A dazzling gold-flecked 1907 portrait by Gustav Klimt has been purchased for the Neue Galerie in Manhattan by the cosmetics magnate Ronald S. Lauder for $135 million, the highest sum ever paid for a painting.

The portrait, of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the wife of a Jewish sugar industrialist and the hostess of a prominent Vienna salon, is considered one of the artist's masterpieces. For years, it was the focus of a restitution battle between the Austrian government and a niece of Mrs. Bloch-Bauer who argued that it was seized along with four other Klimt paintings by the Nazis during World War II. In January all five paintings were awarded to the niece, Maria Altmann, now 90, who lives in Los Angeles, and other family members. Klimt turned his energies to the Vienna Secession, of which he had been a founding member. His Secessionist style departed from his earlier traditional naturalism and was based on the sinuous linearity of Jugendstil. He soon became known as the foremost portraitist of Vienna’s new upper class, primarily its female members. He depicted the wives and daughters of these wealthy families as splendid icons enfolded in luxuriant patterns. This development reached spectacular intensity in a handful of rare paintings in his “gold style.” These portraits were so labor-intensive that he averaged only one per year after 1900. Each portrait required many sketches (several hundred in the case of Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, on which he worked from 1904 to 1907).

Klimt took three years to complete the painting. It measures 138 x 138 cm and is made of oil and gold on canvas, showing elaborate and complex ornamentation as seen in the Jugendstil style. Klimt was a member of the Vienna Secession, a group of artists that broke away from the traditional way of painting. The painting was judged to be pivotal and revolutionary, akin to Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d'Avignon of the same year. The picture was painted in Vienna and commissioned by Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer. As a wealthy industrialist who had made his fortune in the sugar industry, he sponsored the arts and favored and supported Gustav Klimt. His wife Adele Bloch-Bauer became the only model who was painted twice by Klimt when he completed a second picture of her, Adele Bloch-Bauer II, in 1912.

As the leading exponent of Viennese Jugendstil in painting, Klimt’s most memorable works included his dazzling portraits of Vienna’s leading society ladies, many of whom were Jewish. One of the best known of these is his magnificent 1907 painting, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, portraying the wife of the industrialist Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer (the aunt of Maria Altmann). Foremost among the rare “gold style” works, the painting captures its elegant and intelligent subject as the ideal of feminine beauty. The figure dissolves into sumptuous patterning reminiscent of the Byzantine mosaics at Ravenna, Italy, portraying the Empress Theodora, which Klimt had visited in 1903. Klimt’s fine craftsmanship in this work is evident in his varied uses of real gold: as a diffuse background luster reminiscent of Japanese lacquer, as the fabric of a flowing gown, and as a pattern punctuated with Egyptian god’s-eye motifs. In contrast with this rich decorative treatment, Adele’s face stands out as an extraordinarily modern psychological portrayal, while her hands are arranged gracefully to conceal a deformed finger. Self-assured yet introspective, she comports herself as a woman of privilege devoted to the world of the intellect.

Completed in 1907, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I is a painting by Gustav Klimt. It measures 138 x 138 cm and is made of oil and gold on canvas, showing elaborate and complex ornamentation as seen in the Jugendstil style. It was painted in Vienna after being commissioned by Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, a wealthy industrialist. Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer had made his fortune in the sugar industry, but was an avid sponsor the arts and he favored as well as supported Gustav Klimt. It took Klimt three years to complete the painting.

Although confidentiality agreements surrounding the sale forbid Mr. Lauder to disclose the price, experts familiar with the negotiations, speaking on condition of anonymity, said he paid $135 million for the work. In a telephone interview Mr. Lauder did not deny that he had paid a record amount for the painting, eclipsing the $104.1 million paid for Picasso's 1905 "Boy With a Pipe (The Young Apprentice)" in an auction at Sotheby's in 2004.

"This is our Mona Lisa," said Mr. Lauder, a founder of the five-year-old Neue Galerie, a tiny museum at Fifth Avenue and 86th Street devoted entirely to German and Austrian fine and decorative arts. "It is a once-in-a-lifetime acquisition." He said Christie's had helped him negotiate the purchase.