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'The Amazing Shoemaker' Exhibit Gustav Klimt’s “Portrait of
Adele Bloch-Bauer,” his elegant, iconic 1907 painting of a
Viennese woman, is the centerpiece of Ronald Lauder’s Neue
Galerie in New York. With its intricate gold motifs, inspired by
Byzantine mosaics the artist saw in Ravenna, it glows from the
walls. But the painting’s history is a complex one, involving
war, theft and legal battles, which Washington Post writer Anne-
Marie O’Connor has now described in her new book, “The Lady in
Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt’s Masterpiece,
‘Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer’” (Alfred A. Knopf). The painting
was originally commissioned by Ferdinand Bloch, a sugar baron;
he and his wife were part of a sophisticated group of wealthy
Viennese Jews whose interests fueled a remarkably vibrant art
scene. Bloch was deeply in love with his much-younger wife, and
she greatly enjoyed posi