The Lady in Gold

by Anne-marie O'connor

  Since the Anschluss, Führer had become a legal double agent, a vulture lawyer, awarded the lucrative concession for managing the state theft of property of Jewish families whom Führer quietly plotted to fleece personally. Führer would compile a distinguished roster of desperate clients, including Richard Strauss’s poor Jewish daughter-in-law, Alice; Serena Lederer and her daughter, Elisabeth Bachofen-Echt; Louis Rothschild; Freud’s four sisters—and now poor Ferdinand. They may not have been aware that Führer had been promoted to the rank of SS Hauptsturm-führer.

  Führer sent Ferdinand obsequious birthday cards. Behind his back, Führer called Ferdinand an “ugly Jew,” and secretly disregarded his wishes. Führer was going to cash in on the Klimts.

  Klimt’s son, Gustav Ucicky, soon learned who controlled the Bloch-Bauer Klimts. He tracked down Erich Führer. Ucicky coveted Schloss Kammer am Attersee, which was hanging in the Belvedere. Schloss Kammer am Attersee was a lovely painting of the beautiful golden yellow Habsburg castle at Seewalchen, down the road from the Villa Paulick, where Klimt vacationed with Emilie Flöge. Ferdinand had donated the painting to the museum in 1936, deferring to Adele’s wishes.

  Führer had a solution. On September 30, 1941, he met with Grimschitz, the new Belvedere director, to cut a deal. He proposed to buy Schloss Kammer am Attersee from the Belvedere. In return the Belvedere would get two paintings that Erich Führer controlled as the Nazi-appointed “representative” of Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer. One was Klimt’s botanical explosion, Apple Tree. The other was the spectacular gold portrait of Ferdinand’s long-dead wife, Adele Bloch-Bauer.

  The German art collectors for Hitler’s Führermuseum weren’t interested in Adele’s gold portrait. But the painting was a familiar icon to Austrians at the Belvedere. Thanks to Ferdinand’s generosity in lending it to shows abroad, it had become a visual talisman of the country of Strauss and Mozart at a time when Austria was struggling to forge a new identity.

  Erich Führer, the Nazi lawyer who helped the Reich fleece Ferdinand, 1965. (Illustration Credit 38.1)

  The deal was struck.

  Führer sent the gold portrait of Adele to the Belvedere with an obsequious letter signed “Heil Hitler!” The Belvedere art historians knew, of course, that Adele Bloch-Bauer was Jewish, the wife of the man whom government Aryanization files called “the Jew Ferdinand Israel Bloch-Bauer.” But the painting could be reinvented, just as Ferdinand and Adele’s Elisabethstrasse mansion was being refitted with offices for the German Railways.

  Adele’s identity disappeared with a simple stroke of the pen.

  Her gold portrait turned up in a book that announced the Belvedere’s acquisition, in the winter of 1941, of an “awe-inspiring portrait of a woman covered with a shimmering crust of gold. Perhaps the most significant of [Klimt’s] works, the dark head emerges, as if drowning in gold, the golden ornaments transporting her from the realm of the ordinary. We are beheld by a goddess, but not from afar, like the solemn, sainted gold mosaics of Ravenna.” This was an earthly goddess, a Judith “with an unrestrained sensuality, like a wild Salome in flames,” wrote the author of the 1942 book Gustav Klimt: Ein Künstler aus Wien. Strangely, he did not identify this illustrious painting, perhaps to avoid drawing attention to a backroom deal involving people he knew personally, or to the origins of a woman who was now a racial enemy.

  An illustration in the book gave the gold portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer a new German title: Dame in Gold.

  The author of this cover-up was Klimt’s old friend, the writer and set designer Emil Pirchan, who had once praised the artist’s virile physique, and had likely known Adele personally. It was a sad end to Pirchan’s long and rich career. “Heil Klimt the Hero!” Pirchan wrote.

  Adele, the long-haired sylph with the Grecian gown and tedious wedding poem, was no more. The wealthy muse of Klimt, his patron, his friend, and perhaps much more, was wiped away. Adele Bloch-Bauer was now simply the “Lady in Gold.”

  Nazis in the Family

  For most Klimt patrons, erasing the Jewish stain wasn’t quite so easy.

  Jewish society families who had supported the Secession with Adele and Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer were now intermarried with Gentile aristocratic families. The Nuremberg laws banned marriage between Germans and Jews, putting these families in a precarious position.

