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The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav… por Anne-Marie O'Connor
O’Connor writes in a journalistic style. She includes a depth of detail about art history, the secessionist movement, and the art scene in Vienna prior to WWII. She also contributes to the canon of the Holocaust narrative by recounting the horrific tragedies and heroic rescues with respect to the extended family of the Bloch-Bauers. The book is well-researched and includes a massive amount of information, some of which is only tangentially related to the main premise. It covers an extensive time period and there are many names to recall. It probably could benefit from the inclusion of a family tree to assist readers in remembering all the players.
Overall, I found it a compelling story, combining art history, the Holocaust, and legal disputes. It is a niche read, appealing those that enjoy both art and history.
If you're interested in history, art, or Viennese culture, you'll like this book. If you're living in Vienna, I highly recommend it.
Adele Bloch-Bauer was a socialite of the highest order in the Vienna of the late 19th and early 20th century. She was also a woman who craved education and intelligent conversation. She became acquainted with Gustav Klimt at the time when he revolted against the "expectations" of art and became a founding member of The Succession Movement of Art.
As I mentioned the early parts of the book take you through the war years and the German/Austrian theft of millions of dollars of Art. The book follows the painting through the years up to and including The landmark Supreme court decision that basically held Austria accountable to the families who lost so much.
This book is not for everyone, thus a 5 star rating wasn't in the mix. However, I enjoyed the history of the painting and learning a few things about the Jewish culture of Austria before the war.
It is an important story that to me lost some of its energy in the telling. The story of pre-war Austria, with its intellectual and artistic energy and an influential, highly assimilated Jewish community was usually compelling, but it seemed as if the narrative jumped around just a bit to too much. I told a friend that it seemed “fractured,” and maybe that was an artistic choice, or maybe it’s just my mind that’s fractured.
Gustav Klimt was an artist with an eye for beauty and the skill to capture a unique impression of it on canvas. He lived in Vienna, Austria from the late 1800s until his death in 1918. Some of his work was regarded as pornographic, yet (or, perhaps, thus) he attracted many lady admirers, among them wealthy art lovers. One of them, Adele Bloch-Bauer, was the subject of the pivotal Klimt painting in this tale. When completed in 1907, it was hung in the Bloch-Bauer mansion. Adele died in 1925, leaving an expression of her wish that her husband, Ferdinand, would donate the portrait and five other Klimt paintings, which he owned, to the Austrian State Gallery upon his death.
Anschluss derailed the Bloch-Bauers and every other Jewish family in Vienna; almost overnight, they had everything taken from them—cars, homes, country estates, jewelry and artworks, businesses, their houses of worship, their standing and respect in the community. SS men spirited away all the artworks. The railroad took over the house, converting it into office space. Adele's niece, Maria, had just returned from her honeymoon with Fritz Altmann, her husband of ten days, who was arrested. Fritz's elder brother Bernhard, Europe's largest knitwear manufacturer, was maneuvering to keep company stock out of German hands; dangling his assets before the Nazis, he negotiated Fritz's release and helped Fritz and Maria escape to Britain. Other family members confronted worse ordeals.
When the war ended, survivors tried to get their property back, but the Austrian government was loathe to part with it. Ultimately, Maria survived when few other family members did and she became principal heir to Adele and Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer's estate. Represented by Randol Schoenberg, grandson of exiled Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg, Maria pressed her case. Seemingly thwarted by Austrian stalling, Schoenberg took the case to U.S. courts, where the case was decided—by the U. S. Supreme Court—in the heirs' favor. You have to read it to believe it.
This book changed my viewpoint on Klimt's work. I thought it was interesting that he got his inspiration for his later paintings after a visit to Ravenna where he saw the Byzantine mosaics of Empress Theodora and that influenced his painting of Adele. I've never seen this painting, but I imagine it is amazing as it is personal.
