The purchase of Gustav Klimt’s "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I" (1907) for New York’s Neue Galerie was a great coup. The painting had been expropriated from its Jewish owners by the Nazis, was exhibited for 25 years in Vienna’s Belvedere museum and, in a case that went all the way to the United States Supreme Court, was eventually returned to the heirs of the Bloch-Bauer family. There was competitive bidding in Los Angeles, where it was on exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and in June 2006 it was acquired for the Neue Galerie by Ronald S. Lauder, the museum’s president and co-founder. Lauder referred to the painting as "our Mona Lisa" and, indeed, much like the overexposed Leonardo portrait, the Klimt had by then become an adored icon. CNNMoney.com called it "hands down the biggest American museum purchase of the past 100 years."

The "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer" was painted in what has been called Klimt’s "Golden Style," and indeed, it shimmers with golden particles. In 1903 the painter was in Ravenna and was greatly impressed by the powerful mosaic of the Empress Theodora in the nave of San Vitale. He sought to achieve similar splendor in his paintings of the period, such as his masterpiece "The Kiss" (1907–08). In the portrait of Adele, he worked with meticulous craftsmanship, painting the layers of pigments and laying on the gold leaf. Adele, the sitter and patron, is enthroned in an armchair, which is concealed by the exuberance of ornaments—squares and spirals, almond-shaped or vaginal configurations. Emerging from the flux of decorations are the woman’s head and folded hands, bespeaking refined sensuality as well as status and wealth. The detail of the green floor and checkered black-and-white molding on the lower left recalls the Wiener Werkstätte, and, indeed, Josef Hoffmann designed the frame of the painting, which was exhibited at the Vienna Kunstschau in 1908.

Probably no other work of art has been as frequently reproduced in recent years. The combination of the erotic and the precious may very well account for this popularity. But "Klimtomania" is a rather recent phenomenon. During his lifetime (1862–1918), Klimt enjoyed the reputation of being Austria’s foremost artist. But his eminence waned in the 20th century. Klimt paintings, unlike those of the younger Austrians, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele, were rarely seen in international exhibitions. The epoch-making Armory Show of 1913, which introduced modern art to America, exhibited his contemporaries (Seurat, Signac, Bonnard, Vuillard and Matisse, among others), but not Klimt. In the United States, he was included in a Wiener Werkstätte show in 1923, but it was not until almost 20 years later that the dealer Otto Kallir began presenting Klimt’s work in his Galerie St. Etienne (now owned by his granddaughter, Jane Kallir). The publication of my book German Expressionist Painting in 1957 began to draw attention to the paintings of Klimt in this country, and in 1960 a painting by Klimt was shown at an American museum for the first time. The occasion was the Art Nouveau show at the Museum of Modern Art, and the picture was his great "Judith II (Salome)," indeed one of the glories of Art Nouveau and Symbolist painting. Since that time, interest in Klimt’s work has been on the increase, and a vast number of books and catalogues on the artist have been published.

In 1908, a year after Klimt completed his portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer—which is currently the centerpiece of "Gustav Klimt: The Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections" on view at the Neue Galerie (through June 30)—Kaiser Franz Josef celebrated the 60th anniversary of his ascension to the Habsburg throne. The dual monarchy presided not only over Austrians and Hungarians, but also over Germans, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Italians, Poles, Croats and Jews. An elaborate bureaucracy ruled over an uneasy multicultural conglomeration and permitted a limited amount of freedom of artistic expression. Vienna was the seat of Imperial power, with a ruler who believed above all in law and order. "Everything about our thousand-year-old Austrian monarchy appeared grounded upon eternity, the State itself the ultimate guarantor of continuity … Anything radical, anything violent seemed impossible in this Age of Reason," wrote Stefan Zweig in his memoir, written in the novelist’s exile in Brazil shortly before he committed suicide in 1942. But, at the fin de siècle, Vienna attracted the best minds and greatest talents, and not only from the Empire’s provinces. It became a great focal point of European culture before World War I and the Empire’s collapse.

There were the writers: the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who hoped that aesthetic beauty might bring harmony to the inescapable devastation of an old aristocratic culture, writing, "We must take leave of a world before it collapses." Arthur Schnitzler suggested in his plays that free sexual relations would break down social hierarchies. Karl Kraus, the spokesman for purity in language and the great satirist, attacked hypocrisy and the corruption of the Empire, which he named the "experimental station for the collapse of mankind." Robert Musil in his novels described the moral and intellectual decline of traditional culture. And, of course, Sigmund Freud, the inventor of psychoanalysis, revealed the activity of the libido and broke down the boundaries between dream and reality. Like Kraus and Schnitzler, Freud accused a false morality of having crippled sexual life, an attitude that can be seen in Klimt’s drawing and certainly in his life. In the political sphere there were the anti-Semitic Christian politicians Karl Lueger and Georg von Schonerer, who influenced the young Adolf Hitler’s thinking. At the same time the journalist Theodor Herzl founded modern Zionism.

