The Lady in Gold

The Lady in Gold, by Anne-Marie O’Connor

In June 2006, The Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer was sold at auction at Christie’s in New York for a record 135 million dollars.  The buyer of the painting was Ron Lauder, who had coveted the gold portrait of Adele for years.  He needed a destination painting for his new museum in New York City called  the Neue Galerie.  This painting had a lot of history behind it.  He was willing to pay a lot of money for it.  How this gorgeous  painting was created, and how it came to the United States is the subject of a fascinating book by Anne-Marie O’ Connor.

The painter was Gustav Klimt, part of a new generation of artists in the early 1900s who refused to conform to convention and were instead in the vanguard of the nascent “Art for Art’s sake” movement. The subject of the painting was Adele Bloch-Bauer, a wealthy Jewish socialite, who was also ahead of her time, being an avid suffragist, chain smoker, and salon intellectual.  There were also rumors that she and Gustav were lovers although nothing has been proven.  Klimt produced several portraits of Adele and often used real gold leaf which added to the allure of his work.  However at the time most everyone was disgusted by the overt eroticism of Klimt’s  pieces and thus they did not enjoy wide popularity. 

The painting resided happily on the walls of the Bloch-Bauer family’s  Belvedere Estate in Vienna, until the Anschluss (March 1938) when Hitler insisted that Germany and Austria be united under the Third Reich.  Jews and Jewish property were fair game for the Nazis.  They stole vast art collections from all the countries of Europe, but Klimt’s works were spared   because “Der Fuhrer” considered modern art to be degenerate and unwholesome.  However the painting was expropriated by Viennese nationals, who were not Nazis but had no love for the Jews. The name of the painting was changed to “The Lady in Gold” so as to eradicate any connection to its Jewish owners.  It survived the war and ended up in a national  museum.

 During the last decades of the twentieth century,  modern art gained in popularity and value.  Most of the Viennese Jews had perished in the holocaust, but some claimants came forward and demanded restitution for their stolen property.  Litigation went on for years but finally the painting was restored to its rightful owners, the heirs of Adele and her family.

 “in Vienna, the impact of the Bloch-Bauer restitution rippled out of ministries and courtrooms and into cafes and dinner parties. “It was our Austrian ‘Mona Lisa’ ” lamented Werner Furnsinn, the director of the Austrian Culture Ministry’s Commission for Provenance Research. 

If you like modern art and history, then this book will be perfect for you.

Joel