“Lady in Gold’ Author Draws Overflow Crowd

There was an overflow audience at Westport’s Temple Israel today to hear best-selling author Anne-Marie O’Connor. Her “The Lady in Gold: The Story of Gustav Klimt, Jewish Vienna, and the Restitution of his Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer” is her true account of the masterpiece gold portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the beautiful Muse who Gustav Klimt painted into history as a sensual Mona Lisa of turn-of-the-century Vienna. It tells the story of Jewish Vienna’s patronage of Klimt; the painting’s bizarre fate under Nazi rule; and the restitution battle that secured the painting, which now hangs in the Neue Galerie in New York. The letters and journals written by Gustav Klimt and his enigmatic intellectual portrait models shed new light on the artist, whose erotic drawings and notorious love life scandalized turn-of-the-century Vienna—but is now considered Austria’s finest painter. (CLICK TO ENLARGE) Phyllis Groner for WestportNow.com