Adele Bloch-Bauer face swap

Where this one comes from

Klimt painted this in Vienna in 1907, using gold and silver leaf laid over the canvas like a Byzantine icon — his father had been a gold engraver and he had grown up around the material. Adele Bloch-Bauer was the wife of a sugar manufacturer and ran a salon; she is the only person Klimt painted twice. In 1938 the Nazis took the picture. It came back to her niece after a lawsuit that reached the United States Supreme Court, and sold in 2006 for a hundred and thirty-five million dollars.

What is in the picture

The face and the hands are painted in flat naturalistic skin and everything else is ornament: spirals, eyes, triangles and rectangles of gold and silver, dissolving the body and the chair and the wall into one continuous field. Only her head, her shoulders and her interlocked fingers escape it. She is looking straight out with her lips parted, and the effect of a real face in the middle of all that abstraction is exactly the tension the picture is built on.

When people use it

For being the most expensive thing in the room. It suits anything gilded, overdressed or deliberately excessive, and it is the obvious choice for a birthday.

How your face lands in it

The gold field surrounds the head completely, which frames the swap and keeps it clean. The light on the face is flat and frontal with almost no shadow, so an ordinary indoor photograph matches easily. Expect the result to look considerably more decorated than you do; the picture around your face is doing an enormous amount of work.

Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I — Gustav Klimt, 1907. Gustav Klimt died in 1918, so the painting has been in the public domain in Austria and the United States for many years, and the reproduction is published as public domain. Source

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