The story of Adele Bloch-Bauer and Maria Altmann formed the basis for the 2017 novel Stolen Beauty by Laurie Lico Albanese. The portrait is featured in the memoir of Gregor Collins, The Accidental Caregiver, about his relationship with Maria Altmann, published in August 2012. The book was dramatised for the stage in January 2015.
On 19 January 1923 Adele Bloch-Bauer wrote a will. Ferdinand's brother Gustav, a lawyer by training, helped her frame the document and was named as the executor. The will included a reference to the Klimt works owned by the couple, including the two portraits of her:
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I. The painting was stolen by the Nazis in 1941, along with the remainder of Ferdinand's assets, after a charge of tax evasion was made against him. The assets raised from the purported sales of artwork, property and his sugar business were offset against the tax claim.
Still, the newly created Austrian restitution panel denied Ms. Altmann’s claim. It wasn’t until 2006, after the United States Supreme Court cleared the way for Ms. Altmann, then living in California, to sue the Austrian government, that an agreement was reached. Rather than pursue a lengthy and costly trial, Ms.
Neue Galerie New YorkPrivate collectionPortrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I/Locations
February 7, 2011Maria Altmann / Date of death
Thirteen years later, Ferdinand would flee Austria just before the Anschluss, the union with Hitler's Germany. Everything was left behind and plundered by top Nazis such as Hermann Goering. Adele's diamond necklace, passed on to Maria Altmann upon her marriage, reportedly ended up decorating the neck of Goering's wife.
“Woman in Gold,” a 2015 film starring Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds, is based on the true story of Maria Altmann, a Jewish woman who took on and won a years-long battle against the Austrian government to regain ownership of a Gustav Klimt painting of her aunt, Adele Bloch-Bauer.
His wife began selling cashmere sweaters from a shop in Beverly Hills, and was so successful that she turned it into a fashion shop and her husband joined her in the business. Fritz died in 1994. Altmann's quiet life ended abruptly in 1998, when Czernin announced his discovery.
(JTA) — When attorney E. Randol (Randy) Schoenberg saw himself portrayed on the big screen by hunky Ryan Reynolds in the movie “Woman in Gold,” he immediately spotted a difference.
The painting began to get a lot of exposure in the mainstream media, which attracted public attention in 2006, when it was sold at an auction for $135 million, the highest auction price recorded at that time in the art market. Ten years later, the painting is now worth more than $160 million.
An arbitration panel in Vienna would ultimately award Altmann ownership of the paintings. In June 2006 cosmetics magnate Ronald Lauder purchased Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I for $135 million — then the highest price ever paid for a painting — for display in Manhattan's Neue Galerie, a sale brokered by Christie's.
Gustav KlimtPortrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (also called The Lady in Gold or The Woman in Gold) is a painting by Gustav Klimt, completed between 1903 and 1907.
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer IIOprah Winfrey made a pretty penny selling Gustav Klimt's Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II (1912) for $150 million in 2016, reports Katya Kazakina for Bloomberg. The buyer is allegedly an unidentified Chinese collector, who pulled the trigger on the purchase over the summer.
Bruno Grimschitz, the Nazi curator at the Belvedere Gallery, first changed the name of the painting to Golden Portrait and later to The Lady in Gold. As emphasized in the movie, this was done to hide the fact that the woman in the painting was Jewish.
Austrian Gallery BelvedereThe Kiss / LocationThe Ă–sterreichische Galerie Belvedere is a museum housed in the Belvedere palace, in Vienna, Austria. The Belvedere palaces were the summer residence of Prince Eugene of Savoy. Wikipedia
For one, there is the mesmerizing gold-flecked painting itself, which set a record price of $135 million when it was sold in 2006.
What aided in the return of Adele Bloch-Bauer’s portrait was its location in a federal museum , said E. Randol Schoenberg, Ms. Altmann’s lawyer.
The German newspaper Der Spiegel also took successive regimes to task in 2013 when reporters revealed that the German government, both on its own and with various museums, ignored or actively frustrated restitution for decades. At the time, the paper called it “a moral disaster that began in the 1950s and continues to the present day.”
The German newspaper Der Spiegel also took successive regimes to task in 2013 when reporters revealed that the German government, both on its own and with various museums, ignored or actively frustrated restitution for decades.
As the new film “Woman in Gold,” starring Helen Mirren as the indefatigable Maria Altmann, acknowledges in a brief written prologue before the credits roll, more than 100,000 stolen works of art are still unaccounted for.
In 1998, 44 countries, including Austria, signed the Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art, a nonbinding agreement that called for a “just and fair solution” for Jews and other victims of Nazi persecution.
Italy came in for particular censure, followed by Hungary , Poland, Argentina, Spain and Russia. (The report, while noting that Germany had made some progress, still chastised the government for keeping its discovery of the Gurlitt stash secret.)
