Name: altlovesbooks's review of The Lady in Gold by Anne-Marie O'Connor
Item: The Lady in Gold
Rating: 2
Author: altlovesbooks

Anne-Marie O'Connor

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, writer for The Washington Post, formerly of the Los Angeles Times, tells the galvanizing story of the Lady in Gold, Adele Bloch-Bauer, a dazzling Viennese 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 Bloch-Bauers were art patrons, and Adele herself was considered a rebel of fin de siècle Vienna (she wanted to be educated, a notion considered “degenerate” in a society that believed women being out in the world went against their feminine “nature”). 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. She writes of the Nazis confiscating the portrait of Adele from the Bloch-Bauers’ grand palais; of the Austrian government putting the painting on display, stripping Adele’s Jewish surname from it so that no clues to her identity (nor any hint of her Jewish origins) would be revealed. Nazi officials called the painting, The Lady in Gold and proudly exhibited it in Vienna’s Baroque Belvedere Palace, consecrated in the 1930s as a Nazi institution. The author writes of the painting, inspired by the Byzantine mosaics Klimt had studied in Italy, with their exotic symbols and swirls, the subject an idol in a golden shrine. We see how, sixty years after it was stolen by the Nazis, the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer became the subject of a decade-long litigation between the Austrian government and the Bloch-Bauer heirs, how and why the U.S. Supreme Court became involved in the case, and how the Court’s decision had profound ramifications in the art world. A riveting social history; an illuminating and haunting look at turn-of-the-century Vienna; a brilliant portrait of the evolution of a painter; a masterfully told tale of suspense. And at the heart of it, the Lady in Gold—the shimmering painting, and its equally irresistible subject, the fate of each forever intertwined.

The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Bloch-Bauer

The Lady in Gold

altlovesbooks

I'm unsatisfied, and I feel like the book title and premise misrepresented what it ended up being about. The beginning was promising, and I really enjoyed the picture the author painted (heh heh) of pre-war Vienna and the sorts of people it attracted. The depictions of Adele, Klimt, and all their associated friends and flings were interesting. From there, though, the book rushed its way to World War II and then spun its wheels there while it tried to tell short little stories of anyone who had even a tenuous connection to the painting or Adele or Klimt, and their experiences with World War II. It felt like half the book was stuck here, and I ended up getting really fatigued at reading Nazi story after Nazi story. It also felt like the painting, what I thought was the subject of the book, was mentioned very little during this section.

The book then sped up again, speeding us along to what I was expecting more of -- the actual fight for the painting. Or so I thought, anyway, the legal battle ended up spanning only a small handful of chapters (and the chapters in this book are only a page or two), and then it was over and Maria had won her fight. The rest of the book was Vienna's complaints about the paintings being purchased.

I like a good non-fiction book about random historical topics, but this one didn't feel like it fit the bill for me. It lacked direction and cohesion, because while the people stories were for the most part interesting, I never had a clear idea of where one thought was leading to the next. It also lacked substance about the actual painting beyond what was told pre-WWII, which is a letdown considering the book title implied more. This one missed the mark with me, I think.

Anne Marie O'Connor

Shares the dramatic and fantastical events that shaped the creation of the Austrian Symbolist painter's most famous portrait, covering such topics as the story of the beautiful Viennese Jewish salon hostess who was his model, contributing factors in turn-of-the-century Vienna and the painting's bizarre fate.

The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer

Wynter

Oh poo. I was hoping to love this one more than I did. The Lady in Gold, as the subtitle suggests, is the story of the famous portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer by Gustav Klimt. The portrait itself is magnificent, so I was utterly intrigued. Did the book deliver? Meeeeh. I had several issues here:

1. History is not black and white. O'Connor sort of came across as this crusader on the mission that read "Jews - good, Austria - bad". Undeniably the Nazi party did horrendous things to the European population based on their race and background, but Austria wasn't divided clearly into Nazis and Jews. It's as if anybody who didn't resist the Nazis were evil supporters of Holocaust. How about the Austrians who hid Jews at the risk of their lives? How about Jews who sympathized with Germany's vision of dominance and growth until the genocide began? Austrians are all evil, all out to get the Jews, and museums that tried to save the art after the war were actually marauding criminals, racing against each other to satisfy their greed. Or at least that is the impression I got from reading The Lady in Gold. My stance on the topic is that history is a vast ocean filled with circumstance, personal passions, mistakes, chances, and survival. You cannot lump people into one pile based on their nationality, miss O'Connor. Oh wait, that's what the Nazis did. Let's learn from that.

2. The story deviates too much into brief biographies of multiple historical characters, and eventually you start losing track of who is who, and how they are related to the Bloch-Bauer portrait. There are chapters upon chapters of horrors of war, which again relate little about the art itself. Because of that the subtitle of the book is somewhat misleading. Considering that Klimt never discussed his private affairs and very few documents of Adele survived to present day, I should have expected that the much-speculated affair would not become any more clear after this book.

3. Too much speculation. The author imagines what goes though her subjects' heads as if this was fiction. How much of this can I attribute to the imagination of miss O'Connor and how much to her research, I don't know. 

4. This is not the authors fault, but I hated the part when the five heirs were choosing what to do with the Klimt collection that was returned to them by the courts. Only one of them wanted to send the paintings to museums in Austria, so they could be enjoyed by the public as national treasure. The rest wanted to sell to private collectors. And then they have the audacity to claim it wasn't for money. "That's what Adele would have wanted", they say. She would want these paintings locked up in bedrooms of filthy rich magnates who see them purely as smart investment pieces? One of such paintings was sold to that guy who put his elbow through a Picasso. Yep, what a fate!

I did enjoy the description of pre-war Vienna, Klimt's liberated view of art, and Adele's short, but impactful life. Unfortunately, the book was bloated in places by unrelated trivia, and I disagreed with the author's stance on some issues. You win some, you lose some. Overall, an average kind of study of a famous masterpiece. I don't think I will be revisiting it anytime soon.

Caterina P.

Kim Tyo-Dickerson

SnarkByThePage

Shares the events that shaped the creation of the painter's most famous portrait, covering such topics as the story of the salon hostess who was his model, contributing factors in turn-of-the-century Vienna, and the painting's fate.

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