The Lady in Gold: Adele Bloch-Bauer

One of the wonderful things about living in New York are the museums, big and small.  The Neue Galerie on 5th Avenue is one of my favorites, particularly because of this painting.

Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I

Neue Galerie, NY

This lovely lady in gold is Adele Bloch-Bauer, painted in 1907, by this gentleman, Gustav Klimt, one of the foremost painters of fin-de-siecle Vienna.

The painting was bought by Ronald Lauder for $135 million dollars in 2006 after the painting was finally released by the Austrian government to the relatives of  Adele Bloch-Bauer who fought for over 8 years to have the painting and 4 others returned to the family.  From the moment that I saw the painting in the museum, I've been curious about this beautiful woman with the rather sad eyes who was painted by one of my favorite painters.  It turns out that I'm not the only one who has long been fascinated by the subject of the painting. Lauder stated that as a young teenager of 14, he too had become fixated on the painting.

According to Anne-Marie O'Connor in her new book entitled Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, it took Klimt 3 years to paint Adele's portrait.  At the time, Adele was a 21 one year old married socialite from a well to do Jewish family. Her father was the head of one of hte largest banks in the Hapsburg Empire, as well as head of the Oriental Railway, whose Orient Express ran from Berlin to Constaninople. At the age of 17, she'd married Ferdinand Bauer, a sugar-beet baron who was 17 years older than she was.  Adele's sister Therese had married Ferdinand's brother Gustav.  After their marriages, the couples hyphenated their last names to Bloch-Bauer.

Adele was apparently not only very intelligent but also a bit bohemian compared to her more staid hubby.  She was also considered a bit of a rebel, she had wanted to attend university, or to have some sort of intellectual job.  Instead, she bowed to convention and married. Although her husband adored her, commissioning not one but two portraits of Adele from Klimt, Adele was frustrated with her life.  Unfortunately Adele and her husband were unable to have children which meant that she had failed in her primary duty.  Instead, Adele threw herself into the world of art patronage, nobbing with some of the most influential mind in Viennese society, including Schnitzler, and Freud.  One of her closest friends was Alma Mahler who came very close to having an affair with Klimt as a teenager. Adele's niece Maria describes in her in the book as being somewhat cold and impatient with children.  Adele smoked which was tres risque for the time, especially in public.

Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II, 1912, 

 private collection

 



There is speculation that Klimt and Adele were lovers were a brief time.  Adele was the only woman that he painted twice. No one knows for sure since Klimt left very little in the way of private letters or a diary.  He was known to be a bit of a scoundrel, Wikipedia writes that he had 16 illegitimate children.  Unlike Adele, Klimt grew up dirt poor, so poor that he didn't go to school for a year because his parents were embarassed by his shabby clothes. Initially Klimit just hoped to become an art teacher, he had no vision that he would one day be considered one of the greatest Austrian artists. Of course that happened after his death.  While he was alive, Klimt was considered a rebel, an artistic heretic.  He refused to paint pretty pictures of landscapes, or society portraits like Winterhalter or Markt.  Klimt was influenced more by the work of the Impressionists in Paris and then later by the works of Matisse & Picasso.  Shunned by the Viennese aristocracy, Klimt looked to the rich Jewish industralists as art patrons.

Klimt didn't look like a painter, he looked more like a sculptor or a wrestler.  He was tall, and built like an ox.  Typically he wore large smocks and sandals to paint, designed by his companion Emilie Floge, with nothing on underneath.  People talk about his charisma, almost an animal magnetism.  Looking at his photographs, I can definitely see how he seduced so many women.  Klimt seemed to have not only loved women, but respected them as human beings.  He understood that they had sexual desires like a man, there are several drawings in the Neue Galerie that Klimt did of women in the throes of ecstasy or pleasuring themselves.  For most of his life, he lived with his mother and his sisters.

Both Klimt and Adele died young, in their 50's.  Klimt died in 1918 just as World War I was ending, Adele died several years later of meningitis.  Their secrets died with them. 

