Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer
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Looking for the umpteenth time at Gustav Klimt’s “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” (1907) at the estimable Neue Galerie, on the occasion of a show celebrating Klimt’s hundred and fiftieth birthday, I’ve changed my mind. The gold- and silver-encrusted picture, bought by the museum’s co-founder Ronald Lauder for a headline-grabbing hundred and thirty-five million dollars, in 2006, isn’t a peculiarly incoherent painting, as I had once thought. It’s not a painting at all, but a largish, flattish bauble: a thing. It is classic less of its time than of ours, by sole dint of the money sunk in it.

“Adele” belongs to a special class of iffy art works whose price is their object. A dispirited version in pastels of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” which fetched a hundred and nineteen million last month. Another example is the sadly discolored van Gogh “Sunflowers,” which set a market record—forty million—in 1987, when sold to a Japanese insurance company. (The purchase amounted to a cherry on top of Japan’s then ballooning, doomed real-estate bubble.) And I remember asking the director of Australia’s National Gallery why, in 1973, he had plunked an unheard-of two million for Jackson Pollock’s amazing but, to my eye, overworked “Blue Poles.” He mused, “Well, I’ve always liked blue.”

by Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker | Changing My Mind About Gustav Klimt's "Adele" |  Read More: