The Lady in Gold

by Anne-marie O'connor

  Women from good families rarely smoked openly, but Adele did so unrepentantly. Ferdinand watched silently as a plume rose in a delicate spiral from Adele’s cigarette holder, while she and Alma Mahler listened to the dashing young Renner discuss the latest improvements in Vienna social services with Berta Zuckerkandl.

  Not all of Adele’s family approved of her flirtation with socialism, and she knew it. But she was adamant about the importance of keeping an open mind. “Beware of criticizing things and conditions that you have no idea about or are unfamiliar to you. Beware of being disrespectful! You have to be thorough in everything!” Adele admonished.

  “With regards to others, you have to approach them with the greatest respect (also from within),” Adele wrote in a letter to her nephew Robert, Therese’s deeply conservative youngest son.

  Ferdinand was powerless to deny his wife what pleased her. He shrugged when she openly told people she did not believe in a Supreme Being. There was no point in trying to tone down her frankness. Ferdinand was a forward-minded industrialist, but he was as impeccably conventional as his porcelain collection. Without Adele, the palais on Elisabethstrasse would have been a silent museum.

  Klimt’s painting of Adele captured Ferdinand’s own feelings with such clarity, it was as if Klimt knew Ferdinand’s heart better than he knew it himself. As encrusted with golden mystery as a Byzantine mosaic, Klimt revealed Adele as a proud, regal empress, with her chin held high and her eyes shining with the aspirations Ferdinand saw when he first laid eyes on her. Anything was worth the treasure of that glance. Ferdinand did not possess a photograph that captured it. It had proved fleeting, like the empire, and so much else in life.

  Adele’s eyes gave away little now.

  As Ferdinand watched his wife across the room in a silk brocade chair, tossing off bons mots his slower wit left him powerless to attempt, Adele wore her usual expression of opaque sophistication: self-possessed, subtle, inscrutable. She had grown into the very incarnation of the elegant, elusive Viennese woman he had seen in the street but never dreamed he would marry.

  The childless Adele had failed as a conventional woman. She would be written out of the family tree, a dead-end branch that failed to bear fruit. Adele had not distinguished herself in world affairs, like Berta Zuckerkandl. She was not brave enough to face hostile resistance to women entering a profession, like Gertrud Bien. Unlike Alma, she wasn’t courageous enough to roll the dice for love. Adele remained an unfinished woman. But like Serena Lederer and Klimt’s other patrons, Adele had succeeded in being a woman of her times. She was a freethinker, a muse, a self-invented founder of the Vienna Bloch-Bauers, the handmaidens of artists, progressive thinkers, and cultural creation. In her own way, Adele had pushed history forward, as one who helped give birth to modernism in Vienna. Yet her air of self-importance suggested she longed to be more.

  Perhaps Adele was most fully realized in Klimt’s majestic gold portrait.

  ——

  Adele set a new course now, but she did not complete the journey. At her Saturday salon, she spoke excitedly with public health pioneer Julius Tandler about the creation of a new society in the Soviet Union. Renner knew some of the Russian revolutionaries personally. Adele’s family be-lieved she was in love with Renner. She spoke of traveling with him, to witness the Soviet experiment.

  This was the dream that illuminated Adele when Alma dropped by with Werfel one wintry day in February 1925. Alma and Werfel were headed to Jerusalem. Adele was excited about their trip. She pulled books off her library shelves and gave them to the couple to read on the journey. A few days later, Adele felt feverish, went to lie down, and slipped into a coma. Early the next morning Adele was dead, at the age of forty-three. Doctors debated the cause: Was it a tumor? Or “brain flu”? They settled on meningitis.

  “I’m still dazed by Adele Bloch’s death, which I learned of here yesterday,” Alma wrote the composer Anton von Webern from Cairo.

  In the last days of my Viennese sojourn she couldn’t show me enough love! As if she had known!

  She gave us books, offered me hundreds of things, so that I was reminded of her during the whole trip. I have not yet used the sleeping bag for fear of spoiling it. Poor creature! She fainted and didn’t wake up. Lucky, terrible death!

  I would prefer to leave this world in a properly organized way.

  Her death completely unsettled me yesterday.

  Today the world is brighter again.

  Ferdinand was devastated. As sleet fell outside, he turned his wife’s room into a shrine. He hung their Klimt paintings on the wall, and set a photograph of Klimt, cuddling a black and white kitten, on her bed table. He asked servants to ensure there were always fresh flowers in the room. He called it his Gedenkzimmer, his Room of Remembrance. Here he retreated into mute mourning, gazing at the portrait of Adele, the teenage bride he had outlived, frozen in the golden instant when Vienna rivaled Paris.

