The lawyer acting on behalf of the German state gave the portrait to the Galerie Belvedere, claiming he was following the wishes Adele had made in her will.

One of Ferdinand's nieces, Maria Altmann, hired the lawyer E. Randol Schoenberg to make a claim against the gallery for the return of five works by Klimt.

In 2006 after a seven-year legal claim, which included a hearing in front of the Supreme Court of the United States, an arbitration committee in Vienna agreed that the painting, and others, had been stolen from the family and that it should be returned to Altmann.

She sold it the same year for $135 million, at the time a record price for a painting to the businessman and art collector Ronald Lauder to place the work in the Neue Galerie, the public New York–based gallery he co-founded.

[1] He attended the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts (German: Kunstgewerbeschule Wien) before taking on commissions with his brother, Ernst, and a fellow-student Franz von Matsch from 1879.

[3][4] Klimt worked in Vienna during the Belle Époque, during which time the city made "an extreme and lasting contribution to the history of modern art".

[3] In 1897 he was a founding member and president of the Vienna Secession, a group of artists who wanted to break with what they saw as the prevailing conservatism of the Viennese Künstlerhaus.

[9] By 1900 he was the preferred portrait painter of the wives of the largely Jewish Viennese bourgeoisie,[3][10] an emerging class of self-made industrialists who were "buying the innovative new art that state museums rejected", according to the journalist Anne-Marie O'Connor.

[12][13][n 1] Klimt had begun using gold in his 1890 portrait of the pianist Joseph Pembauer,[16] but his first work that included a golden theme was Pallas Athene (1898).

The art historian Gilles Néret considers that the use of gold in the painting "underlines the essential erotic ingredient in ... [Klimt's] view of the world".

The artist Catherine Dean considered that Adele was "the only society lady painted by Klimt who is known definitely to be his mistress",[21] while the journalist Melissa Müller and the academic Monica Tatzkow write that "no evidence has ever been produced that their relationship was more than a friendship".

Whitford writes that the only evidence put forward to support the theory is the position of the woman's right hand, as Adele had a disfigured finger following a childhood accident.

[31] Adele was the model for the work[32] and wore a heavily jewelled deep choker given to her by Ferdinand, in what Whitford describes as "Klimt's most erotic painting".

[30][n 3] In mid-1903 Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer commissioned Klimt to paint a portrait of his wife; he wished to give the piece to Adele's parents as an anniversary present that October.

[35] In December 1903, along with fellow artist Maximilian Lenz, Klimt visited the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna where he studied the early-Christian Byzantine gold ground mosaics of Justinian I and his wife, Empress Theodora.

[22] Much of the portrait was undertaken by an elaborate technique of using gold and silver leaf and then adding decorative motifs in bas-relief using gesso, a paint mixture consisting of a binder mixed with chalk or gypsum.

[44][45] In places the dress merges into the background so much so that the museum curator Jan Thompson writes that "one comes across the model almost by accident, so enveloped is she in the thick geometric scheme".

[3] Adele's hair, face, décolletage and hands are painted in oil; they make up less than a twelfth of the work and, in Whitford's opinion, convey little about the sitter's character.

[33] For Whitford the effect of the gold background is to "remove Adele Bloch-Bauer from the earthly plane, transform the flesh and blood into an apparition from a dream of sensuality and self-indulgence"; he, and Thomson, consider the work to look more like a religious icon than a secular portrait.

[39][44] O'Connor writes that the painting "seem[s] to embody femininity" and thus likens it to the Mona Lisa,[40] while for Müller and Tatzkow, the gold gives the effect that Adele appears "melancholy and vulnerable, unapproachably aloof and yet rapt".

[22] Both the current holder of the portrait—the Neue Galerie New York—and the art historian Elana Shapira describe how the background and gown contain symbols suggestive of erotica, including triangles, eggs, shapes of eyes and almonds.

[50] (Translates from the German as: "I ask my husband after his death to leave my two portraits and the four landscapes by Gustav Klimt to the Austrian State Gallery in Vienna.

[35] In 1936 Ferdinand gave Schloss Kammer am Attersee III to the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere; he later acquired a further Klimt painting, the Portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl (1917–1918).

[63] In December 1941 Führer transferred the paintings Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I and Apfelbaum I to the Galerie Belvedere in return for Schloss Kammer am Attersee III, which he then sold to Gustav Ucicky, an illegitimate son of Klimt.

The committee's decision recommended that 16 Klimt drawings and 19 pieces of porcelain that had been held by Ferdinand and Adele and which were still at the Galerie Belvedere should be returned, as they fell outside the request of the will.

[72][73] To avoid the prohibitively high costs, Altmann and Schoenberg sued the Galerie Belvedere, and the museums owner, the Austrian government, in the US courts.

[80][81][n 13] After the panel's decision was announced, the Galerie Belvedere ran a series of advertisements that appeared in bus stops and on underground railway platforms.

"[85] In June 2006 the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I was sold to Ronald Lauder for $135 million for his public art museum, at the time a record price for a painting.

[91] The painting's history is described in the 2012 book The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, by the journalist Anne-Marie O'Connor.

[93] The portrait is featured in the memoir of Gregor Collins, The Accidental Caregiver, about his unusual bond with Adele's niece Maria Altmann, published in August 2012.