Behind every portrait is a real person, and the stories of the people surrounding Klimt are as rich and complex as the gold leaf woven into his paintings. There is a dark side to his work that represents a civilized society that only a short time later after his death was welcoming the Third Reich with open arms. It is incredible that not only were Jewish families plundered of all their assets practically overnight, but that the Austrian government held on to stolen art over 60 years later with little apology. Anne-Marie O'Conner does an incredible job bringing us the drama of how these paintings ended up back with their rightful owners.
by Anne-Marie O'Connor
The story of Klimt, Adele Bloch-Bauer (the Jewish Viennese society figure) and the history of
the painting
nonfiction
9 audio discs
4★
I thought I would find an interesting turn of the century tale of an artist and his muse.
Instead, it was a compelling social history beginning at the turn of the century Vienna.
It was an exploration of the culture, introducing the reader to the anti-Semitism that permeated the era.
Exploration of the historical and political climate are essential to understanding the trail of Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I.
It began as a "glamorous era, peopled by Sigmund Freud, Marlene Dietrich, Hedy Lamar, and Billy Wilder.... An era that had ended with the arrival of Hitler."
We follow the massive theft of art in Europe by the German (Nazi) Government during World War II.
This particular portrait was stolen by the Nazis during World War II and renamed The Lady in Gold (to avoid any hint that its subject was Jewish)
They proudly exhibited it in Vienna's Baroque Belvedere Palace, consecrated in the 1930s as a Nazi institution.
The Lady In Gold was finally returned to Bloch-Bauer's heirs in the 21st century.
The years leading to the 21st century are intense, multifaceted and illuminating to the reader.
I finished the nonfiction feeling somewhat haunted and definitely pleased I had chosen to investigate this particular pocket of history..
....a vivid narrative...historically rich in detail...
(less)
This is a story of a portrait of a beautiful Viennese Jewish salon hostess, the now-vanished turn-of-the-century Vienna cultural scene of which it became an emblem, the atrocities of the Nazi regime, and the efforts of Adele’s heirs to recover this and other paintings from an Austrian government that wished to hide the realities of war-time complicity.
My husband and I have reproductions of two Klimt paintings in our home – The Kiss (perhaps his most famous work) and Water Serpents I, so I was immediately interested in the book. I really appreciated that O’Connor took the reader back to the late 19th century and early 20th century to paint the landscape of the era – the parties, the intrigue, the art scene, the romantic scandals, the loving families and not-so-loving marriages. I was completely drawn into this era and felt the loss of it when the narrative moved on to the war years and how the family members endured and/or escaped.
I thought it lost a little momentum when the time frame advanced to modern day and the early efforts of Maria Altmann (Adele’s niece) to recover the paintings which had been stolen from her family. For some of the chapters in the last section of the book O’Connor switched to a first-person narrative, told from Maria’s point of view, and that seemed to interrupt the flow. Still, I was captivated from beginning to end.
Still, for lovers of art and art history, it is a good read.
from Austria: a portrait of one of its family member, long dead, Adele. Adele was painted by Austria's most famous painter Klimt and wished her portrait to be displayed in an Austrian gallery. Maria is very convincing in her claim that Adele would have not left the painting to Austrians if she would have known the betrayal, murder and theft committed by Austrians against the Jewish population. The importance of this book is that the truth be told. How could Maria rest in peace knowing that a family symbol would be left for her family's oppressors? I was disappointed with the ending and I wish there would have been more explanation about the monetary issues.
Also, a glossary of names would have been helpful.
I first learned of the history of the Adele portraits from the documentary, The Rape of Europa (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rape_of_Europa), about the Nazi's campaign to steal Europe's art. I have had an interest in this subject since then. Now, I need to go the the Neue Gallery in New York City to view the painting. The Gallery's owner purchased the painting in 2006 after the family recovered it, for $135 million (a record at the time).
