In a single evening in November 2006, Christie’s sold nearly half a billion dollars of art, almost double the previous world auction record. Driving this sale were four paintings by Gustav Klimt that together sold to unnamed collectors for $192 million. The headlong spending spree had been occasioned by the Austrian government’s restitution, just a few months earlier, of five Klimts to the heirs of Adele Bloch-Bauer (1881-1925). The fifth, one of two portraits of Adele herself, had already been separately purchased by the Neue Galerie in New York for $135 million—with funds provided by its billionaire co-founder, Ronald S. Lauder. At the time, it was the most ever paid for a painting.
ENLARGE
‘Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I’ (1907) by Gustave Klimt NEUE GALERIE NEW YORK / ART RESOURCE, NY
But there was something quite apart from their market value that made the Bloch-Bauer Klimts so noteworthy. Owned by a leading Viennese Jewish family before World War II and only returned to the heirs after years of litigation, they had come to represent the shameful story of art confiscated from Jewish collections by the Nazis in Austria and then tenaciously held on to by the postwar Austrian state. Yet the Christie’s sale invited questions of its own. Until 2006, the five paintings had all been in Vienna’s Belvedere Gallery, a national museum. Today only the Neue Galerie painting, “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” (1907), can be seen by the public. And with the two Adele portraits separated, we have lost the rare insight that comes from seeing an artist approach the same subject at different points in his career.
Anne Marie O’Connor is not much concerned with this paradoxical denouement. Her deeply researched account of the Bloch-Bauer case, “The Lady in Gold,” concentrates almost entirely on the Neue Galerie’s picture—along with the Belvedere’s “The Kiss” (1907), the pre-eminent example of Klimt’s now celebrated gold-leaf style—and the wrenching 20th-century tragedy of Vienna’s highly assimilated Jewish elite. She has constructed a sprawling “saga of loss and redemption” that is as much an impassioned elegy for a “golden instant when Vienna rivaled Paris” as a dissection of the restitution battle that led to the Christie’s sale.
The case is straightforward enough: The daughter of one of the leading bankers of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Adele Bloch-Bauer was a patron (and perhaps lover) of Klimt and a fervent supporter of public museums. In 1923, two years before her death, she wrote a will expressing her wish to have her Klimts given to the Belvedere upon the death of her husband, the industrialist Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer. Following the 1938 Anschluss, however, Ferdinand’s assets, including the paintings, were expropriated by the Nazis—”Aryanized”—and he fled to Czechoslovakia and then Switzerland, where he died in 1945. After the war, the Belvedere asserted title to the paintings, citing the 1923 will.
By the 1990s, however, Austria was drawing belated scrutiny for its handling of art looted by the Nazis, and, in 1998, the remaining Bloch-Bauer descendants, all living abroad, asserted claim to the five Klimts. Leading this effort were Maria Altmann, the octogenarian niece of Adele, and a crusading young American lawyer named Randol Schoenberg, who happened to be the grandson of the Austrian composer (and fellow émigré) Arnold Schoenberg. After a protracted legal battle, an Austrian restitution panel ruled in favor of the heirs in January 2006.
THE LADY IN GOLD
By Anne-Marie O’Connor
Knopf, 349 pages, $30
It is, as Ms. O’Connor’s subtitle tells us, an “extraordinary tale,” and yet, as narrative, it poses challenges. A vast span of time separates the Catholic-born Klimt and his sitter, who both died well before the Nazi period, from the legal battle, which began many decades after the Nazi defeat. Ms. O’Connor makes generous use of the shimmering, if now familiar, backdrop of Secession-era Vienna to fill out her story. While the miniatures of Sigmund Freud, Alma Mahler, Arthur Schnitzler and Mark Twain (who spent two years in Vienna just before the turn of the century) can seem superfluous, the many portraits of members of the city’s Jewish haute bourgeoisie deepen her account. Like the Bloch-Bauers, cultivated families such as the Loews, Zuckerkandls and Lederers collected art, and many championed Klimt’s decorative, yet sexually-charged compositions.
The central and largest section of Ms. O’Connor’s book is devoted to the brutal destruction of their Vienna. The rapacity with which the Nazis pursued Jewish wealth is rendered with particular force thanks to the recollections of Maria Altmann, the Bloch-Bauer niece. Just weeks after her marriage into one of the most powerful families in the city, Altmann’s exquisite new apartment was seized and then occupied by Felix Landau, the Austrian Gestapo chief who had been put in charge of plundering Jewish assets. Her husband, meanwhile, was sent to Dachau—as a hostage to help the Nazis track down his brother’s foreign bank accounts. He was released when his brother made a deal, and the couple later escaped and eventually settled in Los Angeles. (Maria Altmann died there in 2011.) Among Austria’s Nazi elite, Ms. O’Connor suggests, material jealousy seems to have played as much a part as racist ideology.
