Download The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, 'Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer' AudioBook Free

"The Lady in Gold", a family portrait considered an unforgettable masterpiece, one of the 20th century's most recognizable paintings, made headlines around the globe when Ronald Lauder got it for $135 million a hundred years after Klimt, the most well-known Austrian painter of his time, completed the society portrait. Anne-Marie O'Connor, writer for the Washington Post, formerly of the Los Angeles Times, explains to the galvanizing story of the Lady in Platinum, Adele Bloch-Bauer, a stunning Viennese Jewish society figure; girl of the top of 1 of the largest banking companies in the Hapsburg Empire, brain of the Oriental Railway, whose Orient Express went from Berlin to Constantinople; better half of Ferdinand Bauer, sugar-beet baron. The Bloch-Bauers were skill customers, and Adele herself was considered a rebel of fin de siècle Vienna (she wished to be educated, a concept considered "degenerate" in a society that thought women being out in the earth went against their female "nature"). The author explains how Adele inspired the portrait and exactly how Klimt made more than a hundred sketches of her - simple pencil drawings on thin manila paper. And O'Connor writes of Klimt himself, child of an failed gold engraver, shunned by arts bureaucrats, called an imaginative heretic in his time, a genius in ours. She writes of the Nazis confiscating the family portrait of Adele from the Bloch-Bauers' grand palais; of the Austrian federal putting the painting on screen, stripping Adele's Jewish surname from it so that no signs to her identification (nor any hint of her Jewish roots) would be exposed. Nazi officers called the painting, "The Lady in Platinum" and happily exhibited it in Vienna's Baroque Belvedere Palace, consecrated in the 1930s as a Nazi organization. The author writes of the painting, inspired by the Byzantine mosaics Klimt had analyzed in Italy, with the exotic icons and swirls, the subject an idol in a golden shrine. We observe how, 60 years after it was taken by the Nazis, the Family portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer became the main topic of a decade-long litigation between your Austrian federal and the Bloch-Bauer heirs, how and why the U.S. Supreme Judge became involved in the case, and how the Court's decision had serious ramifications in the skill world. In this booklet listeners will see riveting social history; an illuminating and haunting look at turn-of-the-century Vienna; a brilliant family portrait of the development of an painter; a masterfully advised story of suspense. And at the heart than it, The Sweetheart in Platinum - the shimmering painting, and its equally irresistible subject matter, the fate of every forever intertwined.

Category: History