The Lady in Gold is a fantastic read, a vivid portrait of a world that was lost with the advent of World War I, it's also the story of a family and what they endured, as well as a brief history of the Jews in Vienna.  It's a pretty quick read, and well worth it.  There is happiness and sadness, particularly the rift that developed in the family over the fight for the family's Klimt paitings.  Although the family made a great deal of money from the sale of the 5 paintings, I think it's a shame that the two portraits of Adele are seperated.  I don't know why Lauder didn't buy the 2nd painting.  It would have been wonderful if the paintings could all have gone to a museum.  Perhaps one day.

In the meantime, if you get a chance, please do visit Adele at the Neue Galerie and then head downstairs to Cafe Sabarsky for a piece of sachertorte and a cup of strong Viennese coffee with whipped cream.

The Glamorous Gunning Sisters: Lady Anne Davenport

This week we have the final installment in author Deborah Hale's series on The Glamorous Gunning Sisters: The Next Generation.

Lady Betty Hamilton’s cousin, Lady Anne Coventry, did not move in such exalted circles, but she did manage to create every bit as great a scandal. Lady Anne was born in 1757, the third of Maria Gunning’s children by the Earl of Coventry. Like her cousin, she experienced early loss with the death of her mother when she was only three. The earl took an interest in his heir, but little in his daughters, Maria and Anne. Shuttled between the family estate, Croome, and Brighthelmstone, they were left mostly in the care of their French governess and their uncle by marriage, Gilly Williams.

One person who did take an interest in the child was famed wit and eccentric George Selwyn, a friend of Williams who had also been admirer of Anne’s mother. Selwyn’s interest in “Nanny,” as he called her, was described by contemporaries as singular (an 18^th century euphemism for obsessive and rather creepy). In a biography of the Duchess Argyll, Horace Bleakly recounts, “in the subsequent correspondence will be found many pleasing proofs of the anxiety with which he (Selwyn) watched over the welfare of the offspring of his deceased friend and of the parental and almost romantic affection with which he regarded the interesting child.”

Selwyn expected updates on her health and spirits in every letter he received from Williams. He sent Anne and her sister gifts for which she wrote him a thank-you note in French, asking him to visit. In a letter to Selwyn in 1765 when Anne was eight-years-old and her brother ten, their father sounds disturbed by Selwyn’s interest in his children: “I have refused so many applications to let the little boy leave Marybone, that I must beg of you not to ask it. There is no one but Duchess Hamilton has liberty to send for him, and it would be very inconvenient to extend that privilege any farther.” In a post-script, he added, “I shall not trust you in a post-chaise with Nanny a year or two hence.”

Was Selwyn as much a pedophile as his correspondence and actions make him sound, and did he ever act upon his obsession? Were Anne’s subsequent actions those of a child alternately neglected and spoiled, as contemporaries suggest, or might they have been the self-destructive behaviour of a sexual abuse victim?

When Anne was seven, her father remarried Barbara St. John who was an affectionate stepmother. Williams wrote to Selwyn, “I wish her indulgence may not, in the end, prove worse than a little wholesome reserve and moderate restraint.” Not long afterward, he complained to Selwyn of the child’s behaviour: “I told Nanny what you have brought for her, though by the by she does not deserve it, for, from the want of all restraint and contradiction, she grows so intolerably passionate, that I wish one time or other she does not hurt her sister.” In another letter, he wrote, “There is seldom a night she does not fight us all round. The very last night of all, she hit me a box of the ear, and told her good-natured stepmother not to be so impertinent as to trouble her head about her.” He concluded by predicting, “I fear she will be outdone before she knows she is to blame.”

