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Adele Bloch-Bauer I
1907
Oil, silver, and gold on canvas
Neue Galerie New York
I've bought my summer book, which depletes my yearly book quota, which is three a year (it's only July!). The book is: The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer" by Anne-Marie O'Connor.
It was recommended to me by a staff at my local Chapters/Indigo bookstore, when I asked her for her advice. "I'm pretty sure you'll like this" she said. She had previously assisted me in finding/ordering/buying the two other books I recently bought - Ann Coulter's Adios America, which I've written/reviewed here, and The Founding Fathers at Home: The Building of America, 1735-1817, which became a delightful journey into the homes of these Founding Fathers, and about which I've written a brief post here. They are both serious books, Coulter's more so, but engaging and witty, and Magnate's is a joy to read about the homes, and rooms, where these American men conceived so many of their ideas.
If my quota weren't already over I would also buy a dog book. Now, dog books are a dime a dozen. Everybody has a Fido to biographize. But the New Yorker's book: The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs, which I saw online, is described thus:
Only The New Yorker could fetch such an unbelievable roster of talent on the subject of man’s best friend. This copious collection, beautifully illustrated in full color, features articles, fiction, humor, poems, cartoons, cover art, drafts, and drawings from the magazine’s archives.These authors take their dog a tad too seriously. But such is the honor we should bestow our dog, loyal, silent (except for the bark or the growl to protect his master) playful, and infinitely patient. But, once in a while we should make gentle jokes about him. He is, after all, a dog.
As does Kurt Vonnegut, whose loopy novels I avidly read. In his book The Sirens of Titan, Kazak the dog (who has appeared in previous Vonnegut novels) belongs to Rumfoord, who comes:
...from a wealthy New England background. His private fortune was large enough to fund the construction of a personal spacecraft, and he became a space explorer. Traveling between Earth and Mars, his ship - carrying Rumfoord and his dog, Kazak - entered a phenomenon known as a chrono-synclastic infundibulum, which is defined in the novel as "those places ... where all the different kinds of truths fit together."Even in outer-space, and a dog as sole companion, truth is important to decipher.
I might break my (personal) contract, and just buy Vonnegut's parody. He does have a dog as a protagonist, after all!
Now, onto those metaphorical dogs, or more appropriately, wolves. In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an America Family in Hitler's Berlin, by Erik Larsen is:
...a disturbing but highly compelling account of the life of the American ambassador to Germany and his family during Hitler’s rise to power. Larson, author of “The Devil in the White City” and other bestsellers, focuses on a narrow yet intriguing chapter of the buildup to the war: what life was like in Berlin among the social and political elite as Hitler became chancellor, told through the eyes of a most unusual ambassador and his family.The Hitler regime is fascinatingly macabre. How could a whole civilization be taken in by this impostor? My layman's, naive, conclusion is that people abandoned God, and could no longer differentiate between good and evil, and between truth and falsehood, and in fact supported evil.
My latest book acquisition, mine for only a day now, is: The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer. It is about the wolves of history, the Nazis.
Here is a review:
Anne Marie O'Connor...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.So there you have it, "Of Dogs, Nazis and Truth."
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 [Vienna's] Belvedere [Gallery] 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 central and largest section of Ms. O'Connor's book is devoted to the brutal destruction of their Vienna [by the Nazis].