Adele Bloch-Bauer II

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About Adele Bloch-Bauer II

Adele Bloch-Bauer stands upright at the centre of a tall field of colour. A black feathered hat gives her head a firm silhouette. A long pale dress and a scarf spread across her body, yet their edges repeatedly merge with flowers, geometric bands and small figures behind her. The painting presents a named person while making the space around her brilliantly unstable.

Gustav Klimt's Adele Bloch-Bauer II is his second full-length portrait of the Viennese patron. The Belvedere uses the date 1912–13; the Gustav Klimt Database and Neue Galerie use 1912. These are catalogue conventions for one canvas, not separate versions. Historical museum records identify the work as oil on canvas, 190 by 120 centimetres.^[1][3][5][8]

The second portrait is physically and artistically distinct from Klimt's 1907 image of Adele. It abandons that work's extensive metal-leaf field for open oil paint, high colour and a background divided into floral and figural zones. No gold leaf or other metal appears in its documented medium.^[3][5][8]

Scientific examination at the Belvedere in 2023 revealed that this apparently fluent image was substantially revised. X-radiography and infrared reflectography show an earlier arrangement in which Adele stood closer, on an oval carpet, wearing a fuller dress with more neck exposed and a hat extending farther towards the edge. The evidence records changes within the same canvas; it does not disclose an intact hidden painting.^[2]

The portrait is privately owned. It returned temporarily to Vienna for research, conservation and display from 9 November 2023 to 11 February 2024. That presentation is over, and the lending credit “courtesy of HomeArt” does not identify the current owner or permanent location.^[1]

At a Glance

• ArtistGustav Klimt
• Current titleAdele Bloch-Bauer II
• Alternative title formPortrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II
• Date1912–13 in the Belvedere record; 1912 in the Gustav Klimt Database, Neue Galerie and historical catalogue evidence^[1][3][5][8]
• MediumOil on canvas^[5][8]
• Dimensions190 × 120 centimetres^[8]
• SitterAdele Bloch-Bauer, born Adele Bauer; the family adopted the combined surname in 1917^[6]
• CommissionThe second of two separate full-length portraits made for the Bloch-Bauer patronage circle^[3][4]
• First major exhibitionXI International Art Exhibition, Royal Glass Palace, Munich, June 1913^[3]
• Nazi-era historyTaken from Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer's control after 1938; acquired by the Austrian Gallery through Erich Führer in 1943^[6][8]
• RestitutionReturned with four other Klimt paintings to Ferdinand's heirs following Austrian arbitration in 2006^[1][6][7]
• Current statusPrivate collection; no stable public location disclosed^[1][5]
• Recent conservation/displayUpper Belvedere, 9 November 2023–11 February 2024^[1][2]

The Same Sitter, a New Portrait

Adele had already sat for one of Klimt's most elaborate paintings, completed in 1907. Five years later he did not update that canvas or produce a simplified replica. He began another full-scale oil portrait with a different pose, spatial system and material character.^[3][5]

The existence of two paintings can make the Roman numeral seem like a sequence of states. Here “II” is a modern catalogue distinction. It separates two autonomous portraits of the same sitter. The first is now at Neue Galerie New York; the second remains privately held.^[5]

Their contrast is useful only if it remains bounded. In the 1907 work, Adele is seated and absorbed into a gold- and silver-rich ornamental field. In the later painting she stands, and colour replaces literal metal as the dominant means of expansion.

That difference does not make the second portrait less decorative. Ornament is everywhere, but it behaves more like painted atmosphere than a fixed precious screen. Flowers, fabric, floor and distant figures form changing bands around an upright body.

The new portrait also changes the viewer's relation to Adele. She no longer appears enthroned inside a frontal icon. Her tall pose and broad hat establish social presence, while the looseness of the surrounding paint prevents complete stillness.

Adele Before the Bloch-Bauer Name

The sitter was born Adele Bauer in 1881, the daughter of Moritz Bauer, a director of the Wiener Bankverein, and Jeanette Honig. She married sugar industrialist Ferdinand Bloch in 1899. The two related couples in their family formally adopted the combined surname Bloch-Bauer in February 1917.^[6]

Both Klimt portraits therefore predate the legal surname by which Adele is now universally known in art history. The current title remains appropriate as an established historical identifier; it should not be treated as the exact wording used during every sitting.