  The little poetess who won Ferdinand’s heart before she knew her own.

  The Good Spirit of his life was now a ghost.

  PART TWO

  Love and Betrayal

  Degenerate Art

  By the summer of 1937, Ferdinand’s brother, Gustav, presided over a big, happy family. When they strolled over to Elisabethstrasse to dine with Ferdinand, they visited his bedroom shrine to Adele and exchanged glances. Ferdinand still kept fresh flowers at Adele’s bedside in his Room of Remembrance.

  His family worried that he was lonely, but Ferdinand was too preoccupied to notice their concern. He was deeply distracted, as his chauffeur drove him to his sugar factory in a late-model limousine built by Graf & Stift, the carmaker whose elegant convertible had carried the archduke on the day of his 1914 assassination in Sarajevo.

  The factory was in Bruck an der Leitha, a peaceful twelfth-century castle town near the Hungarian border. As the villages and farmland rolled by, Ferdinand brooded over the troubling political developments in Germany. He was increasingly convinced that the ugly movement led by Hitler was not just an outrage, but a serious threat.

  In the years since Adele’s death, Ferdinand had attained stature in Vienna. The Vienna Handbook of Culture and Economy described him as one of the last gentleman industrialists of the monarchy, “cultured and educated,” who lived “not for his work, but for the nurturing of his spirit and his noble heart.” By then he had served as president of the sugar industry and so many other business associations he was often addressed simply as “Herr President,” or with the “von” prefix of the titled aristocracy, though there was no record of his ennoblement to a “von Bloch-Bauer.”

  Ferdinand was a serious patron—not just a collector of beautiful objects, but someone who cared deeply about artists and the future of art. This had led him far from his conventional tastes. After years of porcelain and Waldmüller pastorals, Ferdinand was gravitating to the modernism Adele had loved. He was sponsoring a fifty-year retrospective of Kokoschka, Austria’s greatest living painter, an Expressionist who embraced political engagement with the same reckless passion that roiled his love life.

  Ferdinand had been introduced to Kokoschka by Klimt’s old friend Carl Moll, whose stepdaughter, Alma Mahler, had been a great love of the artist, his “Bride of the Wind,” the subject of his painting of a couple entwined.

  Kokoschka was a different man than his gruff mentor. Kokoschka was intellectual and articulate.

  Like Klimt, he gravitated to the Jewish intelligentsia because, unlike the entrenched Viennese elite, they “welcomed anything new.” He told a friend that Ferdinand reminded him of “the old Moses of Rembrandt.” Their friendship deepened when Ferdinand asked Kokoschka to paint a portrait of him, wearing a hunting rifle and Alpine lederhosen.

  The result, Portrait of Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer as a Hunter, turned out “very differently from how you imagined it,” Kokoschka wrote Carl Moll. “He is sitting with his little hat, reflective, and yet curious. He is old, and not as sympathetic as my feeling for him.”
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  Yet Ferdinand was “very happy” with the portrait, Kokoschka reported to Moll. “He found it very true to him, and he made an allusion to Rembrandt. I told him, of course, that in these times, one shouldn’t speak of the Gods. Such comparisons are not allowed.”

  Moll told Kokoschka he would ask “our Uncle Ferdinand” to sponsor the Kokoschka retrospective. Everyone knew Ferdinand was a soft touch.

  But Ferdinand probably never planned to be a hero.

  The Kokoschka show opened in Vienna in early May 1937, and quickly became a place to see and be seen among the avant-garde.

  The show’s notoriety soared on June 30, when Joseph Goebbels, the minister of propaganda of the German Reich, gave subordinates free rein to ransack museums and “cleanse” Germany of more than five thousand artworks deemed symptomatic of the “perverse Jewish spirit” infecting German culture. Museum directors were forced to pull down these works of “degenerate art,” created by the most distinguished artists of their time, from Pablo Picasso to Vincent van Gogh.

  Kokoschka was one of them. He was outraged. How could these beer-hall thugs judge art? He defiantly titled one of his works Self-Portrait of a Degenerate Artist.

  Ferdinand was disturbed by this news from Germany. Kokoschka was already threatening not to appear at the retrospective at all, as a protest against the authoritarian Austrian state, known as Austro-fascism.

  One of the organizers of the show, Richard Ernst, had written a monograph on Ferdinand’s porcelain collection in 1925, and he was well aware of Ferdinand’s reputation for generosity. Ernst asked Ferdinand to pay to extend the show. Ferdinand agreed. He felt they couldn’t appear to back down. But he wondered: Where will it end?

