Lecture: Former LA Times Reporter Anne-Marie O'Connor Discussed Maria Altmann's Tale of Recovering Five Klimt Paintings from Austria at the Skirball Center in Los Angeles

by Catherine Schofield Sezgin, ARCA Blog editor

Los Angeles - Tuesday night, across from the 405 Freeway where Bill Cosby's son Ennis was murdered while changing a tire in 1997, dozens of people were refused admittance to the lecture hall at the Skirball Center where Washington Post Correspondent Anne-Marie O'Connor was set to discuss her book, The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece (Knopf, 2012).

The Skirball Cultural Center, located just north of the Getty Center in Brentwood, is a difficult to reach institution so when people who had stood in line with reservations were refused admittance, you could hear stringent complaints to Zócalo Public Square that overbooked the free event.  Some people bought the hardcover copy of the book from the representative from Book Soup, who was redacting words on recycled paper to write poetry, and others left for dinner.  It's not easy to drive in evening traffic through either San Fernando Valley or Los Angeles on $5/gallon gas to be turned away from a must-see event.

I am telling you all of this so that you can understand the overwhelming interest in this fascinating book that Ms. O'Connor diligently worked on for years and quickly direct you to more efficient coverage of the material.  This is the story of life in Vienna before and during World War II; the beautiful Adele Bloch-Bauer, the subject of the painting; and the artist, Gustav Klimt, who grew up in poverty because his father couldn't make enough money engraving in gold.  O'Connor writes of the theft of the painting from the Jewish family that owned it, how the anti-Semetic government hid the identity of the portrait sitter, and Randy Schoenberg's stubborn fight for Adele's niece, Maria Altmann, to regain ownership of her family's paintings more than 50 years after the Nazis had stolen them.

Zócalo Public Square has posted a review of the lecture, photos and a video of the event here; 

KPCC's recent interview with the author is here; and you can read a book review in the Christian Science Monitor about this "epic" story.