Nazi aesthetics, however, had little patience for Secessionist art, and when museum officials were sent to inspect the Bloch-Bauer house, they ignored the Klimts. The paintings were only appropriated subsequently in a dirty deal between an illegitimate son of the artist, who had become a National Socialist die-hard, and the Belvedere, which had meanwhile been taken over by the aptly named Hitler acolyte Bruno Grimschitz. “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” was “reinvented” as an unidentified “Lady in Gold,” and the history of its subject neatly suppressed.
Klimt found posthumous celebrity after the war, and it is here that the story becomes more complicated than Ms. O’Connor allows. In 1984, the magazine Art News published an exposé of Austria’s disgraceful coverup of art stolen by the Nazis, which caused an international outcry and spurred multiple investigations, culminating in a series of high-profile lawsuits in the 1990s and 2000s. It turned out that hundreds of plundered paintings and objects had ended up in Austrian museums, where they remained, and that the government had adopted a secret policy of intransigence. Adding to the injury, many of the disputed works had been painted by leading Modernists such as Klimt and Egon Schiele, whose soaring reputations (and market valuations) were being put in the service of promoting Austria’s national heritage.
Though it is mentioned only in passing in Ms. O’Connor’s book, this controversy came to a head in 1998, when Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau seized two Schiele paintings that had been lent by Vienna’s Leopold Museum to New York’s Museum of Modern Art: Heirs to the original owners had claimed them as Nazi-looted art. One of these two works, “Portrait of Wally” (1911), became a cause célèbre that was only resolved in 2010, when the Leopold Museum made a settlement with the heirs, keeping the painting in exchange for a $19 million payment and clear acknowledgment of its provenance.
It is difficult not to see the contrast between this outcome and what happened with the Bloch-Bauer Klimts. “Portrait of Wally” remains in the public domain, displayed in a prominent Austrian museum—one that, like the Belvedere, has been dogged by provenance issues—with signage that indicates its theft by the Nazis. It offers a powerful history lesson to all audiences even as it can be seen together with other important Schieles. The Bloch-Bauer Klimts—with the exception of the Neue Galerie portrait—have disappeared from public view, apparently because no museum, not even one funded by Ronald Lauder, could compete with private bidders.
Has justice been served? Ms. O’Connor, in her otherwise thorough account, might have taken up this question, since the fate of the paintings bears much on what future generations will learn about their original owners. But there is a journalistic convention at work here: Stolen art, a subject of ever-greater interest to reporters, is supposed to be appealingly black and white—in this case, a matter of “hatched-faced” Nazis and “aging Vienna belles.” The art market, on the other hand, is nearly always shades of gray. Even as inflationary prices have inspired a litany of restitution cases, the extraordinary rewards they hold out to a small minority of claimants and their lawyers can preclude the kinds of remedies that truly redeem the victims and the art.
Ms. O’Connor has told an important story. Yet it is hard not to agree with the late John Updike, who upon visiting the Neue Galerie in 2007 lamented that there are “not enough” Klimts “to show the curve of a career.
yn Lang March 16, 2012
“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.
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.
’The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt’s Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer’ by Anne-Marie O’Connor (Knopf)
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.
Despite the misgivings of some family members, Maria sold Adele’s gleaming portrait five months later for $135 million to Lauder for his Neue Galerie in New York City. (At the time it was the world’s most expensive painting, a distinction now belonging to Cezanne’s “The Card Players,” which sold last year for more than $250 million.) Instead of donating one of the remaining Klimts to Lauder’s gallery, as one relative suggested, or limiting potential buyers to representatives of museums so that the paintings would stay on public display, the new owners put them up for auction. In November 2006, it took Christie’s all of six minutes to sell the Bloch-Bauer Klimts to anonymous buyers for a combined total of $192.7 million. Now in private hands, unfortunately these paintings will seldom, if ever, be seen by the public.
O’Connor’s research turned up an enormous trove of information, much of it peripheral to her subject, such as the fact that Ferdinand Bloch’s limo was made by the same firm that built the convertible in which Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914; or that one Hedy Kiesler escaped her jealous husband, who had imprisoned her for swimming naked in a Czech movie, then made her way to Hollywood to become Hedy Lamarr. O’Connor can’t resist telling us that Maria used a corset to flatten her breasts for her first date with Fritz and that on their honeymoon, in the throes of passion, he cried out his former mistress’s name. She notes that on the evening Schoenberg got word of his big legal win, his son Joey had a fever.
