An entire nation considers it their Mona Lisa, but the museum proudly displaying it had taken it from a family fleeing for their lives. This episode tells the story of Adele Bloch-Bauer, born in 1881 into a wealthy Jewish Viennese family, married at eighteen to sugar manufacturer Ferdinand Bloch, and host of a salon at the center of the city’s cultural rebellion. We explore her relationship with Gustav Klimt, the Vienna Secession, the debate over whether they were lovers, and the disfigured finger that links her to the woman in The Kiss.

We break down how Klimt’s 1903 trip to the Byzantine mosaics of Ravenna launched his golden phase, the gold and silver leaf and raised gesso of the portrait completed in 1907, and the critics who dismissed it as grotesque. Then we follow the darkness: Adele’s death in 1925, her precatory will, the 1938 Anschluss, fabricated tax charges used to seize Ferdinand’s assets, the painting’s renaming as Lady in Gold to erase her Jewish identity, and a wedding choker that ended up with Hermann Goering’s wife. Finally we trace Maria Altmann’s fight, from journalist Hubertus Czernin’s archival revelations to lawyer E. Randol Schoenberg’s commercial activity argument, the 2004 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, the 2006 arbitration victory, and the 135-million-dollar sale to Ronald Lauder that placed the portrait in New York’s Neue Galerie.

• How Vienna’s new Jewish bourgeoisie became the patrons of modern art
• Why Adele’s request to leave the paintings to Austria was not legally binding
• Post-war export permits as a bureaucratic ransom for Jewish families
• The 1.75-million-euro filing fee that pushed the case into American courts
• Whether a massive sale price cheapens the moral victory of restitution