Gustav Klimt
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Today we have for you one of the most spectacular painting in Western art history (it represents our mood today). Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I was commissioned by the sitter's husband, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, a Jewish banker and sugar producer. The portrait is the final and most fully representative work of Klimt's golden phase. In December 1903, along with fellow artist Maximilian Lenz, Klimt visited the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna where he studied the early-Christian Byzantine gold mosaics of Justinian I and his wife, Empress Theodora. They made an immense decisive impression on Klimt, who later said that "mosaics of unbelievable splendor" were a "revelation" to him.
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 Oriental Railroads. 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." Adele's parents arranged a marriage with Ferdinand Bloch, a banker and sugar manufacturer. 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. The couple shared a love of art, and patronized several artists, collecting primarily 19th-century Viennese paintings and modern sculpture.
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