The portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, The Lady in Gold, was painted by Gustav Klimt. Klimt took three years to complete the painting; preliminary drawings for it date from 1903/04. It measures 54″ x 54″ and is made of oil and gold on canvas, showing elaborate and complex ornamentation as seen in the Jugendstilstyle. Klimt was a member of the Vienna Secession, a group of artists that broke away from the traditional way of painting. The picture was painted in Vienna and commissioned by Adele’s husband Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer. As a wealthy industrialist who had made his fortune in the sugar indstry, he sponsored the arts and favored and supported Gustav Klimt.
According to Austrian sources, in her will, Adele Bloch-Bauer asked her husband to donate the Klimt paintings to the Austrian State Gallery upon his death. She died in 1925 from meningitis. When the Nazis took over Austria, her widowed husband had to flee to Switzerland. His property, including his Klimt paintings, was confiscated. In his 1945 testament, Bloch-Bauer designated his nephew and nieces, including Maria Altmann, as the inheritors of his estate.
The painting was seized by the Nazis during the Anschluss, and later put on display in the Austrian State Gallery.
In 2000, following administrative impedance by the Austria authorities to her claims for restitution of the seized works, Maria Altmann sued Austria in US Courts for ownership of the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer 1 and other paintings from her uncle’s collection. As Bloch-Bauer’s pictures had remained in Austria, the Austrian government took the position that the testament of Adele Bloch-Bauer had determined that these pictures were to stay there. After a court battle, binding arbitration by a panel of Austrian judges established in 2006 that Maria Altmann was the rightful owner of this and four other paintings by Klimt.
The movie, Woman in Gold, is a result of this story, and Pat and I were pleased with its presentation.
The interesting part of this is the fact that in my book, The Anti-Nazi Task Force Adventures, which is a historical fiction, I refer to this painting as belonging to Bauer on pages 166 and 189. While researching the private art pieces that were stolen by the Nazi’s during World War II, I came across several famous paintings that stolen, with The Lady in Gold by Gustav Klimt being one of them. It is important for us to remember the cruelty shown by the Nazis toward Jewish families, showing no respect for their belongings or even their lives.