mountain_adventures's review
informative
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
5.0
Fascinating and sad story of Klimt's art work and what happened to it during WWII and the current state of the work. Lots of excellent little side roads are added to help fill in potential gaps in your knowledge.
sharonslater's review against another edition
4.0
Extremely ambitious, deeply researched and succesfully achieved. Wonderful read. Didn’t expect to enjoy a “historical” book this much. Nevertheless, maybe there was too little about the actual “Lady in Gold” in the book that was supposedly named after her. I did deepen my understanding of WWII times, and got to enjoy individual background stories.
rc_cola's review against another edition
5.0
Fantastic book! This story is very close to my heart and the author does a wonderful job, not only in her extensive research, but also in crafting the vivid image of Vienna and it's amazing culture, art, and tragedy.
bridgetkerr's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
5.0
altlovesbooks's review against another edition
2.0
I'm unsatisfied, and I feel like the book title and premise misrepresented what it ended up being about. The beginning was promising, and I really enjoyed the picture the author painted (heh heh) of pre-war Vienna and the sorts of people it attracted. The depictions of Adele, Klimt, and all their associated friends and flings were interesting. From there, though, the book rushed its way to World War II and then spun its wheels there while it tried to tell short little stories of anyone who had even a tenuous connection to the painting or Adele or Klimt, and their experiences with World War II. It felt like half the book was stuck here, and I ended up getting really fatigued at reading Nazi story after Nazi story. It also felt like the painting, what I thought was the subject of the book, was mentioned very little during this section.
The book then sped up again, speeding us along to what I was expecting more of -- the actual fight for the painting. Or so I thought, anyway, the legal battle ended up spanning only a small handful of chapters (and the chapters in this book are only a page or two), and then it was over and Maria had won her fight. The rest of the book was Vienna's complaints about the paintings being purchased.
I like a good non-fiction book about random historical topics, but this one didn't feel like it fit the bill for me. It lacked direction and cohesion, because while the people stories were for the most part interesting, I never had a clear idea of where one thought was leading to the next. It also lacked substance about the actual painting beyond what was told pre-WWII, which is a letdown considering the book title implied more. This one missed the mark with me, I think.
The book then sped up again, speeding us along to what I was expecting more of -- the actual fight for the painting. Or so I thought, anyway, the legal battle ended up spanning only a small handful of chapters (and the chapters in this book are only a page or two), and then it was over and Maria had won her fight. The rest of the book was Vienna's complaints about the paintings being purchased.
I like a good non-fiction book about random historical topics, but this one didn't feel like it fit the bill for me. It lacked direction and cohesion, because while the people stories were for the most part interesting, I never had a clear idea of where one thought was leading to the next. It also lacked substance about the actual painting beyond what was told pre-WWII, which is a letdown considering the book title implied more. This one missed the mark with me, I think.
cook_memorial_public_library's review against another edition
5.0
Highly recommended by Cheryle, who comments, "Stolen art, a great mystery in the turn of the century and World War II Vienna. A true tale of suspense.''
Check our catalog: http://encore.cooklib.org/iii/encore/search/C__Slady%20in%20gold%20O%27Connor__Orightresult__U?lang=eng&suite=gold
Check our catalog: http://encore.cooklib.org/iii/encore/search/C__Slady%20in%20gold%20O%27Connor__Orightresult__U?lang=eng&suite=gold
srash's review against another edition
4.0
Pretty interesting look at a painting that I wasn't especially familiar with and its history, alongside the history of 20th century Vienna. Ends up being a family history of the subject of the painting more than anything else--Adele Bloch-Bauer, a sophisticated and wealthy Viennese Jewish society girl who likely had an affair with Gustav Klimt.
The painting ends up taking a rather winding path through Austrian history after Adele's untimely death in the 1920s. As Adele's family flees Austria after the Anschluss, the Nazis also usurp the painting and attempt to obscure its origins. After the war, Adele's surviving family have very different ideas about what should happen to the portrait, which remains in an Austrian museum, and a lengthy, contentious legal battle erupts between them and Austria over who's the rightful owner as the family itself also begins to disagree.