After this, Williams’ letters to Selwyn grew less frequent. His last mention of Anne was in 1766, when he wrote, “Nanny is well and in beauty.” His last letter in 1770 contained no mention of the girl, who would have been thirteen. By that time Selwyn seemed to have taken a special interest in the young daughter of Lord and Lady Carlisle. Eight years later, Lady Anne was mentioned again in the Selwyn correspondence by his niece, Mary Townshend: "I am told of another intended marriage not upon so solid a foundation; Mr. E, Foley to Lady Anne Coventry. Except Lord Deerhurst (her brother) takes them on his establishment, I do not see how they are to subsist.” Miss Townshend’s brother Thomas also mentioned Lady Anne’s marriage with distinct disapproval: “You have heard, I suppose of Ned Foley's match with Lady Anne Coventry. The trustees settled the jointure; who settled the match, God knows.”

It was a far less brilliant match than Lady Betty Hamilton had made, and no more happy. Edward Foley, was the second son of a newly created baron. Though his family had a large fortune, Ned and his equally profligate brother seemed determined to spend and gamble it all away. Nine months after the wedding, The Annual Register for 1779 announced, “Rt Hon. Lady Anne Foley of a son.” The child must have died very young for sources indicate the couple had no family. “Within a few months of the wedding,” wrote Horace Bleakley, “the conduct of the lady had provided the scandalous chronicles with new material.” So numerous were Lady Anne’s lovers that it was rumored she sent the following note to General Fitzpatrick, "Dear Richard, I give you joy. I have just made you the father of a beautiful boy...P.S. This is not a circular.”
For several years Ned Foley seemed content to let his wife take as many lovers as she wished, until she began an affair with the Earl of Peterborough. By this time Foley may have run through Lady Anne’s jointure and possibly saw the wealthy peer as a chance to profit from his unsatisfactory marriage. Or perhaps he was looking to settle down and have children he could be tolerably certain he had sired. Foley brought charges of “criminal conversation” (the legal term for adulterous sex) against Lord Peterborough and won £2500 in damages – equal to over half a million US dollars in today’s money.

When Foley sought to divorce her, Lady Anne fought back. Her lawyer argued that “Lady Anne Foley had been guilty of infidelity with many persons before; that Mr. Foley knew it in some instances, and was cautioned against Lord Peterborough, yet that he kept him in his house when his lordship wished to go, and told him not to be vain of Lady Anne's favors, for that she shared them to all men alike; that he left him in the house alone with her for days.” Unfortunately, the court decided against her. Not only did Foley drag Anne through the humiliation of a divorce, where her infidelity was discussed in detail in both Houses of Parliament, he made further money by publishing all the salacious details in a pamphlet that is still in circulation!

Perhaps miffed at the amount of money the dalliance had cost him, Lord Peterborough had no intention of making an honest woman of Lady Anne once she was free. Besides, an earl did not need an infertile wife with a notorious reputation. The lady did not languish, however. Within two years she married Samuel Wright, a captain in the 15th Hussars, who was the son of a prosperous banker. The couple retired to his home in Nottinghamshire to live out the rest of their days in the peace that had long eluded her.

August Book of the Month - Marilyn: The Passion and The Paradox

Marilyn Monroe in The Prince and The Showgirl

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Marilyn Monroe. I hope that Marilyn is looking down to see just how much of an impact her life and career has had on the world.  From the iconic Warhol portrait to Sir Elton John's song "Candle in the Wind" it feels as if Marilyn is somehow still alive. She's inspired everyone from Madonna to Mariah Carey to Lady Gaga. In fact, one could say that Madonna owes her entire career to Marilyn Monroe.  Mariah Carey owns Marilyn's white piano and Lindsay Lohan recreated her last photo shoot for New York Magazine.  In the past year alone we've had Michelle William's Oscar nominated performance in My Week with Marilyn (an accolade that eluded Marilyn throughout her career) and Katherine McPhee and Megan Hilty duking it out to play Marilyn on the TV series SMASH.

Conspiracy theories abound about Marilyn's death, particularly after the revelations of her relationships with both JFK and RFK.  Was Marilyn murdered because she threatened to tell the world about her affairs with the two brothers? Was it just an accidental overdose? Or had Marilyn's life so spiraled down that she no longer wanted to live? Those are questions that the world will probably never have answers too.

