The $135 Million Klimt Portrait With a Rich Background

Maria Altmann, center, chats with Michael Govan, left, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and her attorney, E. Randol Schoenberg, in front of the Gustav Klimt painting of Altmann's aunt. (Ric Francis -- AP)

LOS ANGELES, June 19 -- It has been a long journey for the lustrous and mysterious portrait in gold of the Viennese Jewish society lady Adele Bloch-Bauer -- a work at the center of one of the most sensational Nazi art theft cases ever -- but now the 1907 Gustav Klimt painting has found a permanent home.

"It was important to the heirs and to my aunt Adele that the painting be in a museum," and not in a private collection, said Bloch-Bauer's niece Maria Altmann, the 90-year-old former dress saleslady in L.A. who is among five heirs who will share the record-breaking $135 million that billionaire cosmetics magnate Ronald S. Lauder and others reportedly paid for the painting.

The work, titled "Adele Bloch-Bauer I," will become the centerpiece of Lauder's Neue Galerie in New York, a small museum with a small collection of 166 works devoted to the art of Germany and Austria from 1890 to 1940. Neue means new in German, and the gallery traces the rise of modernism in painting and the decorative arts in middle Europe.

"Absolutely, this will be a destination painting that will bring people to the gallery," said Scott Gutterman, the museum's deputy director. Founded in 2001, the gallery gets around 200,000 visitors a year, "but that figure now is expected to grow."

Lauder, who was traveling and could not be reached for comment, told the Associated Press from Jerusalem that the portrait was "a painting we all wanted . . . It's a stunning picture. It overwhelms you with its beauty and power."

Klimt's portrait in gold leaf and oil is one of the world's most recognizable works, reproduced on posters, coffee mugs, key rings, drink coasters, T-shirts and even clogs.

There is something very appealing, obviously, to viewers in Adele's attitude and pose and in the way Klimt surrounded this wife of a Jewish sugar baron, who may have been the artist's secret lover, with a golden geometry and icons of Egyptian motif, including open eyes and almond shapes, which the Neue folks describe as having "sexual connotations." Renee Price, director of the Neue Galerie, in a statement said that the Klimt portrait is as important to that museum as Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" is to the Louvre in Paris -- and in some ways the two paintings share a character of intrigue and invite the viewer to wonder what the women were thinking and feeling.

Citing confidentiality agreements, the attorneys, the gallery and the heirs declined to state for the record the sale price. The New York Times, quoting "experts familiar with the negotiations," reported Monday the work went for $135 million, and nobody was disagreeing with that figure in their conversations with The Washington Post.

That figure would make the Bloch-Bauer portrait the most expensive single painting ever known to be sold, besting the $104.1 million paid for Pablo Picasso's 1905 "Boy With a Pipe (The Young Apprentice)" at a Sotheby's auction in 2004. The 62-year-old Lauder, whose wealth Forbes estimated at $2.7 billion in March, found others to help buy the piece for the Upper East Side museum but paid for the bulk of the purchase himself.

"This is a fabulous end to what is a terrific story. It was possible for the heirs to get a fair price and for the painting to remain in the public eye," said E. Randol Schoenberg, the lawyer who successfully fought a seven-year legal battle few thought he would win to have Austria return the Bloch-Bauer portrait and four other Klimt paintings.

Steven Thomas, the lawyer who negotiated the sale for the heirs, said five museums and 10 private collectors were serious potential buyers. Thomas said that Lauder and Neue Galerie won out because the painting would be on permanent public display and shown in context with other Austrian art. "They got a fair price," Thomas said, "but they could have made more money selling to a private collector and possibly a lot more if it went to auction."

Klimt spent three years painting the portrait of Bloch-Bauer, which was commissioned by her husband, Ferdinand. After the work was completed it hung on the walls of the couple's mansion in Vienna. Klimt died in 1918. Before Adele died of meningitis in 1925, she wrote of her intention that the Klimt paintings be donated to an Austrian museum after she and Ferdinand were gone. But Adele could not have known of the rise of Hilter, the Nazi annexation of Austria and the Holocaust. After Ferdinand fled to Switzerland, where he died in 1945, he changed his wills, but by then the Nazis had already seized the couple's home, the sugar factory, their porcelain collection and the Klimts, which ended up at the Austrian Gallery of the Belvedere Palace in Vienna, near another famous Klimt painting, "The Kiss."

A change in Austrian law making it possible for art seized by the Nazis to be returned, and a U.S. Supreme Court decision that would have let Maria Altmann and the heirs sue for the paintings in this country, led to the case being heard in Vienna, where an arbitration panel ruled in January that the paintings were inappropriately acquired and should be returned.

Austria could have sought to purchase the five works, but with a value of some $300 million, the Austrian culture minister, Elisabeth Gehrer, said the country couldn't afford them. Yesterday, Viennese art fanciers mourned the sale and criticized authorities for failing to keep the works. Said Rudolf Leopold, director of a large modern-art museum there, "Mr. Lauder paid too much."

Since April the paintings have been on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where they have attracted 9,000 people a week; the museum had sought to put together a pool of donor-buyers. "We were trying for all five," said Stephanie Barron, a senior curator there. Barron pointed out that few museums could match the Lauder offer, which she called "a staggering amount of money."

The billionaire Eli Broad, for example, is funding an entire building at the Los Angeles museum to house a modern-art collection -- at a cost of $50 million. "And that's for a whole museum building," Barron said.

Still, Barron said, "we're sad to see the paintings leave L.A., but we're glad they going to a museum in the United States that values this work and the work of Germany and Austria from this period."

Maria Altmann's son Peter said that the heirs could not be happier with how the sale turned out. "My mom always does the right thing," he said. He said the Neue Galerie will honor the backstory behind the paintings -- their loss and return -- and will bridge their journey from the Old World to the new. "We think it's just perfect," he said, "just right."

The heirs have not decided what to do with the other four Klimts. For now, they will travel on loan to the Neue Galerie for an exhibition scheduled to run July 13 through Sept. 18.