By Catherine Schofield Sezgin, ARCA Blog Editor-in-Chief
In 1907 prosperous Vienna, the
great cultural center of Europe, two events happened which would not collide
for another three decades. Gustav
Klimt would fulfill a commission to paint the portrait of 24-year-old Adele
Bloch-Bauer, who lived across the square from Vienna’s Fine Art Academy, the
art school which would in that same year reject Adolf Hitler’s for admission
because he failed the drawing exam.
In Lady in Gold, the
Extraordinary Tale of the Klimt paintings, journalist Anne-Marie O’Connor
tells the extraordinary story of The
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I which would sell for $135 million to an
American in 2007. O’Connor first
describes the relationship between Klimt, his Jewish art patrons, and the
cultural environment in pre-Nazi Austria. From the point of view of the
Bloch-Bauer family is told of the collaboration between Austria and the German
Nazis to loot Jewish art collections.
The book concludes with the legal struggles of American attorney Randy
Schoenberg to navigate the U. S. legal system to help Maria Altmann and the
other surviving members of the Bloch-Bauer family to recover four stolen Klimt
paintings. It’s a story of how a
legitimate government corrupted legislation to steal from and murder its own
citizens.
Within a decade, the Nazis
succeeded in destroying the Jewish community Austrian-Hungarian Emperor Franz
Josef (ruled from 1848-1916) created in Vienna by providing citizenship rights
to European Jews in the 19th century – offering them a sanctuary
from discrimination and persecution that stretched to the hinterlands of
Russia. The Jewish population in
Vienna rapidly increased from 6,000 to more than 200,000 in less than 40 years,
creating dissention in the anti-Semitic mostly Roman Catholic population. Vienna, against the wishes of Franz
Joseph, elected an anti-Semitic mayor for two decades who served in effect as a
political mentor for Hitler. After
the Second World War, less Jews lived in Austria than had a century ago and
they had no intention of returning to a country that treated them less
favorably than its population of horses.
Against the backdrop of the
murder of 6 million Jews, restitution of stolen art may seem unimportant,
especially as newspapers today sport headlines of Jewish families recovering
then selling artworks for millions of dollars. Why is it so important that these paintings are returned to
the families now? Weren’t these issues of restitution settled decades ago when
Allied forces discovered stolen art in the salt mines of Germany after the war?
And why does the American legal system have to get involved in these cases
almost seven decades after armistice? Isn’t this a matter for the government of
Austria to decide? Lady in Gold
answers these questions.
Vienna at the turn of the 20th
century was hedonistic. In 1889, the
Crown Prince shot his teenage mistress then himself in 1889. The Emperor’s mistress was a stage
actress. In 1897, American writer
Mark Twain publicly lectured about the virulent anti-Semitism palpable in the
Vienna, the city rebuilding itself after successfully defeating Ottoman
invaders a half century earlier.
The old fortress walls came down and the Ringstrasse, a series of
boulevards encircling the center of Vienna arose, providing an opportunity for Vienna’s
nuveau riche, many of them Jewish, to
celebrate their financial and industrial wealth with monumental mansions and
beautiful decorative arts. Even
statues fronting public buildings glisten with gold.
Part Two continues tomorrow.
No comments:
Post a Comment