pretty women in hollywood life and death situations images

#Pretty women in hollywood life and death situations images movie

Then there was this extraordinary chain of events, and at the conclusion of the century both Maria and the painting ended up in the United States.’ Art, music, science and psychology were merging together. ‘Maria was born during that remarkable time in Vienna when it had become the crucible for all the great ideas of the 20th century. ‘It’s one of the great stories of the 20th century,’ he notes. This happens to be a masterpiece that you can find on jam jars, slippers and T-shirts, but nothing about the reproductions prepares you for its magnificence when you first see it.’Īccording to Curtis, Woman in Gold is not merely the narrative of a painting, but a portrait of a century. ‘It’s the Mona Lisa of Austria, but it’s also symbolic of the golden years of Vienna.

‘It’s a witness to the themes of the film,’ Curtis says. The one constant is Klimt’s portrait itself. ‘It’s a courtroom drama, an escape thriller and an odd-couple film,’ comments Curtis. The film switches between Adele Bloch-Bauer in turn-of-the-century Vienna, the upheaval suffered by the family in the wake of the Nazi occupation of Austria, and Maria’s legal crusade towards the end of her life (she died in 2011).

#Pretty women in hollywood life and death situations images movie

His resulting movie is Woman in Gold, starring Dame Helen Mirren as Maria Altmann and Ryan Reynolds as her lawyer, Schoenberg. In 2007 filmmaker Simon Curtis happened to see a BBC documentary about Altmann, Stealing Klimt, and unsurprisingly thought the remarkable tale was tailor-made for Hollywood. The other Klimts were sold at a Christie’s sale of Impressionist and Modern Art later that year. In June 2006 cosmetics magnate Ronald Lauder purchased Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I for $135 million - then the highest price ever paid for a painting - for display in Manhattan’s Neue Galerie, a sale brokered by Christie’s. An arbitration panel in Vienna would ultimately award Altmann ownership of the paintings.

She partnered with inexperienced lawyer Randol Schoenberg - grandson of her aunt’s composer friend Arnold Schoenberg - for what became a protracted battle for justice against the Austrian authorities, the latter erroneously arguing that they legally owned the pictures.Īltmann needed to obtain proof that Adele’s stated wish to leave the paintings to the Belvedere Museum was superseded by the will of Ferdinand (the legal owner), who named his nieces as heirs, and secure a ruling from the United States Supreme Court, permitting her to sue Austria in an American court. When the Austrian government passed a restitution law in 1998, ruling that property stolen by the Nazis could be returned to its rightful owners, Maria Altmann began a legal battle to regain the Klimts that belonged to her family, which included a second portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. Altmann escaped from Austria, making her way to Los Angeles with her husband, where she opened a dress boutique. The Nazis also stole an engagement ring belonging to Maria Altmann, Adele’s niece.

Ferdinand died in exile in Switzerland in 1945. Targeted amid the Nazis’ cultural looting spree, it was one of five Klimt paintings taken from the Bloch-Bauer residence, with the pictures ending up in Vienna’s Belvedere Gallery. Following Adele’s death in 1925 from meningitis, the masterpiece remained in the Bloch-Bauers’ Vienna townhouse until the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938. The mesmerising radiance of Adele Bloch-Bauer’s gaze in Gustav Klimt’s gold-flecked 1907 portrait of her provides no hint of the turbulent fate that lay in store for the painting.Ĭommissioned by her sugar-industrialist husband Ferdinand, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I took Klimt three years to create, and was completed amid speculation that the Austrian artist and his high-society subject were lovers.