The Woman in Gold
Right and true visual art (or image-art) should, most rightly and truly, be visited in silence, in depth, and in a context of deepest aloneness.
– In Plain Sight Without a Word, Transcendental Realism, Adi Da Samraj (2010), p. 207.
The New York Times, March 1, 2026 published a ‘10-Minute Challenge: Klimt’s Woman in Gold‘, inviting readers of their online edition to spend ten uninterrupted minutes looking at the “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” by the Austrian painter Gustav Klimt.
This famous 1907 painting was stolen from Adele’s husband, Ferdinand, by the Nazis in 1941. In 1999 one of Ferdinand’s nieces, Maria Altmann, sued the Vienna Galerie Belvedere for the return of five works by Klimt. In 2006 after a seven-year legal claim, which included a hearing in front of the Supreme Court of the United States, an arbitration committee in Vienna agreed that the painting, and others, had been stolen from the family and that it should be returned to Altmann. She sold it the same year for $135 million to the businessman and art collector Ronald Lauder to place the work in the Neue Galerie in New York, where I viewed it on a 2023 visit.
My woman in gold
I spent 10 minutes on the New York Times website this morning, visiting the painting in ‘silence, in depth, and deepest aloneness’. I found this to be a pleasurable and entirely enjoyable experience.
Motifs from Klimt’s masterpiece elicited memories other images I’d experienced, past and present.
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