  The daughter of August and Serena Lederer had married into a Gentile brewing dynasty and was now Baroness Elisabeth Bachofen-Echt. Elisabeth and her mother, Serena, had been painted by Klimt, as had Serena’s mother, Charlotte Pulitzer.

  They had imagined themselves members of Austrian society. Now, with the Nazi takeover, they were simply unwanted Jews. Serena had been slapped with the usual trumped-up tax charge against Jews, and she was fighting it, unaware that this would be futile.

  Elisabeth was in despair. Her four-year-old son had died after the Anschluss. Her “Aryan” husband, Baron Wolfgang Bachofen-Echt, demanded a divorce from Elisabeth in August 1938, and her property was being transferred to him.

  How this sinister predicament had befallen the delicate Elisabeth, raised under the careful tutelage of Gustav Klimt himself, was difficult to comprehend. As Klimt had once admonished, Elisabeth had not grown into a silly “petit-bourgeois.” Elisabeth, a sculptor, was shy and gentle, with deep convictions. In Klimt’s portrait, she was ethereal, fragile, with enormous dark eyes, and surrounded by powerful Chinese dragons that resembled the statue in the foyer of her parents’ country home. In life, the girl whom Gustav Rinesch nicknamed “Beautiful Lisl” was a soft-spoken hothouse flower, determined to live her ideals.

  When Hitler arrived, Elisabeth, refined and trusting, remained in Vienna to care for her dying child.

  The Lederer name might never have been joined with the Bachofen-Echt barons if August Lederer had not been so successful. When Elisabeth met Baron Wolfgang Bachofen-Echt, he was an heir to one of Austria’s biggest beer breweries, the Nusdorf. The Bachofens had only become barons in 1906, and their title was abolished after World War I. But they still used it.

  The Bachofen-Echt brothers were drinking buddies of Elisabeth’s brother, Erich, and Gustav Rinesch, Maria Bloch-Bauer’s old admirer. Handsome Wolfgang was in no rush to marry. He and his brothers were playboys. Even in a beer-loving country, the family had managed to drain the finances of the family brewery.

  Elisabeth Lederer was conspicuously eligible. She was from a wealthy family with a stately town home and a lovely schloss, or great house, on the outskirts of Vienna. She was also beautiful.

  Elisabeth had a Jewish surname. But that could be remedied by marriage. By then intermarriage between Jews and Gentiles was hardly rare among the urban elite. There were advantages to marrying Jewish girls. In a patriarchal Austria in which the eldest son, or even a nephew, was still often given control of the inheritance, Jewish fathers willed substantial sums to their daughters.

  The high-minded Klimt protégée was no match for the well-practiced charms of rugged Wolfgang. Elisabeth left the Israelite community to convert to Wolfgang’s Protestant Helvetian Church and marry him on July 17, 1921.

  “Wolfgang did not marry the beautiful Lisl for the Lederer money,” his friend Gustav Rinesch wrote, adding, “Of course, the money was no hindrance.”

  August dutifully bailed out the brewery and installed the couple in a well-appointed building on lovely Jacquingasse, facing the Belvedere gardens.

  They finally had a child in 1934. But little August Anton had serious health problems from birth. When Hitler marched into Vienna, the child was very ill.

  From the moment they arrived, Elisabeth had an “insane fear” of the Nazis, Rinesch wrote. Her husband found himself saddled with a prominent Jewish wife.

  It could hardly have been reassuring that Wolfgang’s brother Eberhard immediately applied to become an SS officer. To prove his loyalty, Eberhard noted on his application that he had joined the Austrian Nazi Party in 1933, when it was illegal, and that he had become a brownshirt in 1934.

 
; As Elisabeth struggled with these chilling realities, her crippled little boy died on July 5, a few days before the seventeenth anniversary of her ill-conceived marriage to Wolfgang. Elisabeth collapsed. At the cemetery, “the stricken mother refused any attempts to console her, and didn’t want to leave the grave of her child,” Rinesch recalled. Wolfgang was more decisive. On August 17, he unilaterally divorced Elisabeth in a Nazi court.

  Wolfgang may have kept a secret from Elisabeth: he too had joined the Austrian Nazi Party in 1933. Rinesch said Wolfgang was terribly anguished by Elisabeth’s plight.

  If so, it was too late for regrets.

