Adele Bloch-Bauer, #1 (1907). Oil, gold on canvas. 138 x 138. Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I is a painting by Gustav Klimt, completed between 1903 and 1907. The portrait was commissioned by the sitter's husband, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, a Jewish banker and sugar producer. The painting was stolen by the Nazis in 1941 and displayed at the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere. In 2006, following eight years of effort by the Bloch-Bauer heirs, the painting was returned to the family; it was sold the same year for $135 million, at the time a record price for a painting. 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 had left Klimt's artworks to the Galerie Belvedere in her will, although when she died in 1925 those artworks were in Ferdinand's possession. Following the Anschluss of Austria by Nazi Germany, 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 charge of tax evasion was made against him. The assets raised from the purported sales of artwork, property and his sugar business were offset against the tax claim. 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 1946; his will stated that his estate should go to his nephew and two nieces. In 1998 Hubertus Czernin, the Austrian investigative journalist, 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. 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. It was sold to businessman and art collector Ronald Lauder, who placed the work in the Neue Galerie, the New York-based gallery he co-founded. The 2015 film Woman in Gold commemorates the story of Maria Altmann's escape from Austria and repossession of Adele Bloch-Bauer I. Gustav Klimt was born in 1862 in Baumgarten, near Vienna in Austria-Hungary. He attended the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts 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 Wiener 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 art historian Susanna Partsch, he was the enfant terrible of the Viennese art scene, 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. Art historian Gilles Néret considers that the use of gold in the painting underlines the essential erotic ingredient in. view of the world. Néret also states that Klimt used the gold to give subjects a sacred or magical quality.