GOLDEN GIRL.

"Adele Bloch-Bauer I" (1907), by Gustav Klimt, is a showboat painting that, last month, fetched a showboat price: a hundred and thirty-five million dollars, the most on record for a work of art. The cosmetics magnate and collector Ronald S. Lauder bought it for the Neue Galerie, the spruce little museum of Austrian and German modern art at Fifth Avenue and Eighty-sixth Street which he co-founded in 2001 with the late dealer Serge Sabarsky. "Adele" is now on display there, along with four other Klimts, among them "Adele Bloch-Bauer II" (1912), which are owned by "Adele" 's seller, the estate of Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer. An Austrian Jewish sugar industrialist and Adele's husband, he fled the country after the Anschluss, in 1938; his belongings were seized by the Nazis. (Adele had died in 1925, of meningitis; Ferdinand died in 1945.) The works hung in the Austrian Gallery of the Belvedere Palace, in Vienna, while, year after year, lawyers wrangled over ambiguous wills; an Austrian arbitration panel awarded the paintings to the heirs early this year. Adele, a twenty-five-year-old socialite and patroness in 1907, was probably one of the priapic Klimt's many lovers, though perhaps not for long: the gold- and silver-leafed hieratic portrait is piercingly erotic; its brushy, more Expressionist 1912 sequel is not. Klimt was working in the Indian summer of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the period of Robert Musil's "The Man Without Qualities"--an efflorescence, soon to be ruined, of pell-mell modernization, careering idealism, incendiary genius (Freud, Mahler, Wittgenstein), and, among the rich and cultivated, zealous decadence. It's all there in "Adele": the painting is exquisite and brazen, compelling and brittle, too self-conscious to be experienced as altogether beautiful but transcendent in its cunning way.

The subject is placed off-center, to the right, on a canvas more than four and a half feet square. Imperious and smart, making her slightly horse-faced features seem a paradigm of feminine perfection, she wears a shoulder-strap gown with a cloak-like, billowing outer layer and broad gold and silver bracelets and a bejewelled silver choker. A storm of patterns--spirals, targets, nested squares, split ovals, checks, dots, short vertical bars, arrowhead triangles, ankh-like eyes--may represent fabric, furniture, and wallpaper, or they may be sheer invention. Most of the ground (not background, because almost everything in the picture that isn't flesh snugs up to the picture plane) is mottled gold. Her asymmetrically upswept hair is painted matte black. Her right hand is oddly raised to her shoulder and, wrist bent at a painful-looking right angle, is grasped by her left, as if to restrain it. (On a Viennese note of that epoch, the pencil-outlined fingers faintly suggest claws.) Her frontal gaze turns inward, registering sensations that can only be sexual. Her dark-shadowed hazel eyes, under tapering black brows, are wells of seduction; someone could fall into them. Her bee-stung red mouth parts to expose two competent teeth. Blue tints along her collarbones, wrists, and hands hint at subcutaneous veins: erogenous zones. She is a lighthouse, or shadehouse, of desire. (Lauder, speaking for the Neue Galerie, has called the painting "our 'Mona Lisa.' " I have seen the "Mona Lisa," and "Adele" is no "Mona Lisa." Not very much is mysterious about this cookie.) The picture is most excitingly viewed, after close inspection, from afar. Patterns shatter into drifting, pure abstraction while the facial expression still reads at full power. The double pleasure dizzies.

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