The Woman in Gold (Art Documentary) | Perspective

[Music] gustav klimt lived a colorful life that matched his exuberant paintings especially his most famous work of all the portrait of Adele bloch-bauer Adele bloch-bauer was a fascinating lady for her time really modern really forward-thinking Adele's husband Ferdinand wanted to give it as a anniversary present to Adele's parents claims actually spent over three years incredible much time working on the portrait cliffs most lasting an iconic work was the pinnacle of his aptly titled golden phase it's incredibly meticulous and ornate and must been very very difficult to paint it's completely gleaming it's like a jewelry box little did he know just how troubled a history this painting would have the Nazis confiscated his paintings including the bloch-bauer portrait which would probably have been labeled to degenerate artists if he had lived up until that time how did this portrait get caught up in an epic legal battle and subsequently become the world's most expensive artwork I can paint and draw I believe this myself and a few other people say that they believe this too but I'm not certain whether it's true Gustav Klimt was born in 1862 on the outskirts of Vienna it was brought up very conventionally he was born into an Austria that had been incessantly at war and then suddenly wasn't and so it was a very comfortable secure affluent boring world by the time he was thirty that had all changed and he was living in a city where there was Schoenberg and mallar and Freud and Vicky and Stein and it was just the most extraordinary avulsions of brilliance his father was a craftsman a gold engraver and good staff was brought up in an environment in which art was discussed and he decided to study at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts and he had a fairly conservative education there it was a strange time in that there was a real duality between immense progress and a sense of stagnation in society a lot of this progress I think was driven by a huge surge in the population there were these two opposing sides of society in Vienna real wealth juxtaposed with real poverty and Klimt kind of straddled the tube he was born one of seven children in a small suburb of Fianna very very poor their stories of him and his brother Zane teased at school because they had going to school in rags but there was also the mobility that his talent was recognized and he quite quickly became very famous in Vienna Vienna was then the capital of the austro-hungarian very wealthy but it was an extremely artistic city and in the late 19th century and turn-of-the-century it was very avant-garde and there was a lot of interesting exciting things going on in the art field so it was a great time for an artist to emerge at this time the Vienna secession was emerging meaning a whole new artistic movement was beginning to flourish the Vienna secession was set up in 1897 it was a group of art rebels those artists who wanted to break away from the conventional artistic scene in Vienna they set up an exhibition venue where they showed avant-garde art and Klimt was his first president so he played a crucial role in its founding he started his career really working with the state doing various murals eventually ended up completely turning his back on that and being a leader of the secession had already been a Berlin secession and a Munich secession so Fiona was rather parochial in that sense but it was a rejection of the kind of art that jumped himself had been making he really represents that move from traditionalism through to something really quite radical whoever wants to know something about me as an artist which alone is significant they should look attentively in my pictures and their seek to recognize what I am and what I want [Music] gustav klimt was an unusual character unlike most of the artists in vienna around the same time he steered clear of the burgeoning cafe society he was a very private person but his reputation did spread quickly and patrons sort him out he was very reclusive it seems his first studio the one he was in for 20 odd years was right in the center of Vienna and he in spite of that he didn't socialize he continued to work with artists at the Secession organization but he didn't mix so much with Viennese Society by this time he'd begun to make it and patrons and dealers would knock on his door so this is actually part I think of The Legend of Klimt is that he was quite reclusive he was in his studio a lot at the time he had quite an unconventional dress sort of loose-fitting tunic robe and he would be there working away night and day really he wasn't someone who was out and about March he was really based in the studio and this I think this sort of added to his mystery I have never painted a self-portrait I'm less interested in myself as a subject for painting that I am in other people above all women klimt may not have socialized as much as the other artists of his era but he certainly didn't shy away from all human interaction it's thought that he fathered at least 14 children in his lifetime yet there was always one constant in Clint's life his companion Emily Fleur ger he frequently wrote postcards to her on my first days here I did not start work immediately but as planned I took it easy for a few days flick through books study Japanese art a little when it became quite close to one of the Pflueger sisters in Yulia flugel who had established a dress salon with her two sisters called the Schwester and fuga or pflueger's sisters fashion salon claims brother aunt who died very young was married to Helen Emily's younger sister and unfortunately died which made Klimt really the guardian of Helen and he became very close to the Ferger family and he had long correspondence with her she was really in the center of the avant-garde bohemian circles in Vienna quite a rebellious lady she was Clint's lifelong companion they were almost certainly lovers as well but the relationship is a bit ambiguous Klimt actually he never married and had a string of lovers that Emily Pflueger is said to have been the model in the kiss which is timpz and probably most erotic work klipsch earliest pictures that really incorporated gold were was when he was working on a portfolio for this important Viennese art publisher called garlic and shank and he offered a work called the kiss which did have a rather lavish use of gold and that would have been