Adele and Ferdinand moved within a wealthy Jewish Viennese world of collecting, industry, politics and culture. The Gustav Klimt Database describes their salon as a meeting place for members of the intellectual and artistic elite, with Klimt among their circle.^[3][4]

That context explains sustained patronage without establishing private romance. The fact that Klimt portrayed Adele twice, visited the family circle and accepted commissions shows trust and artistic importance. It does not prove an affair, reveal Adele's thoughts or turn her pose into autobiography.

The known name gives this portrait an unusually rich social setting. It also demands discipline: a documented sitter is not the same thing as a fully recoverable inner life.

A Full-Length Figure Built on Verticality

At 190 centimetres high, the painting approaches the scale of a standing adult. Adele occupies most of that vertical reach, while the narrower 120-centimetre width keeps the composition concentrated.^[8]

She faces outward with her body almost square to the picture. The position is not rigidly military, but it is markedly upright. Klimt gives the head, shoulders and long fall of clothing a continuous vertical force.^[3]

The pose differs from the seated form of the earlier portrait. It also anticipates a wider change in Klimt's commissioned likenesses: the Gustav Klimt Database notes that standing would largely replace sitting in his portrait practice from 1912 onward.^[3]

The body is not modelled as an isolated solid. Dress and scarf broaden across the torso, so the figure's edges are often easier to infer than to follow. Vertical presence survives even as boundary becomes uncertain.

This produces the central paradox of the work. Adele appears monumental because she stands so tall and centrally; she appears nearly weightless because clothing and ground keep exchanging colour and pattern.

The Black Feathered Hat

The broad black hat is the strongest dark accent near the top of the composition. Feathers extend its shape while maintaining a firm contrast with the surrounding colour.^[3]

The hat does more than record fashion. It helps separate Adele's head from the upper field at the very point where dress and background are becoming difficult to distinguish. A dark horizontal mass anchors the face.

Its scale also affects proportion. The hat broadens the upper silhouette while the long clothing extends downward, making the body seem both slender and ceremonially enlarged.

The 2023 technical images show that Klimt reconsidered it. In the earlier arrangement, the feathered form extended more opulently towards the canvas edge.^[2] The visible hat is therefore not the first solution, even though it looks decisive.

No surviving object record identifies the hat's maker, exact material or later history. It is safest to analyse its painted form and role rather than turn it into an independently catalogued accessory.

Face, Hands and the Problem of Likeness

Adele's face is relatively small within the tall canvas, but it remains a principal point of recognition. Klimt differentiates skin from the active surroundings without isolating the head in an empty zone.

The viewer's attention moves between likeness and costume. The face promises access to a known person; the broad garment and patterned setting insist that portrait identity is also socially staged.

Hands play a quieter role than in the 1907 painting. They do not supply the later work's main emblem, and the surviving study evidence concentrates more strongly on upright bearing, arm positions and variations of dress.^[3]

It would be easy to describe Adele as confident because she stands so directly. The curator Markus Fellinger has interpreted the later conception as strong and self-assured.^[2] That reading is grounded in pose, scale and address, but it remains an interpretation of the image rather than a diagnosis of her private disposition.

The portrait's likeness is therefore neither merely naturalistic nor wholly dissolved. Adele is recognisable, yet Klimt makes the act of appearing—through hat, clothing, stance and surrounding display—as important as facial description.

Dress and Scarf Without a Hard Boundary

The floor-length dress establishes the body's long axis. A scarf spreads across the shoulders and upper torso, complicating the transition from skin to garment and from garment to background.^[3]

Klimt does not describe every fold with the same degree of finish. Some passages clarify weight and overlap; others open into freer touches of colour. The result preserves clothing without allowing it to become a static costume plate.

This treatment makes Adele's outline intermittent. Viewers can reconstruct where the body must be, but painted pattern repeatedly crosses the distinction between figure and setting.

