Woman in Gold

Gustav Klimt's 'Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I' (1903–1907), commissioned by the Viennese industrialist Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer and popularly known as 'The Woman in Gold', fuses Byzantine mosaic and ancient Egyptian ornament into a shimmering field of gold and silver leaf from which Adele's face and hands emerge with startling naturalism. The summit of Klimt's 'golden phase', the picture was looted by the Nazis in 1938. After a five-year legal battle by Adele's niece Maria Altmann it was restituted in 2006 and now hangs at the Neue Galerie in New York.