in the late 1890s shortly thereafter in 1901 he made a painting called Judas one and many people believe that's actually a portrait of Adele bloch-bauer herself and that includes rather lavish use of gold not only in the the frame and the background for the figure but also the gold choker that she's wearing which is rather similar to the choker that we see on the portrait of Adele bloch-bauer herself in 1993 he went to Ravenna where there are the amazing Byzantine mosaics and frescoes and he said it was sort of nothing short of a revelation for him these incredible images icons surrounded by golds so I think that's really where we can see this start of using gold leaf the golden background has an amazing effect on the portraits and it's very very dramatic but also we have to remember that it was in his childhood it was in his upbringing his father was a gold engraver and he had the sort of the double lead into it where it was a family career essentially it was during this golden phase that Klimt began his first official portrait of Adele bloch-bauer it's believed that Gustav Klimt met a della bloch-bauer and her husband most likely through the Vienna secession Ferdinand bloch-bauer was one of the most important art collectors in the city and we know that Ferdinand approached Gustav Klimt and asked him to paint a portrait of his young wife who would have been about 25 years old at that time Ferdinand wanted to give it as a anniversary present to Adele's parents if Edmond was pretty rich he was a sugar merchant but Adele's father was really rich and he was a conveyer eminent banker and he was head of the eastern railways and all sorts of things and that occurred certainly by the summer of 1903 and we know that clinch began work on the portrait in the winter of 1903 Adele bloch-bauer took at least three years and when you look at it you can see why I mean it's incredibly meticulous and and ornate and must been very very difficult to pain this portrait of a Viennese society woman would become an object of desire for many including a Nazi officer but how did this artwork leave its home in Vienna and end up in the possession of a wealthy US art collector the portrait of Adele bloch-bauer is one of Klimt best-known works little did he know its turbulent future as he meticulously created this masterpiece which was a very slow artist he liked to spend a lot of time with his sitters making upwards of hundreds of sketches in fact he probably made at least 200 sketches just for the first portrait of Adele bloch-bauer about a hundred and twenty five of which are known to survive and we have a few of them in the collection of the museum here today it was very meticulous of course this was very frustrating for his sitters who would be there for many many hours the gelbach power would have traveled to his studio on the outskirts of Vienna and one of the outlying districts spent hours and hours with him at a time in a private chamber where he made these sketches and certainly that would have deepened the closeness of their relationship there's a lot of speculation surrounding this many people have assumed that they were lovers or delved into that we have absolutely no evidence part of that is because of the very sensuous nature of the portraits of Judith one and Judith two which are believed to be portraits of Adela herself I'm a painter paints day in day out from morning to leave me figure pictures and landscapes more rarely portraits [Music] klimt may have claimed that there was nothing special about him but his art was a different story his portrait of Adele bloch-bauer would eventually be hailed as a masterpiece and become an iconic work of art this painting is a really interesting combination of naturalism and decorative symbolism is the tube's it by side by side the portrait is incredibly complex and many people have described it as being something of a secular icon and I do think that's a rather apt description so in the rendition of her flesh to her face in her arms which is actually only 1/12 of the painting you see this quite naturalistic style you really get a sense of the person the detail in her face I think the first thing you notice other I shave sort of elliptical shapes on her gown there also appeared to be analytic devices the all-seeing eye of God which some people also see as a relation to the Egyptian we Jedi which would provide perhaps a form of protection for her there are theories that this is the eye of horus an Egyptian symbol protecting the vulnerable and eye protection would hang off danger we know that Adela suffered extremely poor health and was very frail her entire life in fact she died when she was only 43 years old and in 1925 and rather unexpectedly she also had tried to raise a family with her husband and had two miscarriages and lost the only child that she brought to term just a few days after his earth and this is believed to have occurred while Klimt was working on the painting so he might have incorporated those ambulating motifs as a sign to try to help her be successful in being a mother finally I would add that he included her initials a and B are scattered really throughout the gown and other parts of the canvas an absolutely marvelous composition and that's really the secret of the success of the painting the way that these different elements are brought together and sort of almost seamlessly merges in a sort of mosaic at the same time as the portrait of Adele bloch-bauer was first presented to the world Gustav Klimt first met the young artist Egon Sheila he would take him on as his protege and eventually Sheila would also become a celebrated artist Egon Sheila was like many other young artists at that time slightly younger generation than Klimt and they really looked up to him as the leader of the avant-garde so I'm gonna broken away opening up the art world in the city and bringing in something new he was incredibly generous to Sheila you know I think Sheila was 17 and tempters 45 he was listening to the Secession and he was you know very eminent and this turned up and said you know I want you to mentor me and he said okay and he found him models and he got him shown I suppose he recognized something in Sheila's work you can really see their belief and goodwill between Klimt and Sheila they even swapped drawings Sheila proposed it and Klimt said to Sheila you're much better off than me why did I ever want to do that but he still did the