There are many people who just don't 'get' Marilyn. I know that I was one of those people.  Watching old movies as a child, I was drawn more to actresses like Vivien Leigh and Olivia de Haviland.  I didn't understand that Marilyn was much more than a wiggle, a breathy voice and large breasts.  It wasn't until I started stufying acting in high school that I really began to appreciate her performances in movies like Some Like it Hot and The Misfits. Even in small roles like Miss Caswell in All About Eve, there is a feeling of sadness and vulnerability about her performance.  I started reading biographies about her, the two best being the memoir written by Susan Strasberg (the original Anne Frank on Broadway) and Barbara Leaming's biography.

Now Bloomsbury has published a major new biography on Marilyn by Lois Banner just in time for the 50th anniversary of her death. There's been a lot of hype about this book in Vanity Fair and Elle magazines, great reviews from Booklist and Publisher's Weekly. Any reader expecting a juicy, gossipy book to read on the beach will be thoroughly disappointed.  This is not the book for you.  Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox is a much more nuanced and authoritative look at the life of the screen siren.  The biography is not only a pyschological portrait but also a cultural history of the first 60 years of the 20th century.

A great deal has been written on line concerning the 'revelations' in the book that Marilyn may have had affairs with women.  Banner doesn't really give any concrete evidence but it shouldn't really be surprising.  Marilyn believed in free love, she was also incredibly emotionally needy, and a people pleaser. She also was constantly searching for both a father/protector as well as a mother figure to replace her own mother who basically abandoned her from birth due to mental illness and lack of money into a series of foster homes. Marilyn would see her mother on weekends until Gladys was admitted to a mental hospital.  Her mother's best friend Grace also shuttled Marilyn into different foster homes and once into an orphanage.  Granted it wasn't a Dickensian orphanage, but Marilyn's abandonment issues ran deep.  Marilyn as bisexual is not that big of a shock.

The first section of the book which details Marilyn's childhood and early teenage years tends to drag a bit. I was fascinated to learn that Marilyn as a child suffered from a stutter, it's the first time that I've ever read that in a biography. Banner also deduces that Marilyn may have suffered from dyslexia.  One of things that I've always found interesting about Marilyn is how her insecurities deepened and grew, the more famous that she became. She never felt that she was good enough.  Banner makes a credible case for Marilyn's lateness and insistence on several takes as being part of her need to be perfect, no doubt another legacy from being shuttled around from one home to another.

Banner astutely points out something that I think tends to be forgotten with Marilyn, how hard she had to work for her stardom.  Studio executives, amazingly enough, had no faith in Marilyn as either as an actress or a star.  Zanuck only took notice when the audience did. Banner suggests that Marilyn's past as a party girl, attending studio parties that were mostly men, may have hurt her in the eyes of the studio.  Too them she was just a piece of ass that got passed around. They treated her like a joke.  I was also impressed by how seriously Marilyn took her craft, studios normally paid for actors to take singing and dancing lessons but not for her.  She paid for all of that herself out of her salary and her modeling jobs. It was Marilyn's determination and skill that made her a star.  She manufactured the persona of Marilyn Monroe, not the studio.

Banner also pointed out that Marilyn was very open about that fact that she had been sexually abused as a foster child which was not openly discussed in the 1950's.  Marilyn was a pioneer in a way that she talked about sex and sexuality in interviews, in a notoriously puritanical decade.  She was pre-sexual revolution.

Banner is an excellent writer and she definitely has a deep love and understanding of Marilyn that I've seen from only a few other biographers. The book is at it's best when Banner is discussing some of Marilyn's earlier films, the ones that sort of get lost in the shuffle, in order to concentrate on her later films after she became a star. My one complaint about the book is that it tends to be a bit repetitative.  It's not necessary to repeat a bit of information that you've told the reader two pages before yet again.  Our attention span is not yet that bad! Despite that one flaw, Marilyn couldn't have asked for a better biographer to interpret her life story for the 21st century. Marilyn comes across as a deeply complex woman. Hopefully readers of the biography will be motivated to seek out some of Marilyn's earlier films like Niagara or Don't Bother to Knock.