The dress also connects technical and visual history. The earlier composition revealed in 2023 contained a much more voluminous garment and a different relation between jewellery, exposed neck and hat.^[2] Klimt's revision narrowed and reorganised the presentation rather than simply applying decorative detail to a fixed silhouette.

Because the work is oil on canvas, its brilliance should be described through paint. Pale fabric, pinks, greens, blues, black and other hues can create luxury without requiring metal leaf.^[2][5][8]

A Background Divided Into Zones

The space behind Adele does not behave like one continuous room. Klimt divides it into strongly differentiated areas whose geometric organisation remains visible beneath their abundance.^[3]

At the bottom, a flowered field reads as carpet or ground. It gives the standing figure a nominal place, yet the density of blossoms weakens ordinary recession. Adele seems to touch a surface that is also an ornamental plane.

Farther upward, bright bands and patterned expanses change scale and visual pressure. Some areas feel textile-like; others suggest painted screens, collected objects or an invented interior assembled from several kinds of looking.

In the upper zone, small mounted warriors bring a figural scene into the decorative field.^[3] Their diminutive scale creates distance, but their pattern-like treatment prevents them from opening a conventional window behind Adele.

The background is therefore neither abstract in a strict sense nor a literal record of the Bloch-Bauer home. It condenses flowers, geometry, figures and display culture into a shallow, unstable setting.

Colour as a Form of Architecture

Colour does more than decorate the zones. It gives them different kinds of weight. Pale values across Adele's dress extend the figure vertically; stronger pinks, greens and blues cause sections of the surrounding field to advance or recede without constructing a measurable room.^[2][3]

The black hat provides the clearest anchor. Elsewhere, dark accents are dispersed, but here black concentrates around the face and prevents the upper body from disappearing into the small figures and changing patterns behind it.

Green performs several roles. In one place it may help separate a garment edge; in another it joins the flowered ground or acts as a field for adjacent hues. It is not a fixed symbolic code for nature, hope or jealousy. Its meaning depends on position and contrast.

Pink similarly moves between body-adjacent warmth, floral colour and independent patch. Belvedere's report that cleaning revived clear pink, green and blue matters because a grey film would have reduced precisely these distinctions.^[2]

Blue can make a passage feel cool or remote, yet the canvas does not organise colour into a simple warm-near/cool-far system. A strong cool hue may press forward if its edge and saturation demand attention. Klimt builds pictorial space by allowing colour to contradict ordinary depth cues.

The pale dress is therefore not an empty interval. Small shifts within it keep the body visible, while its relative lightness lets the surrounding chromatic field register with exceptional force. Adele seems to carry a column of brightness through the canvas.

This is one way the second portrait preserves the intensity associated with Klimt without repeating the first portrait's materials. Preciousness becomes optical rather than literal. The viewer encounters a carefully orchestrated abundance of oil colour, not a reduced substitute for gold.

Colour also joins the social and formal meanings of the work. Bright fabrics, flowers and collected imagery suggest cultivated display, but their arrangement is not passive luxury. They repeatedly unsettle the boundary of a sitter who is nevertheless expected to remain recognisable.

The portrait's achievement lies in controlling that risk. Too much fusion would make Adele disappear; too much separation would turn the background into conventional decoration. Klimt keeps face and hat stable while allowing the rest of the image to hover between figure, costume and environment.

East Asian Imagery Without a Generic Label

The Gustav Klimt Database identifies the mounted figures as Asian warriors and places them within Klimt's sustained attention to East Asian art objects.^[3] That institutional context is useful; its dated language of “primitive exoticism” should not be repeated as a neutral description.

It is better to separate what can be seen from what must be inferred. Small warriors on horseback occupy the upper field. Their costume, scale and arrangement evoke imagery Klimt encountered through Asian art and collecting. The painting does not document a specific country, story or object for every figure.

These references do not turn the portrait into a transparent inventory of the sitter's household. Nor should they be collapsed with Japanese portrait-print traditions or with motifs in other late Klimt paintings. Cultural sources can differ from one passage and one object to another.

