Servus, Adele! Klimt at the Neue Galerie

In a city like New York, where $12 cocktails are de rigeur, even a $135 million price tag for a single painting raised quite a few eyebrows. But the co-founder and owner of the Neue Galerie, cosmetics magnate Ronald S. Lauder, found that the record-breaking price was right for Gustav Klimt's Adele Bloch-Bauer I.

After a decades-long battle between the Austrian government and the Bloch-Bauer heirs, an Austrian arbitration panel ruled the works had indeed been seized illegally in 1938 by the Nazis and declared that ownership of the works should revert to the heirs, now residents of Los Angeles. While the Austrians mourned over the abrupt removal of the nationally iconic painting with large posters around Vienna that said "Ciao, Adele!", preparations for the acquisition in New York were already under way.

Adele looks as resplendent as ever as the centerpiece of the exhibition "Gustav Klimt: Five Paintings from the collection of Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer." Since the exhibition's opening this summer, throngs of visitors have come to pay homage to "the Neue Galerie's Mona Lisa," as the museum's directors have called it. Society belle Adele Bloch-Bauer and wife of Jewish-Austrian sugar magnate Ferdinand was the only woman to be painted twice by society-portraitist and notorious womanizer Klimt-the first time in 1904, after Klimt had seen the Byzantine mosaic of Empress Theodora at Ravenna, he created a lavish gold-leafed portrait that seems to swallow the delicate Adele. Certainly Adele's flushed skin, lidded eyes and sensuously parted lips have led scores of people to speculate on the exact nature of the relationship between artist and sitter; but perhaps visitors should look to the second portrait of Adele, painted in 1912, for a better indication of their intimacy. After the death of three children in birth, Adele's detached and tragic air is captured here by muted Matissian colors against a backdrop of japonais motifs. She's no longer a mythical empress of sensuality, but rather a vulnerable human whose ethereal femininity is conveyed with sinuous lines and floral motifs.

After Adele died of meningitis in 1925, her husband converted her bedroom into a sort of shrine, where these exact five paintings along with another Klimt hung in her memory. So in a way, this is how the paintings were always meant to be seen. In the Neue Galerie's second floor room, the frenzied buzz surrounding Adele Bloch-Bauer I unfortunately eclipses the attention due the other remarkable Klimts, particularly three early Austrian landscapes. Of special note is Birch Forest of 1903, which shows off Klimt's frenzied attention to natural detail, as every square inch of canvas is covered with pointillist brushstrokes that compress and reduce shapes to their geometric forms.

Is Adele Bloch-Bauer I generating all this attention simply because of its astronomical price tag? "I think the price tag absolutely corresponds to its aesthetic worth. However, all of these paintings are deserving of equal attention, and visitors should come for all five of them," says Marina Press, staff at the Neue Galerie. The museum now has the distinction of being the home of the most Klimt paintings outside Austria. The family heirs have made it explicit that they want the paintings to be in a public institution, provided the price is right, so come see these Klimts as they were meant to be seen-together in one room, in the intimate and hushed setting of a turn-of-the-century mansion.