Much fanfare surrounds last month’s record-setting purchase of Gustav Klimt’s portrait “Adele Bloch-Bauer I” (1907), one of the most famous (and, lately, infamous) paintings of the 20th century. Hailed as the Austrian “Mona Lisa,” the resplendent, gold-covered canvas is going on permanent display today at the Neue Galerie. Its arrival in New York will no doubt inspire pilgrimages to the corner of 86th Street and Fifth Avenue.

Acquired by the Neue Galerie for $135 million — the highest price ever paid for a work of art — “Adele Bloch-Bauer I” is one of two Klimt portraits the Austrian sugar magnate Ferdinand Bloch commissioned of his wife. In 1938, the Nazis seized the painting, along with four other Klimts and the family’s palatial Viennese home. Until last March, when the five works were restituted to Bloch-Bauer heiress Maria Altmann, they were on display at the Austrian National Gallery. Now the five Klimt paintings from the original Bloch-Bauer estate, along with six drawings for the portraits, make up a small show at the Neue.

The acquisition of “Adele Bloch-Bauer I,” which is just less than 5 feet square, is certainly a crowning achievement for the Neue Galerie, whose mission it is “to exhibit, acquire, and make available for study Austrian and German art created between 1890 and 1940.” Ronald Lauder, the museum’s president and cofounder, has called the purchase “a once-in-alifetime acquisition, and a defining moment for the Neue Galerie.” The portrait’s purchase is also a crowning achievement for the heirs to the Bloch-Bauer estate and for Mr. Lauder in the realm of combating anti-Semitism and restituting artworks stolen by the Nazis. The question remains, however: Is “Adele Bloch-Bauer I” a crowning achievement for art?

Klimt (1862–1918) was revered in his day for his society portraits, and he remains one of our most beloved Modernist artists, along with Munch, van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, and Klimt’s friend Egon Schiele. If van Gogh, Munch, and Schiele represent art with feeling, Matisse art of beauty, and Picasso art of heroic proportions, then Klimt is understood to be a combination of all of the above. Lauded for being a bridge between the old world and the modern world, his work combines all the overstuffed, decorative splendor of the Victorian age, the bejeweled otherworldliness of the Byzantine era, the paint-handling of Impressionism, and the flatness and bright color of Modernism. It is not difficult to see why Klimt’s work still attracts — not only for its flickering golden shimmer but also for its link, seemingly, to a bygone age.

The Neue’s press release hails “Adele Bloch-Bauer I” as one of Klimt’s “greatest achievements” from his “Golden Style.” It is certainly one of the most outlandish and over-the-top paintings from the period of Art Nouveau. Inspired by the Byzantine mosaics in Ravenna — especially the figure of the Empress Theodora in S.Vitale — “Adele Bloch-Bauer I”is less a portrait than a fairy tale.

“Adele Bloch-Bauer I” is all glow, glitz, and glitter.The painting consists primarily of a decorative field made of gold, interrupted here and there by silver and pieces of color, as well as by eyes that peer out at the viewer and by the repeated initials “A” and “B.” Swirls, checkerboards, lines, diamonds, and rectangles activate the field; out of the center flows the golden angel,Adele.She spreads from out of the gold, burnished here and applied thickly there, like a butterfly from out of heaven’s cocoon. Yet an angst-ridden roughness permeates her pale, dry skin, as if not all is right with the world.

The painting may have the power to draw and to awe — but what 5-foot-square patch of gold would not? “Adele Bloch-Bauer I” has none of the power of the great Byzantine Madonnas it mimics, in which the Madonna’s full, volumetric head is held stringently within a golden plane that represents the pliable yet impenetrable light of God. Klimt’s ostentatious portrait exists only on its decorative surface.Volume is absent and the gold dissolves into dazzling wallpaper.

The Byzantine Madonnas’ golden splendor and metaphoric richness (a richness fully explored, for instance, in portraits by van Gogh) have been made counterfeit in Klimt’s hands. “Adele Bloch-Bauer I” is not a celebration of the wealth of spirit (or of painting). It is a celebration of the wealth of bourgeoisie — a kind of Hail Mary pass from the modern world to the old.

All razzle-dazzle, Klimt can certainly embellish a canvas, but he cannot draw and he remains a second-rate painter. The drawings on view are little better than student works. His landscapes’ color is dry and leaden; his trees, which are not anchored to the earth, do not rotate into volume; his spaces do not open into the distance. His Impressionist handling (compare it to Monet’s) is without light. Klimt’s canvases, though infinitely touched, remain shallow and ornamental. His work is closer to that of Chuck Close than to the earth-shaking mosaics in Ravenna.

The washy rectangles of rose madder, cobaltviolet, blue-violet, and teal green in the portrait “Adele Bloch-Bauer II” (1912) may remind viewers of Matisse’s buoyant color planes from his Nice-period paintings. But Matisse’s miraculous color is simultaneously airy, watery, pure light, and solid. In Klimt, the colors, thickened with white, are impenetrable and slow to a deadened stop. Despite all the minutiae around Adele, who is a swirling mass of pattern, she never materializes but merely floats like a pre-Raphaelite Ophelia on the painting’s daubed surface.

I applaud Mr. Lauder’s efforts, both politically and professionally, regarding the purchase of “Adele Bloch-Bauer I,” and I am pleased that the painting was returned to its rightful owners. But this acquisition has more importance politically than it does artistically.

There is something disconcerting about our continued amazement with glitz and glamour and surface. Might Mr. Lauder not have put this staggering sum of money to better use elsewhere? Not all that glitters is gold.

Until September 18 (1048 Fifth Avenue at 86th Street, 212-628-6200).