The relevant effect here is spatial. The mounted figures occupy a band that might otherwise be distant background, yet they also operate as repeated signs on the canvas surface. They extend the portrait's cosmopolitan display while refusing naturalistic depth.

That doubleness reflects the broader social world of the commission. Adele belonged to a collecting milieu connected to international modernism, but Klimt rearranged sources into a new painted environment rather than copying an interior around her.

The 1911 Drawings

Surviving studies show that Klimt tested Adele's appearance before resolving the oil painting. The Database says the known sheets present her exclusively in upright standing positions and record changes of dress through clear lines and lightly indicated ornament.^[3]

One particularly useful sheet is With Arms Hanging Down from the Front, dated 1911 and catalogued by the Albertina as S 1980: 2102. Its elongated standing figure helps explain the vertical authority of the final portrait.^[3]

The relationship should not be made mechanical. The drawing is not a full-size transfer design, and its spare linear information does not contain the final background, colour zones or every garment decision.

Other sheets document varied dresses worn during the portrait sessions. That evidence supports an extended search for presentation, not the claim that every associated standing woman must depict Adele or prepare this exact canvas.

The drawings also reveal a useful order of problems. Before flowers, mounted figures and high colour could surround the sitter, Klimt had to establish balance, proportion and the distribution of arms and cloth. Line gave the later painted field something to organise around.

Unlike the first Adele portrait's very large and separately documented study campaign, no imported count is needed here. A few securely related sheets teach more than an unsupported total.

What the X-Ray and Infrared Images Reveal

Belvedere's 2023 investigation looked below the visible paint with X-radiography and infrared reflectography. The two methods respond to different aspects of material and drawing, and together they exposed a substantially different initial arrangement.^[2]

In that earlier design, Adele stood closer to the viewer. An oval carpet organised the lower area. Her dress was fuller, the neck below the jewelled necklace was exposed, and the feathered hat stretched farther towards the boundary of the canvas.^[2]

These findings alter how the finished portrait is understood. Its frontal ease was not achieved in a single uninterrupted conception. Klimt adjusted scale, clothing, bodily exposure, setting and silhouette while seeking what the Belvedere curator calls optimal forms.^[2]

The technical record does not disclose another complete Adele portrait hidden intact. Earlier lines and paint were absorbed into later decisions on the same support. A reconstruction shown by the museum helps viewers imagine the former arrangement, but it is a research visualisation rather than recovered historical colour.

Nor can imaging place every change in exact order. It identifies relations among layers and forms. The artist's moment-by-moment reasoning remains only partly accessible.

Surface Confidence and Sustained Revision

The visible painting can appear bold and immediate. Bright fields meet one another without fussy transitions, and Adele's long form seems to have found an effortless balance.

Belvedere's examination complicates that first impression. Markus Fellinger observes that Klimt heavily reworked the painting and struggled to reach its final configuration.^[2] Fluency was an achieved effect, not necessarily an account of easy making.

This is important for Klimt's late style. Open paint and expressive colour are sometimes described as spontaneous alternatives to the labour of the Golden Period. Adele II shows that looser appearance can coexist with persistent structural reconsideration.

Revision also affected meaning. Moving Adele closer or farther changes the viewer's social distance. Enlarging or reducing the dress changes bodily monumentality. Exposing or covering the neck changes the relation between jewellery, skin and costume.

The final state should therefore be read as a set of chosen relations rather than the inevitable flowering of a first sketch.

Cleaning and the Return of Colour

Before the 2023–24 display, conservators gently cleaned the surface. Stefanie Jahn, head of restoration at the Belvedere, reported that removal of a grey film revived clear pink, green and blue tones.^[2]

Cleaning does not mean that conservators repainted the image or made speculative colours permanent. It removed an obscuring layer from the existing surface under controlled treatment.

The result matters especially for a work whose historical identity depends on the shift from literal gold to coloured oil. A grey veil can flatten distinctions among flowered floor, garment and upper field. Revealed tonal clarity restores some of the separation Klimt constructed.

The museum's photographs also remain photographs. Lighting, calibration and reproduction affect what remote viewers see. Conservation can bring the object closer to its current underlying colour relationships without creating one universally exact digital appearance.