  Wolfgang now received the title to his wife’s shares in the beer brewery and the building on Jacquingasse, though Elisabeth was allowed to remain there, at least for now. Elisabeth had lost everything.

  For a time, Elisabeth was simply in shock. She sat behind the long silk drapes at her elegant home at Jacquingasse, looking over the Belvedere gardens and pondering her fate as a racial outcast in a country that no longer existed, the sensitive, doe-eyed girl in her Klimt portrait a fragile relic of a gentler era.

  “Above the Mob”

  As the purple lilacs bloomed in the terrifying Vienna spring of April 1939, Elisabeth sat down and began a memoir of her idyllic, privileged childhood with Gustav Klimt. The personal reflection must have provided an island of peace, but that may not have been her main motive. Elisabeth was desperately afraid.

  Now Klimt’s roguish reputation would come in handy.

  “My memories of Gustav Klimt go back to my earliest childhood, at the time when the consciousness of the ego and thoughts were being formed,” Elisabeth began, in the Freudian lexicon of her childhood.

  When she was just learning to speak, she wrote, she would crow with delight when she heard the deep baritone that announced Klimt’s arrival. The bearlike Klimt lifted her to his shoulders and spun her around until she was dizzy with joy.

  When Elisabeth was older, she wandered through Klimt’s studio, playing with his cats, Peter and Murl, while Klimt painted a portrait of her mother. Klimt let Elisabeth play with one of his little kittens. How she cried when Klimt found the kitten a home!

  She called him “Uncle.”

  At elementary school, Elisabeth’s teacher was impressed when she told him that Gustav Klimt had already taught her to read. Klimt told her stories by Confucius and Lao-tzu, and introduced her to Japanese and Chinese art.

  Klimt defended Elisabeth when she wrote her own fantasy stories instead of class assignments. “I won’t let her become a little monkey, she should keep her creativity!” Klimt declared in an argument with Serena, before storming out of the house.

  “I was certainly not to become a little bourgeois. He saw to that,” Elisabeth wrote.

  One day Klimt took her to the Gauguin exhibition at the old Miethke Gallery, where Klimt had exhibited his erotic drawings that were denounced as pornography. Gauguin’s Tahiti paintings were “a whole new world,” Elisabeth wrote. “And while the people around us criticized the Impressionists, even as a very young girl, I had the feeling I ‘stood above the mob,’ as [Klimt] himself put it, and a conscious identification with him was developing inside of me.”

  Klimt took her to an exhibition of Cézanne, one of his great influences. An art historian told Klimt that “the little one should maybe wait outside, for she would be bored.” “You! She knows more about Cézanne than you do!” Klimt retorted dismissively.

  When Elisabeth showed Klimt a tiny ceramic dancer she made from a piece of clay, “he decided immediately that I should take up sculpting.” She gave her parents the ceramic dancer for Christmas.

  Her father’s brother smirked maliciously: “Well, well, bohemian.” The uncle turned to Elisabeth’s father. “I would really suppress these inclinations,” he said. “I think we have demonstrated quite enough patience.” Serena rushed out of the room, furious. Elisabeth asked her mother to explain these tensions, but “I was rebuffed,” Elisabeth wrote. “She said I was too young to understand.”

  The sculptor Heinrich Zita was Elisabeth’s art instructor. When she unveiled her first relief in 1908, sculptor Rudolf Weyr came to look at it with Klimt. Weyr “shook Klimt’s hand, grabbed his shoulders, seemed very moved and said passionately, his words still ringing in my ears, ‘You can really see the family resemblance.’ ”

  Soon, “Papa categorically told Mama that he forbade her to go to Uncle’s studio, and that within the family there was already too much talk about me,” Elisabeth wrote.

  They went anyway. One day Elisabeth fell asleep there on a divan, and “when I woke up, [Klimt] was there, with a married lady that was part of the circle of the friends of my parents. His behavior didn’t leave any doubt of his feelings for this known beautiful woman.” Elisabeth burst into tears.

  Klimt took her in his arms. “Who do you really love?” Elisabeth asked Klimt. “Your mother, you silly girl,” Klimt replied.

  At school Elisabeth defended Klimt against a “malicious remark” by a daughter of the Baron Gutmann et Gelse, who “told me openly that the whole world knew whose daughter I was. Her parents were convinced of it, she said.”

