The spellbinding story, part fairy tale, part suspense, of
Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, one of the
most emblematic portraits of its time; of the beautiful,
seductive Viennese Jewish salon hostess who sat for it; the
notorious artist who painted it; the now vanished
turn-of-the-century Vienna that shaped it; and the strange
twisted fate that befell it.
The Lady in Gold, considered an unforgettable masterpiece,
one of the twentieth century’s most recognizable paintings,
made headlines all over the world when Ronald Lauder bought
it for $135 million a century after Klimt, the most famous
Austrian painter of his time, completed the society portrait.
Anne-Marie O’Connor, writer for The Washington Post,
formerly of the Los Angeles Times, tells the galvanizing
story of the Lady in Gold, Adele Bloch-Bauer, a dazzling
Viennese Jewish society figure; daughter of the head of one
of the largest banks in the Hapsburg Empire, head of the
Oriental Railway, whose Orient Express went from Berlin to
Constantinople; wife of Ferdinand Bauer, sugar-beet baron.
The Bloch-Bauers were art patrons, and Adele herself was
considered a rebel of fin de siècle Vienna (she wanted to be
educated, a notion considered “degenerate” in a society that
believed women being out in the world went against their
feminine “nature”). The author describes how Adele inspired
the portrait and how Klimt made more than a hundred sketches
of her—simple pencil drawings on thin manila paper.
And O’Connor writes of Klimt himself, son of a failed gold
engraver, shunned by arts bureaucrats, called an artistic
heretic in his time, a genius in ours.
She writes of the Nazis confiscating the portrait of Adele
from the Bloch-Bauers’ grand palais; of the Austrian
government putting the painting on display, stripping
Adele’s Jewish surname from it so that no clues to her
identity (nor any hint of her Jewish origins) would be
revealed. Nazi officials called the painting, The Lady in
Gold and proudly exhibited it in Vienna’s Baroque Belvedere
Palace, consecrated in the 1930s as a Nazi institution.
The author writes of the painting, inspired by the Byzantine
mosaics Klimt had studied in Italy, with their exotic
symbols and swirls, the subject an idol in a golden shrine.
We see how, sixty years after it was stolen by the Nazis,
the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer became the subject of a
decade-long litigation between the Austrian government and
the Bloch-Bauer heirs, how and why the U.S. Supreme Court
became involved in the case, and how the Court’s decision
had profound ramifications in the art world.
A riveting social history; an illuminating and haunting look
at turn-of-the-century Vienna; a brilliant portrait of the
evolution of a painter; a masterfully told tale of suspense.
And at the heart of it, the Lady in Gold—the shimmering
painting, and its equally irresistible subject, the fate of
each forever intertwined.
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