Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer

Few paintings have captured the public's imagination as thoroughly as Gustav Klimt's 1907 portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the wife of a prominent Viennese sugar manufacturer. The suggestive, gold-leafed painting not only rendered Bloch-Bauer's irresistible beauty and sensuality; its intricate ornamentation and exotic motifs heralded the dawn of Modernity and a culture intent on radically forging a new identity. With this painting, Klimt created a secular icon that would come to stand for the aspirations of a whole generation in fin-de-siecle Vienna.But as synonymous as this famous model's likeness has become with Vienna's Golden Age, the real Adele Bloch-Bauer remained somewhat shielded from the public eye. Filled with well-chosen details, documentary photographs and historically related artworks, this singular, scholarly study attempts to reveal and honor the remarkable life and legacy of Adele Bloch-Bauer and her husband, Ferdinand Bloch, and their patronage of one of Austria's most radical forebears of Modernity.