Munich, June 1913

The portrait appeared at the XI International Art Exhibition in Munich's Royal Glass Palace in June 1913. It was shown with six other Klimt paintings and eleven drawings.^[3]

This debut confirms that Adele II was not treated as a purely domestic likeness. It entered the international presentation of Klimt's newest work, where its standing figure and coloured field could be encountered alongside his broader development.

The date also helps explain the 1912/1912–13 variation. A work catalogued by some sources to 1912 was publicly exhibited in mid-1913; Belvedere's range accommodates activity across that boundary. The records need not be forced into a false disagreement about two versions.

The Munich context belongs specifically to this portrait. It should not expand into a survey of every Klimt work in the exhibition or a biography of the Glass Palace.

From Patronage to a Memorial Room

Adele and Ferdinand lent paintings to the Austrian Gallery from at least 1919.^[1] A loan made art publicly available without transferring ownership.

Adele died in January 1925 at forty-three. The two Klimt portraits later hung in a memorial room at the family's Elisabethstraße residence, and Ferdinand lent both to the Vienna Secession's 1928 Klimt memorial exhibition.^[6][8]

These actions show the paintings' importance within family remembrance and public culture. They do not establish that Adele had personally owned the canvases or that the museum received them as a completed gift.

Adele's 1923 testament included a request that Ferdinand leave Klimt works to the Austrian Gallery after his death. The later dispute turned partly on the legal character of that wish and on Ferdinand's ownership. It is inaccurate to use the testament alone to describe the museum's wartime possession as a voluntary bequest.^[6][8]

The distinction between lending, requesting and owning becomes essential once the family lost control under Nazi rule.

Persecution and the 1943 Acquisition

After Nazi Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer was persecuted as a Jew and accused under the regime's financial apparatus. He fled first to Czechoslovakia and then Switzerland. His Austrian assets were seized and liquidated.^[6]

The lawyer Erich Führer, an NSDAP and SS member, controlled the disposal of the collection. Adele II remained in the Elisabethstraße memorial room into early 1939, later came under Führer's control, and was sold by him to the Austrian Gallery on 1 March 1943.^[6][8]

Historical records note a payment of 7,500 Reichsmarks by the gallery.^[8] Payment to the Nazi-appointed liquidator does not make the transaction a free sale by Ferdinand or his heirs.

The painting then remained in the Austrian Gallery after the war. Its familiar museum presence could obscure the coercive conditions by which the family had lost it.

The provenance cannot be reduced to “Adele wished it to go to the museum.” Her request, Ferdinand's ownership, Nazi persecution, confiscatory control and the 1943 acquisition are different legal and historical facts.

Arbitration and Restitution in 2006

Postwar attempts to recover the Bloch-Bauer property did not produce an early return of the paintings. Decades later, Ferdinand's niece Maria Altmann and other heirs challenged Austria's retention of the Klimts.^[6]

In May 2005 the heirs and the Republic of Austria agreed to submit the paintings question to a three-person arbitral tribunal. On 15 January 2006, the tribunal concluded that five works should be returned. The Austrian government's announcement named both Adele portraits, Apple Tree, Birch Forest/Beech Forest and Houses at Unterach on the Attersee.^[6][7]

Austria complied with the decision. Neue Galerie presented the five restituted paintings in New York in 2006 before their subsequent dispersal.^[5]

Adele II was auctioned later that year and has remained in private collections.^[1] The sale is part of the object's afterlife, but its price is not necessary to explain the painting's quality or the justice of restitution.

Restitution restored legal control to Ferdinand's successors. It did not undo the persecution that had fractured the collection or return Adele's memorial room as a whole.

The 2023–24 Return to Vienna

The privately owned portrait came to the Belvedere for scientific analysis, conservation and temporary exhibition from 9 November 2023 to 11 February 2024.^[1][2]

This was a loan, not a reversal of restitution or a new museum acquisition. It allowed the institution to research a work it had once held while acknowledging current private ownership.

