How a Jewish family won back Klimt’s ‘Woman in Gold,’ now returning to Fifth Avenue

Look closely at the gold cloak in Gustav Klimt’s portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer and you can make out her initials. The diamond choker at her throat was a wedding gift from her husband, Ferdinand. Decades after Klimt finished the painting in 1907, the Nazis seized the family’s collection and the necklace ended up in Hermann Göring’s possession. The portrait hung in Vienna under a title that, according to New York’s Neue Galerie, was meant to obscure the sitter’s identity. It’s the title most people still know it by: Woman in Gold.

On November 12, the Neue Galerie reopens its galleries after a building restoration, with Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I back on view. The museum’s 25th-anniversary exhibition, which runs through January 11, 2027, fills its Fifth Avenue building with Austrian and German art drawn primarily from its own collection. Adele’s portrait is the work most closely identified with the museum and its presence on the Upper East Side owes as much to her niece Maria Altmann’s fight for its return as it does to Klimt.

Before she became the face of a New York museum, Adele was a Jewish collector in Vienna. She and Ferdinand assembled a collection that included several Klimt landscapes as well as two portraits of Adele, the only person the artist painted twice in full-length portraits. The Klimts hung in her private apartment in the couple’s home. It’s worth keeping that domestic setting in mind on Fifth Avenue, where the gold portrait is so thoroughly a museum object that it takes some imagination to picture it as a painting a family lived with.

The Nazis seized five of the family’s Klimts in 1938. The gold portrait remained on display in Vienna for decades while Altmann pursued the return of her family’s property. The dispute eventually went to Austrian arbitration and the paintings were returned to the heirs. In 2006, Ronald S. Lauder acquired the gold portrait for the Neue Galerie. New York was where the painting went after the family regained the right to decide what happened to it.

There’s a particular tension in seeing the painting under its full name now. Vienna could display a work made possible by a Jewish family’s patronage while obscuring the identity of the woman in it. Klimt, meanwhile, had worked her initials into the painting itself. Once you know to look for them, the letters are one of the most intimate details in a portrait whose every surface seems designed to draw a crowd.

The Neue Galerie is at 1048 Fifth Avenue at East 86th Street. Its anniversary exhibition opens November 12 and runs through January 11, 2027. The museum also lists a free opening-week visit on Friday, November 13, with details on the exhibition page.