Who owns beauty ? World art and culture in our museums (8)

Who owns this painting by Klimt, painted by Klimt in Vienna in 1907 using gold in abundance, and depicting a Viennese collector? Immediately after its creation, sponsors and patrons loaned it to international exhibitions, to help promote Gustav Klimt's reputation. In January 1923, in her will, Adele Bloch-Bauer asked her husband to bequeath her portrait, on her death, to the Museum of Contemporary European Art in Vienna. In 1938, Austria became part of Nazi Germany. In 2006, the painting - which had been bequeathed to the museum by Adele Bloch-Bauer - was returned to its rightful owners, i.e. its descendants, who had been racially prosecuted during the Nazi period: the Belvedere Museum returned the portrait to Adele Bloch-Bauer's niece, Maria Altmann. She then sold it to cosmetics magnate Ronald Lauder for 135 million euros. The billionaire incorporated the painting into his Neue Galerie in New York, whose interior architecture and café recreate the Vienna of 1900, Jewish Europe before the Second World War. The departure of the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer has not prevented Viennese youth and non-conformist creative circles, such as Conchita Wurst, from continuing to identify with the painting. The German-speaking press, both German and Austrian, saw the departure of the golden Adele and its return as a "painful loss".