Even though the fate of Adele’s iconic portrait is sometimes lost in a welter of tangential information, what reader won’t feel a frisson of horror on learning that Emmy Goering, Hermann’s wife, wore the diamond necklace that Ferdinand Bloch gave his bride as a wedding gift? O’Connor’s book is a mesmerizing tale of art and the Holocaust, encased in a profusion of beguiling detail, much as Adele herself is encrusted in Klimt’s resplendent portrai
Gustav Klimt and Adele Bloch-Bauer: The Woman in Gold
April 2, 2015-September 7, 2015
On April 2, 2015, Neue Galerie New York will open “Gustav Klimt and Adele Bloch-Bauer: The Woman in Gold,” an intimate exhibition devoted to the close relationship that existed between the artist and one of his key subjects and patrons. Included in the exhibition will be a display of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, paintings, related drawings, vintage photographs, decorative arts, and archival material. The show will be on view through September 7, 2015.
This exhibition is made possible in part by the Neue Galerie President’s Circle.
Conservation of Adele Bloch-Bauer I and support for this exhibition is made possible in part by A. Lange & Söhne.
This exhibition coincides with the opening of the historical drama “Woman in Gold,” starring Helen Mirren as Adele Bloch-Bauer’s niece Maria Altmann, and Ryan Reynolds as lawyer Randol Schoenberg. The Weinstein Company is set to release the film in U.S. theaters on April 1, 2015. The film is based upon the incredible true story of how Altmann, working in collaboration with Schoenberg, successfully sued the Austrian Government for the return of five Klimt paintings seized by the Nazis from the Bloch-Bauer family townhouse in Vienna during World War II.
Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) is one of the most important artists of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Trained at Vienna’s Kunstgewerbeschule, Klimt began his career in a traditional and historicist style, but quickly emerged as one of Vienna’s preeminent modern artists, creating ebullient landscapes, striking portraits, and erotic drawings of women. Klimt was a key figure in Vienna’s art scene, and is one whose artistic achievements and mentorship paved the way for painters Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele.
“Gustav Klimt and Adele Bloch-Bauer: The Woman in Gold” will be displayed on the second floor of the museum and will be comprised of approximately 50 works, including the Adele Bloch-Bauer I, paintings, related drawings, vintage photographs, decorative arts, as well as archival material. The show is organized by Janis Staggs, Associate Director of Curatorial and Publications at Neue Galerie New York. The highlight of this display will be Klimtís stunning 1907 “golden style” portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, as well as related sketches prepared during the four years that he worked on this iconic masterpiece. The exhibition will also feature a number of rare photographs of Klimt and material about the Bloch-Bauer family.
Adele Bloch-Bauer possesses the rare distinction as the only person Klimt ever painted twice. Following the outcry surrounding Klimt’ s most controversial public commission -three faculty paintings that were to be installed in the Great Hall of Vienna University (Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence, 1900-07)- Klimt withdrew from government projects and focused his energies on private portrait commissions of society women from Vienna’s cultural elite.
Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer assembled one of Vienna’s most renowned art collections, which included paintings by masters of Vienna’s Biedermeier period, modern sculpture, an impressive array of porcelain from the Royal Vienna Porcelain Factory, and a stellar group of works by Klimt, including the two portraits of Adele Bloch-Bauer and also landscapes. The Klimt paintings originally hung in Adele’s private apartment in the couple’s Vienna home.
Klimt’s 1907 Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I was acquired for Neue Galerie New York in 2006. At the time of the acquisition, the museum’s President and co-founder, Ronald S. Lauder, stated: “With this dazzling painting, Klimt created one of his greatest works of art.” During the years that Klimt labored over the commission, he spent time in Ravenna, Italy, where he visited the sixth-century Church of San Vitale. He was deeply impressed by the richly decorated Byzantine mosaics of the Empress Theodora and described them as of “unprecedented splendor.” His first portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer incorporates jewel-like areas that resemble semi-precious stones and layers of lustrous gold and silver.
A series of lectures will be held in conjunction with this special exhibition, including presentations by scholar Dr. Alessandra Comini, curator of “Egon Schiele: Portraits”; Anne-Marie O’Connor, author of The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt’s Masterpiece; and Janis Staggs, curator of “Gustav Klimt and Adele Bloch-Bauer: The Woman in Gold.”
The Neue Galerie will celebrate Klimt in other parts of the museum as well. Café Sabarsky will feature its special Klimttorte during this period. The Design Shop will offer gold and silver cufflinks designed by Josef Hoffmann for Gustav Klimt, a set produced exclusively for Neue Galerie by First Edition. The Book Store will carry Anne-Marie O’Connor’s The Lady in Gold and monographs on Klim