Klimt's anniversary is celebrated with ten different exhibitions in Austria, which shows both that Vienna's museums are unwilling to cooperate and coordinate among themselves and that Klimt's work is overrepresented in Austria and underrepresented abroad. During the last years, Klimt has been in the news mostly because of the struggle for the restitution of the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, duly reported by the author of this book for the Los Angeles Times. Unfortunately her account is very partisan. "Audiatur et altera pars" is not something she seems to be aware of. She also fails to evaluate the information collected. The author further has an unfortunate tendency to conflate a person's English language skills with that person's intelligence and friendliness, e.g. I would hesitate to interpret the graveyard gardener's responses as hostile. Gardeners are not selected for their language skills. Answering questions in English might just have frightened them. They might not even have been Austrian.
The book is also filled with numerous howlers that a quick look up at Wikipedia could have prevented easily. No, Marc Aurel did not hold back the Huns who arrived two hundred years later. No, Hitler was not Vienna's native son. No, Czechoslovakia did not exist then and no longer exists now. European history certainly was neither Mrs. O'Connor's forte nor her editor's. She certainly fits into the truthiness mold of her present employer, the Pravda on the Potomac. Why check a statement if it sounds true?
The narrative of the end of her book and its beginning are also not compatible: She starts with a classic, idealistic tale of justice, of handing the portrait back to its just owners. Her story ends with a greedy lawyer cashing in forty percent of the auction money extracted and four of the five paintings (which had been on public display in a public museum) disappearing in unknown private collections. In the light of this outcome, a rewrite of the first two thirds of the book would have been in order.
In an ethical decision analysis, one would have to take into account the declaration of the lady in the portrait to have it displayed in a public museum. One would further have to consider the suffering and expropriation caused to the Bloch-Bauer family. The lawyer's efforts also deserve adequate compensation. Finally, one should also acknowledge that today's Austrians are not guilty for their grandparents' actions. Thus, a compromise of displaying the portraits in a US museum should have been an acceptable solution for all, which would have also increased Klimt's visibility abroad.
Enter the lawyers. On the Austrian side, the lawyers held firm to the idea that Adele Bloch-Bauer had declared to have the painting displayed in the Belvedere museum. They failed to take into consideration that the Cold War had ended and the old generation of US politicians who were aware of their own complicity in not restoring the looted properties and not cleaning up institutions (exhibit A: former Austrian Nazi and UN secretary general Kurt Waldheim) were no longer in charge. On the American side, the lawyer representing the heirs was looking out more to his own than his clients' interests. Which went so far that he started suing his client (a Holocaust survivor) to extract his pound of flesh in the form of a full forty percent of the proceeds - which crashed a superior US museum solution at 150 million US dollars. Heir and collector Ronald Lauder added his political connections to extract and auction off the paintings to the highest bidders. At least, the portrait of Adele Bauer-Bloch is now on public display as the signature piece at Lauder's Neue Galerie in New York.
To accomplish this, the laws had to be stretched. To disregard Adele Bauer-Bloch's declaration, one had to resort to the anti-feminist solution that she never was the real owner of the painting. It was her husband who owned it all the time. A rather ugly political power play that at least compensated the heirs of Bloch-Bauer for some of their wartime losses, although the lion's share went to an extremely greedy lawyer. Hopefully, the Klimts now in the private collections will one day appear in public again. Authorities in Austria have in the mean time learned from the case. Recent restitutions have been performed much more amicably and with superior outcomes for all. As a recent report has indicated, there is still a lot of work to be done (especially concerning works from less valuable artists).
A true synthesis of the case of Adele Bauer-Bloch is still to be written. The first part about the creation of the portrait suffers from a lack of research and depth. The last part suffers from bias. The valuable part of this book is the middle one which drastically tells the story of the emergence of Nazism in Austria and the mistreatment and expropriation of the Bauer-Blochs and their relatives (some of which were Nazis themselves!). The trials of survival and escape of their war years are movingly told.
4 
jcbrunner | 21 reseñas más. | Mar 18, 2012 |
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