Vienna also took the lead in architecture. Josef Hoffmann, who was a great advocate of the unity of the arts and crafts, was the founder of the Wiener Werkstätte and a collaborator of Klimt’s on several projects. Otto Wagner, a significant city planner and architect, simplified the design of buildings toward more functional style, which was carried forward by Adolf Loos, who helped inaugurate the International Style, protesting against ornament, an element essential to Klimt’s enterprise. And in music Gustav Mahler’s great harmony, composed to "resume the music of the spheres" was to be contravened by Arnold Schoenberg’s breakthrough to dissonance and atonality. In painting, Kokoschka and Schiele turned from Klimt’s Symbolism to Expressionism.The exhibition at the Neue Galerie is not a full-fledged retrospective. It consists of the formidable collections of the museum’s co-founders, Ronald Lauder and the late Vienna-born art dealer Serge Sabarsky, who exhibited and sold Klimt’s paintings and drawings at his Madison Avenue gallery. There are more than 120 drawings in the show (Klimt produced some 6,000 drawings in his lifetime), beginning with fine and accurate portraits dating from the early 1880s, when he was still in art school, and concluding in 1918, the year he died. There are preliminary studies for his paintings, such as "Adele Bloch-Bauer Seated in an Armchair," done four years before the completed work. The show also presents a good number of his erotic drawings, in which the models often offer themselves to the male gaze, resulting in pictures that had been almost taboo in Western art. They had, however precedents in Auguste Rodin’s erotic drawings. Rodin participated in the first Vienna Secession show in 1898. In 1908 he exhibited 120 works on paper in a Vienna gallery, an exhibition that was inaugurated with a talk by Rainer Maria Rilke. Klimt, like Rodin, drew these poses with overt, but delicate, emphasis on the genital areas. These drawings were private notes of the artist and have not been shown publicly until fairly recently.

The current exhibition presents large photo-murals of Klimt’s "Beethoven Frieze," which he produced for the 1902 Secession exhibition that was intended to be a Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) in celebration of the composer. The famed German artist Max Klinger created a Wagnerian statue of Beethoven, which was unveiled at the performance of the composer’s "Ode to Joy" from the Ninth Symphony, sung by musicians conducted by Mahler. Rodin came to Vienna and went to see this exhibition in Klimt’s company. Klimt’s frieze of highly stylized, austere figures dealt with man’s desire for happiness, a state in which he finds fulfillment in the arts.

There are five important paintings of female figures in the show. (Klimt refrained from painting men after his apprentice years.) In "Pale Face" (1903) the young woman’s white face stands in strong contrast to the dark mass of hat and garment, with its flowing and languorous Art Nouveau lines. The painting is followed chronologically by the portrait of Adele and then by "Hope II (Vision)" of 1907–08, which depicts a pregnant woman in profile, her body largely concealed by an elaborate robe from which only her head and breasts and right hand protrude. A head of Death is placed at her side and three praying women arise from the bottom of her robe in this Symbolist painting. When Oscar Wilde wrote, "All art is at once surface and symbol," he might have been speaking of Klimt. But Symbolist painting in general, as seen in the work of Redon, Gauguin, Munch, Hodler or Klimt, is in search of a mysterious reality that often deals with birth, love and death, asking the viewer to re-experience the emotions of the artist. Klimt kept "Hope II" in his studio, and the Neue Galerie recreated the studio with the picture in its original arrangement.

In 1910, Klimt produced "The Black Feather Hat," one of his most realistic portraits. The elegant, pale-faced woman, with a large modish black hat covering most of her red hair, one slender finger pointing at her red lips and an averted gaze presents an image of high Viennese fashion. And, completed not long before the painter’s death, there is "The Dancer" (1916–18): Again the figure, a bare-breasted woman, is enveloped and surrounded by decoration in a painting that is dreamlike in its veiled meaning. Painted at the end of the Great War, it is an example of how removed art can be from the reality of life.

Klimt’s landscapes—of which there are three in the exhibition—are beautiful decorative paintings. They are like tapestries. Typical is "The Park of Schloss Kammer" (c. 1910). They are square in format and pointillist in technique. There is no distant view, no room for action or for people. As in Cézanne’s landscapes, but even more so, there is no access for the viewer to enter the picture. In keeping with modernist trends, they affirm the picture plane. But unlike landscapes by Cézanne, they do not convey the process of nature but are paintings of pictorial harmony.

The structure of the old world, which was embodied in Klimt’s paintings of decorative harmony, was about to be shattered. The Expressionists—painters like Kokoschka and Schiele, who had great respect for the older master—were among the animators of the fracture; along with many other artists, writers and intellectuals, they had become painfully aware of the degree of alienation that permeated all aspects of life beneath the masks of progress, prosperity and ornament.

Peter Selz is Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley, a distinguished museum curator and author of more than 20 books, including The Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and Beyond, which was honored with the College Art Association’s best art history book award in 2007. At the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he brought to greater light many major artists; among them were Mark Rothko, Max Beckmann, Emil Nolde, Jean Dubuffet, Alberto Giacometti, Ferdinand Hodler, Sam Francis and innumerable contemporary artists.