Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) Austrian Art Nouveau Painter
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I 1907 – Oil and gold on canvas

This painting was recently purchased by the cosmetics magnate Ronald S. Lauder for $135 million, the highest sum ever paid for a painting. Lauder is the founder of the Neue Galerie, a tiny museum at Fifth Avenue and 86th Street in New York City, devoted entirely to German and Austrian fine and decorative arts. Ronald S. Lauder quote : “This is our Mona Lisa”
About Gustav Klimt: Educated at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts (Kunstgewerbeschule), Gustav Klimt received training as an architectural decorator. He began his professional career painting interior murals in large public buildings on the Ringstrasse (Ringstraße), the circular road surrounding the old town of Vienna. Klimt was also an honorary member of the Universities of Munich and Vienna.
Klimt’s work is distinguished by the elegant gold or coloured decoration, often phallic in shape that conceals the more erotic positions of the drawings he based many of his paintings on. His works are also characterized by a rejection of earlier naturalistic styles, and the use of symbols or symbolic elements to convey psychological ideas and emphasize the “freedom” of art from traditional culture.
From the New York Times, June 19, 2006: The portrait, of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the wife of a Jewish sugar industrialist and the hostess of a prominent Vienna salon, is considered one of the artist’s masterpieces. For years, it was the focus of a restitution battle between the Austrian government and a niece of Mrs. Bloch-Bauer who argued that it was seized along with four other Klimt paintings by the Nazis during World War II. In January 2006 all five paintings were awarded to the niece, Maria Altmann, now 90, who lives in Los Angeles, and other family members. After the paintings were sent to America, they were on display in Los Angeles in 2006 before the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I was sold to Lauder.
For most of the last 60 years, this portrait has hung in the Austrian Gallery in the Belvedere Palace in Vienna near “The Kiss,” another gold-flecked Klimt masterpiece of the Art Nouveau era. With its sinuous lines and intricate details, the painting, “Adele Bloch-Bauer I,” was commissioned by the subject’s husband, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer.

The Kiss by Gustav Klimt

The Dancer by Gustav Klimt

Mother and Child by Gustav Klimt

Woman With a Necklace, 1917, oil on canvas Amedeo Modigliani

Amedeo Clemente Modigliani (July 12, 1884 – January 24, 1920) was a Jewish-Italian painter and sculptor who pursued his career for the most part in France. Modigliani was born in Livorno, Italy and began his artistic studies in Italy before moving to Paris in 1906. Influenced by the artists in his circle of friends and associates, by a range of genres and movements, and by primitive art, Modigliani’s oeuvre was nonetheless unique and idiosyncratic. He died in Paris of tubercular meningitis—exacerbated by a lifestyle of excess—at the age of 35.
Livorno was still a relatively new city, by Italian standards, in the late nineteenth century. The city on the Tyrrhenian coast dates from around 1600, when it was transformed from a swampy village into a seaport. The Livorno that Modigliani knew was a bustling centre of commerce focused upon seafaring and shipwrighting, but its cultural history lay in being a refuge for those persecuted for their religion. His own maternal great-great-grandfather was one Solomon Garsin, a Jew who had immigrated to Livorno in the eighteenth century as a religious refugee.

The Cellist by Amedeo Modigliani