The Mona Lisa of New York

August 12, 2006

The beautiful Klimt portrait of his lover has finally been brought to rest
in New York. Patrick McCaughey reports.

New York has its Mona Lisa at last. Naturally it is the world's most
expensive painting: Gustav Klimt's Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. Ronald
Lauder of Estee Lauder fame bought it from Adele's niece, Maria Altmann, for
$US135 million ($A177 million). It has now gone on view in the Neue Galerie
together with the four other Klimts owned by the surviving family of the
sitter.

They spent 50 years wresting Adele from the determined and unscrupulous
clutches of the Austrian Government.

Adele died childless in 1925. In her will she had expressed the wish that on
her husband's death the two portraits of her by Klimt, plus the landscapes,
should be given to the Osterreichische Galerie in Vienna. The paintings were
not, however, hers to give.

The Bloch-Bauers, who were Jewish, had all their property confiscated
shortly after the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938. Adele's
husband, wealthy sugar manufacturer Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, died in penury in
Switzerland in 1945, making Maria Altmann and her brothers his heirs.

Austria was regarded as "an occupied country" after the war, like Denmark or
the Netherlands. When the surviving Bloch-Bauer family members sought
restitution for their confiscated property, they were largely fobbed off.
Reluctantly, the Austrian authorities gave them an export license for other
parts of the once huge Bloch-Bauer collection, provided they made no claim
to the Klimts by then ensconced in the Belvedere Palace.

For the next 50 years Austrian authorities clung to Adele's 1923 will as
their justification for retaining the paintings. Everyone knew it was a
legal fig leaf. Just to make sure, the will was removed from the court
documents.

The argument began to unravel in 1998 when the Austrian Minister for
Education and Culture, Elisabeth Gehrer, opened up the files, averring that
there was no looted art in Austrian public collections; $90 million worth of
art formerly owned by the Rothschilds surfaced as just one anomaly, and then
the Bloch-Bauer Klimts.

Baldly stating that the latter had not been looted, putting her one step
away from being a Holocaust denier, the minister promptly buried the matter
under commissions and committees stacked in favour of the Austrian
government and refusing restitution to Maria Altmann, who in 2004 was
granted permission by the US Supreme Court to sue the Austrian government
through the US court system. She won hands down and the five Klimts were
restored to Mrs Altmann.

The Austrians fought her to the end. Public opinion in Austria ran strongly
against restitution. These were not your run-of-the-mill Klimts. They were
all masterpieces, and the 1907 portrait of Adele regarded as the supreme
work of the "gold period". Reproduced in every book on Klimt, it was as
famous as The Kiss and used to hang alongside it in the Osterreichische
Galerie. How dare a Jewish family take this vital part of Austria's national
patrimony?

The story of the fight for restitution gripped New York as much as the $135
million sticker price. But now it was the Neue Galerie's turn to stumble.

This museum is Ronald Lauder's own creation. It opened five years ago in a
stately mansion at the corner of 86th Street and 5th Avenue, once the home
of the improbable Mrs Cornelius Vanderbilt III. Devoted to German and
Austrian 20th century art, it has a fine permanent collection of paintings
and a knockout collection of furniture, glass, ceramics and metalwork from
such masters as Josef Hoffmann and Adolph Loos, Marcel Breuer and Mies van
der Rohe. But it takes only 350 spectators at a time - $15 for adults, $10
for seniors and students.

With New York's Mona Lisa inside, lines were ringing the building.

The mildly eccentric Neue Galerie closes on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Why not
open on Wednesdays with a special charge of $50 per person? This was too
much for New York. Sumptuous extravagance is one thing; greed and
exploitation another. A howl went up so loud it threatened the beaux arts
windows of the Neue Galerie and its masters quickly backed off.

One other curiosity clouds this glittering ensemble.

In the famous gold portrait of Adele, Klimt paints her bony chest and
shoulders tenderly but dissolves her body into a waterfall of eye-like
shapes. They swim like fish and suggest female genitalia.

Adele Bloch-Bauer was Klimt's lover when he started the portrait in 1903.
She was 20 years younger than her husband and was the model for Klimt's two
paintings of Judith, the Old Testament heroine/assassin of the dread
oppressor Holofernes. In the first version, naked from the waist, she half
closes her eyes in invitation to the viewer, the overwhelming, smiling
seducer. In Judith II she is the bare-breasted slayer who idly streams her
fingers through her victim's hair.

When Klimt painted Adele five years later, he clad her in street clothes
from chin to toes with only her face and her hands exposed. She was no
longer his lover. Why the Neue Galerie should air brush that out of the
story is puzzling.

It makes all the difference. Klimt descended on his secret lover in a cloud
of gold as Zeus did to Danae locked away in her tower, or in her palace on
the Ringstrasse.

The Austrians fought her to the end. Public opinion in Austria ran strongly
against restitution. These were not your run-of-the-mill Klimts. They were
all masterpieces, and the 1907 portrait of Adele regarded as the supreme
work of the "gold period". Reproduced in every book on Klimt, it was as
famous as The Kiss and used to hang alongside it in the Osterreichische
Galerie. How dare a Jewish family take this vital part of Austria's national
patrimony?

The story of the fight for restitution gripped New York as much as the $135
million sticker price. But now it was the Neue Galerie's turn to stumble.

This museum is Ronald Lauder's own creation. It opened five years ago in a
stately mansion at the corner of 86th Street and 5th Avenue, once the home
of the improbable Mrs Cornelius Vanderbilt III. Devoted to German and
Austrian 20th century art, it has a fine permanent collection of paintings
and a knockout collection of furniture, glass, ceramics and metalwork from
such masters as Josef Hoffmann and Adolph Loos, Marcel Breuer and Mies van
der Rohe. But it takes only 350 spectators at a time - $15 for adults, $10
for seniors and students.

With New York's Mona Lisa inside, lines were ringing the building.

The mildly eccentric Neue Galerie closes on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Why not
open on Wednesdays with a special charge of $50 per person? This was too
much for New York. Sumptuous extravagance is one thing; greed and
exploitation another. A howl went up so loud it threatened the beaux arts
windows of the Neue Galerie and its masters quickly backed off.

One other curiosity clouds this glittering ensemble.

In the famous gold portrait of Adele, Klimt paints her bony chest and
shoulders tenderly but dissolves her body into a waterfall of eye-like
shapes. They swim like fish and suggest female genitalia.

Adele Bloch-Bauer was Klimt's lover when he started the portrait in 1903.
She was 20 years younger than her husband and was the model for Klimt's two
paintings of Judith, the Old Testament heroine/assassin of the dread
oppressor Holofernes. In the first version, naked from the waist, she half
closes her eyes in invitation to the viewer, the overwhelming, smiling
seducer. In Judith II she is the bare-breasted slayer who idly streams her
fingers through her victim's hair.

When Klimt painted Adele five years later, he clad her in street clothes
from chin to toes with only her face and her hands exposed. She was no
longer his lover. Why the Neue Galerie should air brush that out of the
story is puzzling.

It makes all the difference. Klimt descended on his secret lover in a cloud
of gold as Zeus did to Danae locked away in her tower, or in her palace on
the Ringstrasse.

Maybe Mona Lisa should be forever chaste? Maybe Aunty Adele's secrets should
be kept from the prying and the prurient?

Maybe Mona Lisa should be forever chaste? Maybe Aunty Adele's secrets should
be kept from the prying and the prurient?