'Woman in Gold' relives a lesson in art and history
Gustav Klimt'sThe Kiss is one of the most famous paintings in history — yet it's the artist's privately commissioned portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer that has become the artist's most infamous masterpiece.
The gold-laden Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, was seized from Jewish Bloch-Bauers by the Nazis in 1938, scrubbed of its provenance and ultimately acquired by Austria's Belvedere museum, where it hung for half a century.
Six decades later, Adele Block-Bauer's niece, Maria Altmann, fought to reclaim her aunt's portrait and four other Klimts once owned by her family. The case wove through the Austrian and U.S. courts for eight years until she prevailed in 2006 (Altmann died in 2011 at age 94).
Now the story has earned its own feature film. Woman in Gold stars Helen Mirren as Atlmann and Ryan Reynolds as her rumpled young lawyer, Randy Schoenberg. "When we went to the Supreme Court, really no one thought we would have any chance of winning," says Schoenberg, who is the grandson of Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg. He grew up listening to Altmann's family tales; she was his grandmother's best friend.
Their efforts culminated in five Klimt paintings being returned to Altmann in 2006. The resulting film is "a courtroom drama, it's a thriller , and it's an odd-couple comedy," says director Simon Curtis (My Week With Marilyn), who begins Woman in Gold in a drawing room of the Bloch-Bauers, then wealthy sugar industrialists, as Klimt applies delicate gold leaf to his canvas.
The film marries Altmann and her lawyer's salty modern exchanges with terrifying scenes of the past. Oprhan Black star Tatiana Maslany plays Atlmann as a young woman, trying to flee as Jews were stripped of their rights and property and threatened with deportation to concentration camps after Nazis annexed Austria in 1938.
Mirren says she pored over hours of Altmann's videotaped depositions, read Holocaust materials and watched documentaries before playing the Viennese refugee. The actress (a dame across the pond) is the daughter of a Russian immigrant father, but Mirren says the comparisons stop there. "I wasn't thrown out of my home, my culture. Half my family were not murdered in the way Maria Altmann's (was)," says Mirren.
Reynolds calls the unassuming Schoenberg, who successfully argued Altmann's case before the Supreme Court in 2004, a quiet lion. "He lost everything in his life to fight for this," says Reynolds. "He doesn't strike you as a guy who's a warrior. And he is."
Schoenberg continues to consult on art restitution cases, including a pending case surrounding Lucus Cranach's oil paintings of Adam and Eve, believed to have been owned by the Dutch-Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker before he fled the Nazis in 1940. The works currently sit in the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, Calif. "Those two paintings are 100% stolen," says Schoenberg.
The Klimt portrait of Adele was purchased by Ronald Lauder for a then-record $135 million, and today hangs in the Neue Galerie in New York. Yet the painting's Hollywood ending is as much warning as it a history lesson. With anti-Semitic attacks rising in cities including Paris and Copenhagen, a recent Atlantic cover story asked if it's time for Jews to leave Europe.
Mirren said she felt the weight of keeping history alive in conveying Altmann's tale — particularly for younger generations.
"There's the line I added to the script: 'Because people forget, you know. Especially the young.' And it's true," she says. "We are losing the generation of people who had firsthand experience of (the Holocaust). I think the pain and the trauma of it was so profound they couldn't speak about it for a long time and it's only toward the end of their life they began to articulate what had happened to them, to remember it and live it again."