Adele Bloch-Bauer

Austro Hungarian socialite

Adele Bloch Bauer (née Bauer; August 9, 1881 – January 24, 1925) was a Viennese socialite, salon hostess, and patron of the arts from Austria Hungary. A Jewish woman, she is most well known for being the subject of two of artist Gustav Klimt's paintings: Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer I and Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer II, and the fate of the paintings during and after the Nazi Holocaust. She has been called "the Austrian Mona Lisa."

Adele Bauer was born in Vienna, Austria Hungary, on August 9, 1881, to Moritz and Jeannette (née Honig) Bauer. Her father was a railway and bank director. She met her future husband, Ferdinand Bloch, at the wedding of her sister Therese to Ferdinand's brother Gustav Bloch in 1898. Adele and Ferdinand became engaged the next year, followed by marriage in Vienna's Stadttempel on December 19, 1899. In 1903, he commissioned the artist Gustav Klimt to paint a portrait of his wife, which was completed in 1907 and became the Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer I. Kimberly Bradley of the BBC wrote the portrait transformed Bloch Bauer into an "icon". In sitting for Klimt twice, she is the only verified person to be painted by the artist twice in full length. Among the many people she hosted were conductors Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss. She also socialized with royalty, and high nobility including Prince Adolph Schwarzenberg. Maria Altmann, the niece of Bloch Bauer, stated: blockquote|[Bloch Bauer was a] rather cold, intellectual woman who was very politically aware and became a socialist. She wasn't happy. It was an arranged marriage but she was childless, after two miscarriages and the death of a baby. I remember her as extremely elegant, tall, dark and thin. She always wore a slinky white dress and used a long, gold cigarette holder.

Klimt's website says that Bloch Bauer was his mistress. He painted her at least twice.

During World War II, the Nazis stole Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer I from Bloch Bauer's family. It ended up in the Belvedere Gallery. In 2016, the city of Vienna named a street, Bloch Bauer Promenade, after her and her husband.

The 2015 film Woman in Gold is about Maria Altmann's case. Adele Bloch Bauer is shown in flashbacks. In the German Italian children's series Mia and Me (2012), the teenager Mia is transported into a world of elves. The king and queen of the elves wear dresses that very closely resemble Adele's in the Woman in Gold painting.