In 2006, the art collector Ronald S. Lauder purchased Gustav Klimt’s “Adele Bloch-Bauer I” (1907) for $135 million, then the highest price paid for a painting, and made it the crown jewel of the Neue Galerie, the museum he founded in 2001. Since then other paintings have sold for considerably higher sums, adjusted for inflation, including those by Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin.
If some of the luster was lost from Klimt’s masterpiece as other works eclipsed its sale price, it is being renewed with the release of the movie “Woman in Gold.” It tells the tale of how Adele Bloch-Bauer’s niece, Maria Altmann (1916-2011), played by Helen Mirren, succeeded in gaining ownership of her aunt’s portrait from the Austrian government decades after it was looted by the Nazis and displayed by the Belvedere in Vienna.
