A review by wynter
The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer by Anne-Marie O'Connor
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.