Two Klimts on the Red Carpet: Adele Bloch-Bauer Meets Mada Primavesi

Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) — gold, geometry, no perspective

Klimt painted Adele Bloch-Bauer twice. The 1907 first portrait is the gold one — the one Gracie Abrams wore to the 2026 Met Gala. Adele was 26 when Klimt began the picture; her husband Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer commissioned it. Klimt worked on it for three years and applied actual gold leaf and silver leaf across the bodice, the throne and the background. The painting denies depth on purpose. Adele's body is flat against the gold ground; the only modelled flesh is the face, the shoulders, and the hands. Everything else is surface.

The Byzantine eye-and-square motif Klimt used on the bodice came from his 1903 trip to Ravenna, where he saw the sixth-century mosaics at San Vitale and the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia. He wrote to a friend that the mosaics taught him "that gold is not a colour but a substance." The lesson stayed: every Klimt portrait between 1907 and 1909 (Adele Bloch-Bauer I, the second Judith, Danae) builds on the same gold-as-structure premise.

The Maria Altmann restitution arc

When the Nazis annexed Austria in March 1938, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer fled Vienna; the Gestapo seized the Bloch-Bauer collection, including all five Klimts. The 1907 portrait went to the Austrian Gallery Belvedere as state property and was renamed The Lady in Gold, with Adele's identity scrubbed (she was Jewish; the Nazis preferred a generic title). It hung at the Belvedere for 60 years.

Maria Altmann, Adele's niece, fled to California in 1938 and became an American citizen. In the late 1990s she filed a restitution claim against the Republic of Austria for the five Klimts. The case reached the US Supreme Court in 2004 (Republic of Austria v. Altmann); the Court ruled 6–3 that Altmann could sue Austria in US federal court. Austrian arbitration returned all five paintings to her in January 2006. Six months later she sold Adele Bloch-Bauer I to Ronald Lauder for the Neue Galerie New York for $135 million — at the time the highest price ever paid for a painting. It has hung at the Neue Galerie on East 86th Street since.

The 2015 film Woman in Gold (Helen Mirren as Altmann, Ryan Reynolds as her lawyer Randol Schoenberg) dramatised the case. The dramatisation simplified — Schoenberg's actual brief was 247 pages and the case turned on a narrow point of jurisdictional retroactivity — but the painting's biography is the rare one where the cinematic version under-sells the legal stakes.

Mada Primavesi (1912–13) — white, planted, nine years old

Five years after Bloch-Bauer, Klimt painted his most famous child portrait. Mada Primavesi was nine. Her father Otto was a Vienna banker and a Wiener Werkstätte patron; her mother Eugenia commissioned the picture for the family Villa Primavesi in Winkelsdorf (now Kouty nad Desnou, Czech Republic). Klimt produced at least 200 preparatory drawings of Mada in different poses before settling on the standing one — feet planted, weight forward, both arms slightly behind the body, head tilted left, eyes meeting the viewer.

The painting is the opposite of Bloch-Bauer's gold. Mada is in a loose white cotton smock with hand-painted floral motifs at the neckline and skirt; the ground is pale violet-pink with looping floral filigree. The colour palette is the gift Mada gave her own child portraitist — Klimt rarely worked in the pale-pink-with-violet range, but he committed to it for her.

Hunter Schafer's 2026 carpet read picked up the silhouette and the pose: a tent-shaped cotton dress with hand-painted floral panels, planted feet, head tilted in the direction Klimt painted. The pose is the citation as much as the textile.

Where the two paintings live now

Adele Bloch-Bauer I: Neue Galerie New York, 1048 Fifth Avenue at East 86th Street, on permanent view in the second-floor gallery. The Café Sabarsky on the ground floor of the same building serves as the museum's restaurant; the tortes are good, the espresso is real. Admission is by timed ticket through neuegalerie.org.

Mada Primavesi: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gallery 829 (Modern and Contemporary, second floor). Acquired in 1964 as a gift from André and Clara Mertens, who had bought the painting from the Primavesi family. Mada herself outlived the painting's first sixty years; she died in 2000 in Switzerland at 96.

Why two Klimts at the same gala isn't a coincidence

Klimt is the painter Costume Art's curatorial framing was built for. His portraits already treat fabric as if it were paint — the gold leaf in Bloch-Bauer I is literally textile-shaped — and his Vienna Secession project was the first European movement to argue, in the 1898 Secession manifesto, that decorative art and fine art were the same discipline. Andrew Bolton's exhibition makes the same argument 128 years later, with garments next to canvases. Two Klimts was almost overdetermined; the surprise is that more attendees didn't pick him.