The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer

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 tells the galvanizing story of the Lady in Gold, Adele Bloch-Bauer, a dazzling 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 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. O’Connnor also traces the painting once it got into the hands of the Nazis who eventually exhibited the painting in Vienna’s Baroque Belvedere Palace, consecrated in the 1930s as a Nazi institution. Sixty years after the painting’s heist into Nazi hands, the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer became the subject of a decade-long litigation between the Austrian government and the Bloch-Bauer heirs that included the involvement of the U.S. Supreme Court. The book is a riveting social history: an illuminating and haunting look at turn-of-the-century Vienna, at the heart of which is a shimmering painting and its equally irresistible subject, the fate of each intertwined forever. Notes, Selected Bibliography, Index, List of Illustrations. Illus., 54 b&w photographs. 350p.