Lost Lives, Lost Art

This is my latest book, arriving today thanks to Amazon. On the cover you see the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (also called The Lady in Gold or The Woman in Gold) in a painting by Gustav Klimt, and completed between 1903 and 1907. 

The painting was stolen by the Nazis in 1941. After the war, the painting went back to the Belvedere Gallery in Vienna, Austria where Paladian and I saw it in 2002. The portrait is the final and most fully representative work of Klimt's golden phase. 

In 2006 after a seven-year legal battle, an arbitration committee in Vienna agreed that the painting, and others that had been stolen from the family should be returned to Maria Altmann in USA. She sold this painting the same year for $135 million, at the time a record price for a painting.

It went to the businessman and art collector Ronald Lauder, who placed the work in the Neue Galerie in New York. The story is quite well known and has appeared in several documentaries and also made into a movie.