Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer I by Gustav Klimt Jenny Liz Rome letting form and texture carry

letting form and texture carry the composition rather than bold color

and found imagery locked into a composition that is both familiar and displaced

grounded in natural material — gives it an almost abstract quality at distance

and the deep ink-dark silhouettes of boats give the scene its early-morning clarity

and movement

Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer I by Gustav Klimt Jenny Liz Rome letting form and texture carryThis iconic portrait consumed Klimt for nearly four years, the surface built up from genuine gold and silver leaf hammered into a tapestry of Byzantine and Mycenaean motifs. Adele Bloch Bauer sits at the heart of this gilded field, composed and almost otherworldly, her face and hands the only naturalistic elements in an otherwise abstract sea of pattern. The painting's extraordinary ambition to dissolve portraiture into pure decoration was never more