Gustav Klimt´s (1862-1918) vibrant images now glut Vienna’s tourist traps kitsching up shawls, t-shirts, boxes, cups and it’s when you see dozens of marmalade jars with Klimt emblazoned gold glittering lids crowding a supermarket shelf that loathing sets in. This is a great shame as Klimt brilliant painter, creative genius and lusty satyr captured some of the most fascinating women in fin de siècle Vienna on canvas in impassioned portraits which have lost none of their magic. Adele Bloch-Bauer for instance, a bank director’s daughter who was married to a sugar manufacturer 24 years her senior. She and her sugar daddy hosted Vienna’s foremost literary and political Salon and she is best known due to Klimt, who was an avid visitor, framing her distinctive face, ivory décolleté and clutching hands against a gold glittering vortex. Described by a niece as “ sick, suffering, with a perennial headache smoking like a chimney, awfully delicate and enigmatic. Petite and elegant, smug and arrogant …ever searching for spiritual stimulation” and probably much more as Klimt´s celebration of her as a sensuous triumphant Judith goes to show. The sickening surge of envy, revolutionary agitation and Anti-Semitism that broke over impoverished Vienna at the close of World War I gutted and poisoned Adele’s genteel rarefied world. Her early death from meningitis in 1925 would, however, spare her the degradation, exile and impoverishment that the National Socialists forced on her husband. Klimt’s portraits of her that the Nazis had confiscated were only restored to her family in 2006. Magnificent “Golden Adele” has since been sold for a record breaking 135 million dollars and is on view in New York
Posted on: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 11:06:11 +0000
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