Glitter: The Lady in Gold by Gustav Klimt
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, 1907, The Neue Gallery, New York City
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Peter Schjeldahl has changed his mind. The New Yorker art critic announced in June, 2012 “It’s not a painting at all, but a largish, flattish bauble: a thing...” But in 2006 he wrote “[it is] exquisite and brazen, compelling and brittle, too self-conscious to be experienced as altogether beautiful but transcendent in its cunning way.”
Wow. What a comedown from his cautious glow in 2006, when the Klimt work was bought for the staggering sum of $135 million by cosmetic heir, Ron Lauder and was installed in Lauder’s Neue Galerie on the upper East side of Manhattan. Lauder was not only fascinated with it, he needed it as a “destination” painting that would get people to go to his recently opened museum dedicated to art from Germany and Austria.
The Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, some would argue, was famous because it was famously expensive.
This picture’s long journey began in Vienna. At the fin de siecle, Vienna was, according to Anne-Marie O’Connor’s 2012 book “The Lady in Gold”
“...a city of contradictions. It was one of Europe’s richest cities, yet its immigrants were among the poorest. The construction of opulent new palaces did little to hide a severe housing shortage. Vienna doctors were creating modern medicine...yet incurable syphilis spread unchecked...anti-Semitism [was]so crude that some believed Jews murdered children to leaven their matzoh with blood. Famed for it’s gaiety, the “sacred city of musicians” had the highest suicide rate in Europe.”
Gustav Klimt was in full swing with the era’s opulence, employing oil, gold and silver in his “golden phase,” several years in which he notably produced
the gold-drenched lovers in “The Kiss” (1908)
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a savagely sensuous “Judith with the Head of Holofernes” (1901)
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and the erotically charged “Danae”(1908)
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Vienna represented an important center architecturally of the Art Nouveau (called Jugenstihl in Germany and Austria) period. It is within this context that Gustav Klimt had founded the Vienna Secession movement in 1897 which included his own Symbolist style. For more on this stunning art style see http://www.radford.edu/~rbarris/art428/Chapter%202%20Symbolism.html.
Klimt was considered Austria’s finest painter. He also liked women and exuded sexual magnetism with his burning stare and deep baritone. In 1903 he had traveled to Ravenna and stood in awe before the mosaic of the Empress Theodora in the basilica of San Vitale which intensified his fascination with gold.
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Affluent Viennese Jewish families, like that of Adele Bloch-Bauer, loved Viennese culture, embracing the arts, schools, theatres and opera houses and also the newer fields of science and medicine. As the Czech writer Miles Kundera put it, they were the “intellectual cement” of Middle Europe.
Adele herself was the daughter of the head of one of the largest banks in the Hapsburg Empire and an early feminist. She had married Ferdinand Bauer, a wealthy and successful sugar-beet baron, who commissioned her portrait by Klimt. She and Ferdinand had no surviving children.
Klimt succumbed to syphilis in 1918. Adele died of meningitis in 1925. In her will, she asked that her portrait be placed in Vienna’s Belvedere Palace Museum. But Ferdinand wanted to enshrine her portrait in her bedroom. However, he was forced to flee Austria with the onset of the Anschluss. His house was ransacked by German soldiers and Adele’s portrait was looted. She would go into the Belvedere in Nazi dominated Vienna after all. Only now the title of the painting was changed, since Adele was Jewish. It was now called “The Lady in Gold.”
Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer died in 1946, soon after World War II, leaving his estate to a nephew and two nieces, including Maria Altmann. Maria was able to emigrate to the U.S. and was in her late eighties, living in Los Angeles, when her life intersected with Randol Schoenberg, a 31 year old securities litigation attorney and grandson of composer Arnold Schoenberg (also a fugitive from the Nazis). Randol was a passionate advocate for restitution of art looted during the Holocaust and Maria was determined to get the portrait back. According to Maria’s bio she was encouraged by a new law in Austria, enabled by the Austrian Green Party in 1998
“...introducing greater transparency into the hitherto murky process of dealing with the issue of restitution of artworks looted during the Nazi period. By opening the archives of the Ministry of Culture for the first time, the new law enabled the Austrian investigative journalist Hubertus Czernin to discover that, contrary to what had been generally assumed, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer had never in fact donated the painting to the state museum.”
But Austria was requiring what amounted to a huge sum of money as a filing fee, which Maria could not hope to raise. She turned to Randol, whose family she had known all her life. He agreed to pursue her case and in 2000 he filed a brief in a federal district court to allow Maria to sue in U.S. courts under an exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act for property stolen in violation of international law. He won. Austria would not be immune from such a lawsuit.
Worried about the international implications of the case, the George W. Bush administration filed an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court supporting the Austrian position and opposing Maria. The high Court granted certiori in the case.
The Belvedere had bet on the likelihood that Maria, now 88, would die before the case was resolved. Astonishingly, it would claim that “Adele Bloch-Bauer” was Austria’s “cultural patrimony.” Although this was a jurisdictional case, Justice Stevens, writing the 6-3 majority opinion upholding the lower court decision, made a pointed reference to Austria’s outlandish and shameful claim.
Maria’s side of the issue would be publicized all over the world. And it would not go well for Austria. The force of history had Austria cornered, exposing its dark past to the world.
Maria and Randol could now go forward with the case. In light of Maria’s advanced age and the prospect of her dying before the case could make its way through the courts, she and Randol decided to take their chances in an arbitration before an Austrian panel. With the airing of the story, the case became more than just about law. It was now a search for justice.
On January 15, 2006, the three Austrian panelists made their decision. The portrait of Adele would go to Maria and it was her strong belief that the painting belonged on public view in an American or Canadian museum. While several museums were prepared to offer large sums of money for it, they simply could not match Lauder’s purported payment of $135 million, privately negotiated, in June 2006. It was at the time the highest sum ever paid for a painting. His Neue Galerie in New York City won the prize of owning and exhibiting the iconic image.
Adele in Neue Galerie
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Vienna marked the departure with “Ciao Adele” posters in the city.
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Maria died on February 7, 2007. Adele had now become legend.
For a more detailed account see
= new reply since forum marked as read
What a fascinating bit of involved history! All the twists and turns, with victory and justice at the end.
Plus all the artwork is just gorgeous, lush, amazingly erotic.
Thank you!
Sorry I missed jumping into this thread on Friday. This is such a great story!
I've often thought that the Austrians tried to out-German the Germans. That being said, when I spent time in Budapest last year, I made a special trip to Vienna just to visit the Belvedere. From slightly shabby-genteel Budapest, the contrast of Vienna could not have been more stark. More gilt! Bigger buildings! Faster trains! And, of course, higher prices.
As my husband and I settled into our train seats for the ride back to Hungary, I commented that it would be so nice to get "home" to Budapest. Still feel that way. Although I'm glad I saw the paintings, I'm not sure I'd go back to Austria in a hurry.
Maybe I'll post a little about what a sex fiend that guy Klimt was
Thanks for sharing your wonderful essay!
I left out the sex fiend part because I thought it might detract from the central idea of the essay. And then I'd have to post his highly explicit drawings of women and then someone would get upset and...well you know.
But the fact is that he surrounded himself by female models who sat around naked, just waiting for his "inspiration" to hit. But maybe that filled him with more than just inspiration...
Nobody beats Caravaggio - although I don't think I'd want that painting hanging over my living room sofa. But what a wonderful face!
I would love to see these art posts listed in one place. 
On my mobile so maybe I missed the link
