The purchase of Gustav Klimt’s "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I" (1907) for New York’s Neue Galerie was a great coup. The painting had been expropriated from its Jewish owners by the Nazis, was exhibited for 25 years in Vienna’s Belvedere museum and, in a case that went all the way to the United States Supreme Court, was eventually returned to the heirs of the Bloch-Bauer family. There was competitive bidding in Los Angeles, where it was on exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and in June 2006 it was acquired for the Neue Galerie by Ronald S. Lauder, the museum’s president and co-founder. Lauder referred to the painting as "our Mona Lisa" and, indeed, much like the overexposed Leonardo portrait, the Klimt had by then become an adored icon. CNNMoney.com called it "hands down the biggest American museum purchase of the past 100 years."

The "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer" was painted in what has been called Klimt’s "Golden Style," and indeed, it shimmers with golden particles. In 1903 the painter was in Ravenna and was greatly impressed by the powerful mosaic of the Empress Theodora in the nave of San Vitale. He sought to achieve similar splendor in his paintings of the period, such as his masterpiece "The Kiss" (1907–08). In the portrait of Adele, he worked with meticulous craftsmanship, painting the layers of pigments and laying on the gold leaf. Adele, the sitter and patron, is enthroned in an armchair, which is concealed by the exuberance of ornaments—squares and spirals, almond-shaped or vaginal configurations. Emerging from the flux of decorations are the woman’s head and folded hands, bespeaking refined sensuality as well as status and wealth. The detail of the green floor and checkered black-and-white molding on the lower left recalls the Wiener Werkstätte, and, indeed, Josef Hoffmann designed the frame of the painting, which was exhibited at the Vienna Kunstschau in 1908.

Probably no other work of art has been as frequently reproduced in recent years. The combination of the erotic and the precious may very well account for this popularity. But "Klimtomania" is a rather recent phenomenon. During his lifetime (1862–1918), Klimt enjoyed the reputation of being Austria’s foremost artist. But his eminence waned in the 20th century. Klimt paintings, unlike those of the younger Austrians, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele, were rarely seen in international exhibitions. The epoch-making Armory Show of 1913, which introduced modern art to America, exhibited his contemporaries (Seurat, Signac, Bonnard, Vuillard and Matisse, among others), but not Klimt. In the United States, he was included in a Wiener Werkstätte show in 1923, but it was not until almost 20 years later that the dealer Otto Kallir began presenting Klimt’s work in his Galerie St. Etienne (now owned by his granddaughter, Jane Kallir). The publication of my book German Expressionist Painting in 1957 began to draw attention to the paintings of Klimt in this country, and in 1960 a painting by Klimt was shown at an American museum for the first time. The occasion was the Art Nouveau show at the Museum of Modern Art, and the picture was his great "Judith II (Salome)," indeed one of the glories of Art Nouveau and Symbolist painting. Since that time, interest in Klimt’s work has been on the increase, and a vast number of books and catalogues on the artist have been published.

In 1908, a year after Klimt completed his portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer—which is currently the centerpiece of "Gustav Klimt: The Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections" on view at the Neue Galerie (through June 30)—Kaiser Franz Josef celebrated the 60th anniversary of his ascension to the Habsburg throne. The dual monarchy presided not only over Austrians and Hungarians, but also over Germans, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Italians, Poles, Croats and Jews. An elaborate bureaucracy ruled over an uneasy multicultural conglomeration and permitted a limited amount of freedom of artistic expression. Vienna was the seat of Imperial power, with a ruler who believed above all in law and order. "Everything about our thousand-year-old Austrian monarchy appeared grounded upon eternity, the State itself the ultimate guarantor of continuity … Anything radical, anything violent seemed impossible in this Age of Reason," wrote Stefan Zweig in his memoir, written in the novelist’s exile in Brazil shortly before he committed suicide in 1942. But, at the fin de siècle, Vienna attracted the best minds and greatest talents, and not only from the Empire’s provinces. It became a great focal point of European culture before World War I and the Empire’s collapse.

There were the writers: the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who hoped that aesthetic beauty might bring harmony to the inescapable devastation of an old aristocratic culture, writing, "We must take leave of a world before it collapses." Arthur Schnitzler suggested in his plays that free sexual relations would break down social hierarchies. Karl Kraus, the spokesman for purity in language and the great satirist, attacked hypocrisy and the corruption of the Empire, which he named the "experimental station for the collapse of mankind." Robert Musil in his novels described the moral and intellectual decline of traditional culture. And, of course, Sigmund Freud, the inventor of psychoanalysis, revealed the activity of the libido and broke down the boundaries between dream and reality. Like Kraus and Schnitzler, Freud accused a false morality of having crippled sexual life, an attitude that can be seen in Klimt’s drawing and certainly in his life. In the political sphere there were the anti-Semitic Christian politicians Karl Lueger and Georg von Schonerer, who influenced the young Adolf Hitler’s thinking. At the same time the journalist Theodor Herzl founded modern Zionism.

Vienna also took the lead in architecture. Josef Hoffmann, who was a great advocate of the unity of the arts and crafts, was the founder of the Wiener Werkstätte and a collaborator of Klimt’s on several projects. Otto Wagner, a significant city planner and architect, simplified the design of buildings toward more functional style, which was carried forward by Adolf Loos, who helped inaugurate the International Style, protesting against ornament, an element essential to Klimt’s enterprise. And in music Gustav Mahler’s great harmony, composed to "resume the music of the spheres" was to be contravened by Arnold Schoenberg’s breakthrough to dissonance and atonality. In painting, Kokoschka and Schiele turned from Klimt’s Symbolism to Expressionism.