” while its rightful owners (Bloch-Bauer’s heirs) received nothing; (4) Maria Altmann (Adele’s niece by marriage, aged 89 in 2006) won the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Republic of Austria v. Altmann (2004), which gave U.S. courts jurisdiction over the Austrian government; (5) Austrian arbitration in 2006 ruled all five seized Klimt works must be returned — Austrian President Fischer publicly called the result “a great loss for Austria”; (6) Portrait I sold for $135 million to Ronald Lauder for the Neue Galerie New York — the highest price ever paid for a painting at private sale at that time; (7) Portrait II sold for $87.9 million at Christie’s New York, same year. Together: $223 million, from an original seizure compensation of zero. DeckArts Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II single (~$140): warm colour field background (orange, rose, cream), on navy or warm white. Ships from Berlin. 30-day return.

About the Author

Stanislav Arnautov is the founder of DeckArts and a creative director from Ukraine based in Berlin.

Related Guides

0 comments

Leave a comment

Please note, comments need to be approved before they are published.

Best Sellers

View all