  This suspicion caused tension even in her own family, Elisabeth wrote. When she got older, her paternal grandmother died, leaving Elisabeth a substantial sum. But her father renounced the inheritance. “That’s how my suspicion gradually became a legitimate conviction”—that Klimt was in fact her father, she wrote.

  When she was fifteen, Klimt convinced her mother to allow her to draw from nude models at the Kunstgewerbeschule, just off the Stubenbastei. Professors objected to exposing a girl to nude models, but they deferred to Klimt. Her professors watched her work, and one day one remarked to the others, “completely openly, ‘You can see the influence of the father.’ ”

  Here her association with Klimt was not a scandal but a status symbol. “Some scholars asked timidly, and with true admiration, about Klimt. And sometimes I had to tell about his opinions on other artists. When Uncle came to visit me there one day, there was a real commotion, as if God himself had fallen down from heaven.”

  When Klimt finally painted Elisabeth’s portrait, she was treated to “months of yelling and cursing.”

  “It was a joy to listen to him. He threw down his pencil many times and said, ‘You should never paint people who are too close to you.’ ” Klimt argued with Serena, “and he yelled in his deep beautiful baritone, ‘I draw my girl as I like, and that’s final!’ ”

  Klimt painted Elisabeth for three years, “the most beautiful and instructive hours of my life.” Finally, her mother took the painting and loaded it in her car. Klimt came to see the painting hanging in the Lederer home. “It’s still not her,” he mused.

  “When I look back now, every word seems meaningful to me,” Elisabeth wrote.

  Not only has he awakened the love of arts in me, but also the ability to understand people. Today, I look at the relationship between him and my mother with innermost understanding, and I’m proud that my mother was able to captivate him.

  His death, for me, was such a terrible blow that I can’t even describe it. I was paralyzed, and only the singing of the choir of a Beethoven piece during his funeral unleashed the tears and all the pain, the first tremendous loss I had lived.

  His friends were extending condolences, so our relationship didn’t seem at all a secret anymore. For me, however, it was the end of youth. I had only one mission left, to help the world understand Art and its meaning.

  Elisabeth handed over this deeply personal affidavit, the most detailed existing account of Klimt’s private life, to the Reich authorities on racial genealogy. It would have gone far to unravel the mystery of the artist’s psyche—had it not been delivered under duress, to Nazi authorities, in an attempt to protect her from deportation to a concentration camp.

  The portrait of Elisabeth Bachofen-Echt by Gustav Klimt, 1914–16. (Illustration Credit 40.1)

  She included photographs g
iven to her by Gustav Ucicky, an acknowledged son of Klimt, to establish a sibling resemblance. She was aided by the fact that Ucicky, too, was seeking legal recognition as Klimt’s son.

  Elisabeth’s mother, Serena, signed a sworn affidavit testifying that Klimt, not her husband August, was the true father of her daughter.

  The next step was examination, not by a physician, but by architect Paul Schultze-Naumburg. He was a proponent of eugenics, the pseudoscience that purported to study the genetic basis of race, and had given the world the expression “lowbrow,” for the supposedly lower foreheads of southern Europeans and Slavs that were said to denote lesser intelligence.

  Elisabeth’s handwriting was examined. Her sculptures were scrutinized. According to a perhaps apocryphal account by Gustav Rinesch, the final proof of paternity rested on a physical anomaly of Klimt, who he said was born missing a rib, a condition purportedly shared by Ucicky and Elisabeth. In March 1940, Schultze-Naumburg announced that Elisabeth’s art evinced no “Jewish characteristics.”

  “If the fully Jewish Lederer was the father it would be absolutely incomprehensible how it was possible that, in her artistic works, there is no expression of a purely Jewish nature,” he pronounced. The only explanation was “non-Jewish descent,” he wrote, signing his name above a stamp of a swastika.

  The utopian generation of turn-of-the-century Vienna was being reclassified by the bureaucrats of the new dystopia.

  Elisabeth had been fleeced.

  Her jewelry was taken and sold in 1940 at the Dorotheum, the grand European auction house, which was now little more than a Nazi pawnshop. Her former husband now owned her home.

  Her mother had fled to Budapest after authorities seized her passport. Serena had failed to get back her precious Klimts. “Why must it be the paintings?” Serena wrote, in a January 1940 appeal from the Schwarzenberg Sanatorium in Budapest, where she lay ill.