The painting ends up taking a rather winding path through Austrian history after Adele's untimely death in the 1920s. As Adele's family flees Austria after the Anschluss, the Nazis also usurp the painting and attempt to obscure its origins. After the war, Adele's surviving family have very different ideas about what should happen to the portrait, which remains in an Austrian museum, and a lengthy, contentious legal battle erupts between them and Austria over who's the rightful owner as the family itself also begins to disagree.
wynter's review against another edition
3.0
Oh poo. I was hoping to love this one more than I did. The Lady in Gold, as the subtitle suggests, is the story of the famous portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer by Gustav Klimt. The portrait itself is magnificent, so I was utterly intrigued. Did the book deliver? Meeeeh. I had several issues here:
1. History is not black and white. O'Connor sort of came across as this crusader on the mission that read "Jews - good, Austria - bad". Undeniably the Nazi party did horrendous things to the European population based on their race and background, but Austria wasn't divided clearly into Nazis and Jews. It's as if anybody who didn't resist the Nazis were evil supporters of Holocaust. How about the Austrians who hid Jews at the risk of their lives? How about Jews who sympathized with Germany's vision of dominance and growth until the genocide began? Austrians are all evil, all out to get the Jews, and museums that tried to save the art after the war were actually marauding criminals, racing against each other to satisfy their greed. Or at least that is the impression I got from reading The Lady in Gold. My stance on the topic is that history is a vast ocean filled with circumstance, personal passions, mistakes, chances, and survival. You cannot lump people into one pile based on their nationality, miss O'Connor. Oh wait, that's what the Nazis did. Let's learn from that.
2. The story deviates too much into brief biographies of multiple historical characters, and eventually you start losing track of who is who, and how they are related to the Bloch-Bauer portrait. There are chapters upon chapters of horrors of war, which again relate little about the art itself. Because of that the subtitle of the book is somewhat misleading. Considering that Klimt never discussed his private affairs and very few documents of Adele survived to present day, I should have expected that the much-speculated affair would not become any more clear after this book.
3. Too much speculation. The author imagines what goes though her subjects' heads as if this was fiction. How much of this can I attribute to the imagination of miss O'Connor and how much to her research, I don't know.
4. This is not the authors fault, but I hated the part when the five heirs were choosing what to do with the Klimt collection that was returned to them by the courts. Only one of them wanted to send the paintings to museums in Austria, so they could be enjoyed by the public as national treasure. The rest wanted to sell to private collectors. And then they have the audacity to claim it wasn't for money. "That's what Adele would have wanted", they say. She would want these paintings locked up in bedrooms of filthy rich magnates who see them purely as smart investment pieces? One of such paintings was sold to that guy who put his elbow through a Picasso. Yep, what a fate!
I did enjoy the description of pre-war Vienna, Klimt's liberated view of art, and Adele's short, but impactful life. Unfortunately, the book was bloated in places by unrelated trivia, and I disagreed with the author's stance on some issues. You win some, you lose some. Overall, an average kind of study of a famous masterpiece. I don't think I will be revisiting it anytime soon.
1. History is not black and white. O'Connor sort of came across as this crusader on the mission that read "Jews - good, Austria - bad". Undeniably the Nazi party did horrendous things to the European population based on their race and background, but Austria wasn't divided clearly into Nazis and Jews. It's as if anybody who didn't resist the Nazis were evil supporters of Holocaust. How about the Austrians who hid Jews at the risk of their lives? How about Jews who sympathized with Germany's vision of dominance and growth until the genocide began? Austrians are all evil, all out to get the Jews, and museums that tried to save the art after the war were actually marauding criminals, racing against each other to satisfy their greed. Or at least that is the impression I got from reading The Lady in Gold. My stance on the topic is that history is a vast ocean filled with circumstance, personal passions, mistakes, chances, and survival. You cannot lump people into one pile based on their nationality, miss O'Connor. Oh wait, that's what the Nazis did. Let's learn from that.
2. The story deviates too much into brief biographies of multiple historical characters, and eventually you start losing track of who is who, and how they are related to the Bloch-Bauer portrait. There are chapters upon chapters of horrors of war, which again relate little about the art itself. Because of that the subtitle of the book is somewhat misleading. Considering that Klimt never discussed his private affairs and very few documents of Adele survived to present day, I should have expected that the much-speculated affair would not become any more clear after this book.
3. Too much speculation. The author imagines what goes though her subjects' heads as if this was fiction. How much of this can I attribute to the imagination of miss O'Connor and how much to her research, I don't know.
4. This is not the authors fault, but I hated the part when the five heirs were choosing what to do with the Klimt collection that was returned to them by the courts. Only one of them wanted to send the paintings to museums in Austria, so they could be enjoyed by the public as national treasure. The rest wanted to sell to private collectors. And then they have the audacity to claim it wasn't for money. "That's what Adele would have wanted", they say. She would want these paintings locked up in bedrooms of filthy rich magnates who see them purely as smart investment pieces? One of such paintings was sold to that guy who put his elbow through a Picasso. Yep, what a fate!
I did enjoy the description of pre-war Vienna, Klimt's liberated view of art, and Adele's short, but impactful life. Unfortunately, the book was bloated in places by unrelated trivia, and I disagreed with the author's stance on some issues. You win some, you lose some. Overall, an average kind of study of a famous masterpiece. I don't think I will be revisiting it anytime soon.