swap of the drawings and also when Sheila got into a bit of a tricky financial situation Klimt came to the rescue you introduced him to his most important patron orgas lettera who then commissioned Sheena to paint his son so he was really a big supporter of Sheila in his early career gustav klimt on Egon Sheila had both benefited from the amazing artistic and cultural flourishing that occurred in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century but World War one was around the corner and while they were able to steer clear of the conflict they both perished as a result of the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918 [Music] after tea it's back to painting a large popular dusk with a Gathering Storm Clint's work only became more and more highly regarded after he died he was seen as the greatest painter to come out of the Vienna secession but another artist a far less successful one named Adolf Hitler had also come out of Vienna and in the 1930s under his leadership Nazism was taking over Austria and Germany with the rise of the Nazis and really with their invasion of Austria with the onsh Luce of March of 1938 Ferdinand realized that this was you know going to be extremely bad news for him and he fled the country and shortly thereafter he was accused of tax evasion and other crimes and all of his properties were seized and he ended up settling in Switzerland where he lived impoverished a lawyer was appointed to oversee the bloch-bauer collection and homes and all of their assets he worked with various museums in the city and collectors to organize trades and outright sales of these works and through that this particular portrait as well as the second quarter of the dilib of power ultimately ended up in the collection of what is today the belvedere museum questions remained whether this was its rightful home as there appeared to be conflict between Adele's final wishes and the contents of Ferdinand's will he left a will naming all of his property to belong to his family's heirs so he mentioned his nephew in particular in his two nieces one of which was Maria Altmann she had to flee Vienna during the war her husband's got taken to Dachau to the concentration camp and was used almost as a pawn to bribe his brother and as soon as he was released they just completely bolted out of Anna Maria Altmann and her husband ended up settling in the US in California in particular and some family members did perish in the Holocaust in concentration camps she'd lost everything she'd lost the country she was born in she lost all of her family apart from immediate family had gone to gas drain for one way another been killed there was a lawyer and the intervening years right after World War two that did attempt to claim some of the family's property and was successful in reclaiming some things but the government insisted that they had Adela's will in her will provided that the Klimt paintings would go to the Austrian government and when this lawyer asked to see that will they always said it wasn't available or they had misplaced it Adele bloch-bauer it said she wanted the pictures and all the claims to go to the Austrian state but what she really meant was because she and her husband couldn't have children that when ferdinand died they should go to the Austrian state not that they should be stolen by Nazis seven years before he died I think rather changed the rules they really she would stop pursuing her claim but a tragic personal event would spark Maria's drive to get back what was rightfully hers if you fast-forward quite a few decades 1998 the law in Austria changes any works of art or property that had been seized illegally from families during this period you know should be rightfully returned to the heirs and survivors around the same time Maria Altmann sister dies and Maria inherits her papers and as she begins going through these papers she begins to suspect that perhaps that promise to the Museu was nothing more than a promise and it wasn't an outright gift Maria Altmann picked up the phone to a young family friend Rhonda Schonberg who was related to their very famous composer in Vienna had family history in Vienna and he said let's go for it let's take this case to court in America and eventually went up to the Supreme Court and Maria Altmann had several advisers on the case they said don't go with this young young lawyer you need to get someone very experienced we're going to Supreme Court but she's stuck with it and they won the case in 2004 and they won the right to take it to court in Austria so the case then moved there and in 2006 they won the paintings back one of Maria's supporters at the time was Ronald Lauder heir to the Estee Lauder company an avid art collector he had set up the neue Gallery in New York five years previously a gallery dedicated to the art of the Austrian and German avant-garde in 2006 Ronald Lauder purchased the portrait of Adele bloch-bauer from Maria Altmann in a private sale it would have been impossible for her to hang them in her small California bungalow I mean insurance costs alone would have been quite prohibitive and that was never her intention she did want the portraits and the landscapes to be in a museum collection if possible where they could remain on display and so a private sale was engineered so that we were able to acquire this for an undisclosed sum but reportedly 135 million dollars which was said to be the most expensive painting sold at that time well in a way the Belvedere is really the appropriate home for the painting in Vienna where the artists work fortunately as it happened it was bought by an American collector who's very public-spirited and has set up his own museum so at least the painting will remain on public view in the noid gallery in New York keeping the painting on public display has been the wish of every custodian of this portrait and it is testament to the pure creative talent of Gustav Klimt that people still queue daily to see it [Music]

Channel: Perspective

Views: 32,643

Rating: 4.9215684 out of 5

Keywords: Arts, The Arts, Theatre, Music, Full EPisode, Full documentary, documentary, performing arts, woman in gold, gustav klimt, documentary movies - topic, history documentary, gustav klimt (visual artist), art history documentary, art history, stolen painting, wwii, world war 2

Id: XoI0K4MQbGM

Length: 21min 48sec (1308 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 02 2020