“The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt’s Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer” by Anne-Marie O’Connor
By Kathryn Lang,
Kathryn Lang
Mar 16, 2012 09:54 PM EDT
The Washington Post
“The Lady in Gold” is a fascinating work, ambitious, exhaustively researched and profligately detailed. Anne-Marie O’Connor traces the convoluted history of Gustav Klimt’s dazzling gold-leaf portrait of the Jewish society beauty Adele Bloch-Bauer from its commissioning in 1903 to its sale to cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder in 2006. But the book’s title does not do justice to O’Connor’s scope, which includes the Viennese Belle Epoque, the Anschluss, the diaspora of Viennese Jews, the looting of their artwork and legal battles over its restitution, and thorny questions facing the heirs of reclaimed art.
Roughly a third of the book deals with Klimt’s “Austrian Mona Lisa,” its Nazi-era theft and its eventual return to the Bloch-Bauer heirs. The rest provides context and a milieu dense with particulars. The work teems with historical personages who lived in, visited or plundered Vienna during the tumultuous first half of the 20th century. Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Mark Twain, Joseph Goebbels and scores of others, both integral and incidental to the story of Klimt’s golden portrait of Adele, appear in O’Connor’s populous and several-branched narrative.
(Knopf) - ’The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer’ by Anne-Marie O'Connor
A Washington Post special correspondent in Mexico City, O’Connor was a reporter at the Los Angeles Times in 2001 when she met Maria Altmann, Adele’s niece. Altmann had fled the Nazis and settled in Los Angeles, where she and her husband had lived quietly for 60 years. She and her lawyer avidly followed the news of the restitution of the Rothschilds’ looted art. Altmann decided to seek the return of her aunt’s gorgeous portrait, on display in Vienna’s Belvedere Museum, and four other Bloch-Bauer Klimts, to all of which she was principal heir.
O’Connor begins with alternating biographies of Klimt and Adele. Married to Ferdinand Bloch, a Czech sugar baron, Adele established a glittering salon of Viennese intellectuals and artists. Klimt, co-founder of the Viennese Secessionist group of painters, frequented her salon. Having risen from obscurity to become the most prominent painter in Vienna, he was notorious for seducing his sitters. As Klimt was finishing both the refulgent portrait of Adele and his most popular work, “The Kiss,” an aspiring artist named Adolf Hitler was rejected by the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts.
Part Two picks up in 1937, long after the deaths of Klimt in 1918 and Adele in 1925. Goebbels has ordered Germany cleansed of “degenerate” Jewish art, and Adele’s husband has fled Vienna, leaving everything behind. Now O’Connor shifts her focus to Maria, née Bloch-Bauer. Shortly after her wedding in 1937 to Fritz Altmann, a handsome Polish opera singer, Maria’s glamorous life in Vienna is shattered by the Nazi takeover. Fritz is imprisoned in Dachau, her sister is raped, and her brother-in-law is executed.
Part Three features Randol Schoenberg’s eight years of legal maneuverings with the Austrian government on behalf of Maria and the Bloch-Bauer heirs over jurisdiction and ownership of Adele’s mosaic-like portrait and her four other Klimt paintings. A grandson of the exiled Viennese modernist composer Arnold Schoenberg, Randol was passionate about restitution law long before he met Maria. They made a good team with her charm and his persistence and were finally awarded the looted Bloch-Bauer Klimts in January 2006.
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