Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I

Judged on the configuration. Three things resist removal: the face, the hands, and the field of gold that has taken everything else. Remove the field and it is a society portrait of a dark-haired woman; remove the face and it is a gold panel. The meaning is in the ratio between them, and the square is required to hold the gold on every side. Below that level the subtractive test bites. The ornament is additive by nature: an eye-motif more or less on the gown, a spiral field moved from the chair to the wall, a band of chequer at the lower edge, and the picture is the same picture. The discs and flecks of the upper field are distributed, not placed. The scale of the gold is compelled; the inventory of motifs within it is permitted.

Score: 7.8 / 10

What can be stated. A woman of a certain class is made, by the wealth that commissions her image, into an icon: the gold that at Ravenna marks the sacred marks money and its ease here, and she is consecrated by being turned into ornament. Only the face, the shoulders and the clasped, restless hands keep the modelling of a body; the rest of her has gone into the surface of her possessions, gown, chair and wall indistinguishable. That holds as the disclosure of a condition, the bourgeois self absorbed into the decoration of its own standing, and it is disclosed through image. What holds it below the gate is that the picture does not know the absorption as a cost. It is glorious about it, and the disclosure is half celebration and half mood: splendour and languor rendered more than a meaning uncovered.

Score: 7.6 / 10

Elevation is real and of one kind: radiance. The leaf changes with the light and with the viewer’s place before it, so that the field burns and dims, and the face, pale and small inside it, is the more startling for being the only soft thing there. It rises in more than one place: the wall of gold flecked with discs; the cascade of the gown with its eyes; the red mouth and dark hair against the gold; the hands twisted together at the breast. The register is warm and luxurious, with a cold undertow in the pallor and the enclosure. Held below the high eights because the elevation is one effect sustained rather than several heights reached, and because it is splendour without terror or depth of feeling: the transport of richness more than of revelation.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The archetype is the enthroned figure on a gold ground: empress, Madonna, icon. It is built, not only alluded to. The gold ground, the frontal face, the figure fused with her throne and the eye-motifs as watching or warding signs are the structure of the picture, not decoration on a naturalistic scene, and the journey to Ravenna of 1903 stands behind them. The particular is kept: this face, this mouth, these hands, a Viennese woman of 1907 and not a saint. Two things hold it short of the gate. The archetype is borrowed as a form more than enacted as a meaning: the icon’s ground signifies the sacred, and here it signifies nothing beyond itself and the sitter’s world, so the deep pattern supplies grandeur rather than bearing an argument. And the motifs, Egyptian eye and Mycenaean spiral, are gathered as a vocabulary of the archaic, none doing structural work.

Score: 7.8 / 10

The inheritance: the Viennese society portrait in Makart’s grand manner, in which Klimt was trained; the modern full-length of Whistler and Sargent; Symbolism; and the Secession’s programme of joining fine and applied art. The departure: a commissioned portrait of a living patron in which the space of painting is abolished and the figure dissolved into flat ornament in metal leaf, naturalistic flesh set into a field of abstract pattern; a goldsmith’s technique, the trade of the painter’s father, returned to the centre of modern painting. The turn is wide. The stake was real but partial. The University paintings were behind him and he had left the Secession in 1905, but this was a private commission from a supporting patron, and the gold manner was already his in the Judith of 1901 and the Beethoven Frieze of 1902. This canvas carries the turn furthest in portraiture; it did not first make it.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. The knowledge is the absorption of a person into the ornament of her station, and only this form holds it: modelled flesh set against flat leaf, so that the eye registers two physics in one figure and reads the body as surviving only at face and hands. Paint the gown in oil and the absorption becomes a costume; paint the face flat and no person is left to be absorbed. The square holds the gold round her without a horizon. The metal is the form, not the colour of the form: leaf behaves in light as no pigment does, and the picture’s sacral and monetary claim is made in actual gold. Held below the top because the ornament’s internal design is less necessary than its presence: the form knows its central thing completely and its particulars less.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Evidence over promise: 119 years, and a literature that has grown, though much of what keeps it open lies outside the canvas. The history of seizure and restitution has made it one of the most written-about pictures of its century; that is history, and it is not credited here. On the canvas the questions are real and narrower. What the eye-motifs mean, and whether they watch, protect or possess. Whether the picture is homage, eros or a record of property. How the sitter’s own intelligence, that of a hostess whose salon was known, survives in a face made almost a mask. Where the line between person and ornament falls, and whether Klimt meant it as loss. A viewer who returns finds more ornament, and sometimes the same ornament; the picture rewards return less than one whose structure keeps opening.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Published and shown, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of Viennese and Central European painting from 1900 to 1915. The intrinsic force is real and partial: the fusion of figure and abstract ornament, of portrait and decorative scheme, reorganises what a portrait could be, and it is carried here to its extreme instance. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Schiele’s and the young Kokoschka’s early work answer the gold manner and turn from it; the Wiener Werkstätte and Art Deco design carried the ornamental programme on. But the main reorganisation of European painting in the same decade went through Paris, where Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is of 1907 and owes this nothing, and the gold manner closed with Klimt himself. The later reach is overwhelmingly in reproduction and design, which is presence, not pressure. Strong force, narrow reach in painting.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 119 years. Form: whole, with no loss of any part that carries the work known, and no restoration recorded. Presence: in a private house to 1938; then seized with the household’s property; then on public view in Vienna from about 1941; then a contested object in court; and in New York since 2006. It has been in view for some eighty-five years and has passed through the century’s worst dispossession without damage to the image. The seizure is a charge of a moral kind on how it was present, not on whether the picture survived. Fabric: leaf and raised ornament on canvas are more exposed than oil alone, and the general risk is charged lightly. Its fame lends nothing further. The figure sits at the foot of the step for a span between seventy years and two centuries.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Judged as command of oil with metal leaf and relief on canvas, to the anchors of every medium. The making is load-bearing. The face and shoulders are modelled in a thin, cool, exact oil and set into the gold without a halo or a break. The hands, the hardest passage, are drawn into a single knot of fingers that is both gesture and pattern. The gold is laid in more than one tone, with silver, and the relief lets ornaments catch the light as raised objects; eyes, spirals and rectangles are executed with a goldsmith’s precision across a field 138 centimetres square. The transition from flesh to ornament at the neck and wrists is the whole technical problem, and it is solved. Held below 9.0 because the leaf does much of the work any gold ground does, and the gown’s patterning is a craftsman’s repertoire well applied more than a means invented for this picture.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the softly modelled face with its parted red mouth, and a flat, hard-edged eye-motif on the gown. They obey one law, and the law is the picture’s subject: everything that is not the living person is ornament, and the person survives only where ornament stops. Chair, wall and gown follow one physics, flat leaf and pattern with no depth; face and hands follow the other; and the contrast is a single rule, not a contradiction. The range is narrow, though: one figure, one field, two physics, and narrowness is not coherence. The one seam is the floating discs and flecks of the upper field, which belong neither to a surface nor to the figure and sit outside both laws.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The orders held in one structure: the individual, in a face and hands; class and wealth, in the gold and the commission; the sacred, as a form borrowed from Byzantium; eros, faintly, in the parted mouth and bare shoulders; and the history of art, in the archaic motifs. One law, person into ornament, integrates them. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no family, though a family commissioned the picture; no labour, though the gold is the fruit of a sugar fortune; no state; no history, the Vienna of 1907 present only as a style; no natural order. The later history of the canvas encompasses the century; the picture does not. A low mark on a single portrait describes the form.

Score: 6.5 / 10