The credit “Private collection, courtesy of HomeArt” describes the lending arrangement published for that occasion.^[1] It does not establish HomeArt as the owner, and it should not be projected beyond the event.

The exhibition is now past. No retained institutional source identifies a permanent public display after February 2024. As of August 2026, the accurate statement is simply that the canvas remains privately owned.

That limited access gives the conservation record particular importance. It lets viewers understand major changes beneath and on the surface without pretending that the work is routinely available in Vienna.

How to Look at Adele II

Begin with the black hat and face. They hold their shape while almost everything below and behind them spreads into painted pattern.

Follow the long vertical movement of the dress, then look for the moments where its outline weakens. The figure remains present even when garment and field share comparable colours.

At the bottom, decide how securely the flower carpet supports Adele. It names a floor while behaving like a dense surface close to the canvas.

Move upward to the small mounted warriors. Read them first as visible figures, then as an ornamental band whose scale creates a different kind of space.

Remember the technical evidence. The confident visible arrangement replaced an Adele who stood closer, wore a fuller dress and occupied an oval carpet. Revision is part of what the final balance means.^[2]

Finally, resist looking for metal. The luminosity belongs to oil paint. The portrait's historical position after Klimt's gold phase becomes clearest when colour is allowed to do its own work.

A Second Portrait, Not a Secondary One

The Roman numeral can make Adele II sound like an appendix to a more famous painting. Its visual and material evidence argues otherwise.

Klimt returned to the same sitter at a moment when his portraiture was changing. Seated icon became standing presence. Precious metal gave way to saturated oil colour. A continuous golden field became a sequence of flowered, geometric and figural zones.

The 2023 examination adds another dimension. The late portrait's apparent freedom emerged through substantial revision, binding experimental process to a socially formal commission.

Its provenance further resists decorative isolation. Adele's image belonged to a Jewish patronage world that helped make Viennese modernism possible; Nazi persecution removed the canvas from family control; arbitration eventually restored it to the heirs.

The portrait now moves between private custody and occasional public study. Its present location may be undisclosed, but its object identity is unusually well defined: one tall oil canvas, one known sitter, a documented earlier composition and a history that must distinguish lending from loss, museum possession from ownership, and temporary return from restitution.

Frequently Asked Questions

References

Accessed August 2026.

1. Belvedere, Vienna, “Adele Bloch-Bauer II,” current institutional record for 1912–13 dating, private ownership, 2006 restitution, later private-collection history and the 9 November 2023–11 February 2024 research display. View source.
2. Belvedere, Vienna, “Special Guest: Adele Bloch-Bauer II,” official press release dated 8 November 2023, for cleaning results, X-radiography, infrared-reflectography findings, earlier composition, extensive revision and curatorial interpretation. View source.
3. Gustav Klimt Database, “Expressive Blaze of Colors,” for the 1912 convention, standing composition, hat, dress/scarf, flower carpet, mounted figures, late colour, 1911 drawings and June 1913 Munich exhibition. View source.
4. Gustav Klimt Database, “The Bloch-Bauer Family,” for Adele and Ferdinand's patronage, salon, family network and Klimt's connection to their circle. View source.
5. Neue Galerie New York, “Gustav Klimt: Five Paintings From the Collection of Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer,” 2006 exhibition record for the separate 1912 oil portrait, private status, contrast with Adele I and presentation of the five restituted paintings. View source.
6. Commission for Provenance Research, “Bloch-Bauer, Ferdinand,” for family biography, 1917 surname change, patronage, memorial exhibition, Nazi persecution, asset liquidation, Erich Führer's role, postwar claims and the 2006 arbitration. View source.
7. Austrian Federal Ministry / APA-OTS, “Klimt-Bilder: Österreichisches Schiedsgericht entscheidet für Restitution,” 17 January 2006 announcement naming the five paintings ordered returned to Maria Altmann and her family. View source.
8. Jonathan Petropoulos, “Report of Professor Jonathan Petropoulos,” historical expert report in the Altmann matter, for oil medium, 190 × 120-centimetre dimensions, Munich debut, memorial-room location and the 1 March 1943 Austrian Gallery acquisition through Erich Führer. View source.

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