Gustav Klimt was born in 1862 in Baumgarten, near Vienna in Austria-Hungary. He attended the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts (German: Kunstgewerbeschule Wien) before taking on commissions with his brother, Ernst, and a fellow-student Franz von Matsch from 1879.
In mid-1903 Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer commissioned Klimt to paint a portrait of his wife; he wished to give the piece to Adele's parents as an anniversary present that October. Klimt drew over a hundred preparatory sketches for the portrait between 1903 and 1904.
Klimt exhibited his portrait at the 1907 Mannheim International Art Show, alongside the Portrait of Fritza Riedler (1906). Many of the critics had negative reactions to the two paintings, describing them as "mosaic-like wall-grotesqueries", "bizarre", "absurdities" and "vulgarities".
After exhibition at the Kunstschau, the portrait was hung at the Bloch-Bauers' Vienna residence. In 1912 Ferdinand commissioned a second painting of his wife, in which "the erotic charge of the likeness of 1907 has been spent", according to Whitford.
The history of the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I and the other paintings taken from the Bloch-Bauers has been recounted in three documentary films, Stealing Klimt (2007), The Rape of Europa (2007) and Adele's Wish (2008).
Fortune article by Tyler Green about Ronald Lauder and the Neue Galerie's acquisition of the painting.
The case, Republic of Austria v. Altmann, ended up in the Supreme Court of the United States, which ruled in 2004 that Austria was not immune from such a lawsuit.
Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer died on 13 November 1945, soon after World War II, leaving his estate to a nephew and two nieces, one of whom was Maria Altmann.
The paintings were estimated to be collectively worth at least $150 million when returned.
Shortly after Maria arrived in Los Angeles, Bernhard Altmann mailed her a sweater made of cashmere wool – a luxury fabric not yet widely available in the United States – accompanied with the note: "See what you can do with this." Maria took the sweater to Kerr's Department Store in Beverly Hills and attracted a multitude of buyers in California and across the United States for Bernhard Altmann's cashmere sweaters. Maria became the face of cashmere in California and eventually started her own clothing business. Among her clients was Caroline Brown Tracy, the mother of actor Spencer Tracy.
Stealing Klimt, released in 2007, features interviews with Altmann and others who were closely involved with the case from E. Randol Schoenberg to Hubertus Czernin. Adele's Wish, released in 2008 by filmmaker Terrence Turner, features interviews with Altmann, Schoenberg, and leading experts from around the world.
Maria took the sweater to Kerr's Department Store in Beverly Hills and attracted a multitude of buyers in California and across the United States for Bernhard Altmann's cashmere sweaters. Maria became the face of cashmere in California and eventually started her own clothing business.
Similarly to Woman in Gold, Laurie Lico Albanese's 2017 historical fiction novel, Stolen Beauty, tells the story of Maria Altmann and her aunt Adele Bloch-Bauer.
Details of Adele’s $280 million divorce will be kept secret, a judge has ruled.
According to sources, Adele, who has since been linked to British grime artist Skepta, has been hard at work on her next album and is set to release new music this year. Adele (R) and Simon Konecki at the 2013 Grammys. Picture: Lester Cohen/WireImage Source:Supplied.
Details of Adele’s $280 million divorce will be kept secret, a judge has ruled. The singer, 31, split from charity boss Simon Konecki, 45, last April after eight years together but they had not struck a pre-nup deal to protect her fortune.
But the pair’s relationship was dogged by rumours they were living separate lives, with Adele preferring life in glitzy Los Angeles, while Simon often stayed in the UK.
Adele and her now-ex-husband Simon Konecki didn’t sign a pre-nup agreement – and that’s expected to cost her dearly.
All those years later, the lawyer who handled Altmann's case was E Randol Schoenberg, the composer's grandson. Altmann was not old enough at the time to remember Klimt's visits.
The works included another later and finer portrait of Adele. At 90 years of age, her victory over the obstinate Austrian government seemed to give Altmann more pleasure than either the paintings, which she had disposed of so quickly, or the fortune their sale had brought her.
Maria Altmann in 2005 with the recovered Klimt painting of her aunt Adele. It fetched ÂŁ73m in 2006, a world record at the time. Photograph: Ann Johansson/Corbis. In 2006 Maria Altmann, who has died aged 94, won possession of five paintings by Gustav Klimt that had been seized by the Nazis in 1938. Soon afterwards, she sold the most famous ...
In 2006 Maria Altmann, who has died aged 94, won possession of five paintings by Gustav Klimt that had been seized by the Nazis in 1938.
As Klimt's lover, Gustav Mahler's wife , Alma, put it at least as impoliticly: "Klimt's pictures, which had started off in a grand manner, he covered with tinsel rubbish, and his artistic vision sank in gold mosaics and ornaments.".
Before Adele died in 1925, she wrote a will requesting that her husband should bequeath their five Klimt paintings to the nation. After the annexation of Austria, Ferdinand rewrote his will, and in any case it is unimaginable that Adele would have held to her wishes in the face of the Holocaust.