  The attack on “degenerate art” was a manifestation of Hitler’s long obsession with dictating artistic tastes, rooted in his youthful experience as a failed artist in Vienna. Now Hitler had the power to control art, and even artists, in the Reich.

  The rest of the Bloch-Bauers did not share the depth of Ferdinand’s anxiety about the rising political din in Germany. The bustling family had far less time to worry than the introspective Ferdinand. To them, the antics of Hitler were a more distant problem, an unfortunate turn of events that nevertheless would blow over, as had so much other political turmoil. Like many happy people, Ferdinand’s brother, Gustav, and his wife, Therese, were deeply involved in the daily dramas of their own lives. They had lived through World War I; they had lived through the assassination of the architect of Austro-fascism, Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, in a failed Nazi coup in 1934. They would weather this too.

  Ferdinand was not so certain.

  “You Are Peace”

  In early 1937, when Vienna still wavered between winter and spring, Ferdinand’s unmarried young niece, Maria Bloch-Bauer, stood with guests of the family around the grand piano at their Stubenbastei apartment. A family friend, Paul Ulanowsky, was going to play for them. Ulanowsky was one of Vienna’s most popular pianists.

  Life in the Bloch-Bauer household revolved around music. Music quickened the pulse and stirred the heart. It lured the young Viennese out for feverish nights of tango. Music was dangerous.

  Ulanowsky, the son of a Ukrainian singer for the Prague opera, was a favored accompanist for singers in Vienna. In addition to being a fine musician, Ulanowsky was sensitive and kind. As Ulanowsky sat down at the piano, a young man stepped out of the crowd and boldly asked if the pianist could play Schubert. What a ridiculous question! Maria thought impatiently. Of course Ulanowsky could play Schubert. Ulanowsky was one of the best interpreters of Schubert in Europe! Who would dare ask such an impertinent question?

  Fritz Altmann stepped forward.

  Adele’s niece Maria Bloch-Bauer, ca. 1936, at the Opera Ball, the glamorous stage for all to see and be seen in Vienna. (Illustration Credit 20.1)

  Ah, Fritz. Maria had nursed a crush on Fritz for months. Fritz, a lover of music, played saxophone in a jazz band and haunted the opera. She wondered what Ulanowsky would make of his cocky audacity. But the distinguished Ulanowsky merely smiled affectionately, and introduced “the opera singer, Fritz Altmann.” Ulanowsky began to languidly play the first notes of the sensual Schubert ode to love, Du bist die Ruh—“You Are Peace.”

  Fritz began to sing, slowly and ardently.

  You are peace,

  The gentle peace,

  You are longing.

  And what stills it.

  Fritz turned his gaze to his audience imploringly, as if he himself were overcome with yearning.

  Maria was startled. This was a stirringly romantic song, of desire and fulfillment. It hinted at the private world behind bedroom doors, inside closed carriages, on picnic blankets in hidden glens in the Vienna Woods. A world Maria had yet to enter, though she had heard plenty about it from her best friend, Christl. The breathless world of her favorite poet, Goethe. Now Fritz conjured up this unknown realm of seduction. Maria felt chills run down her spine.

  I consecrate to you

  With all my joy and pain,

  A home

  In my eyes and my heart,

  Enter into me

  And close softly behind you the gates of your gentle embrace . . .

  As Maria listened to Fritz sing, an unnamed feeling came into focus. Fritz sang on, drawing out the last word seductively:

  Drive the pain from my breast

  May my heart be filled with your desire.

  Perhaps Fritz noticed the effect he was having. Because now this Orpheus turned to Maria and looked her in the eyes, as if he were singing to her alone.

  The tabernacle of my eyes is illumined by your radiance. O fill it completely!

  As Ulanowsky played the closing notes, Maria felt the kind of dizzying, weak-kneed thrill that electrified her when she rode the Ghost Train at the Prater, below the giant Ferris wheel that spun over Vienna. The Ghost Train ran through dark tunnels where unchaperoned couples stole private moments to kiss and caress.

  “I’d like to go on the Ghost Train with him,” Maria whispered to Christl.

  Fritz stood for a moment, as Ulanowsky artfully interpreted the final stanzas, and looked boldly at Maria. Maria looked up shyly, overwhelmed by an impulse that none of her suitors had ever awakened. The music stopped. Fritz turned away and walked across the room to sit down with a crowd of men. One of them pulled out a silver cigarette case and offered Fritz a cigarette. Maria was crestfallen. Her poised older sister, Luise, would have walked over to Fritz and made a provocative joke. Maria was not that confident.

  Fritz Altmann, a Vienna sophisticate from a Polish immigrant family. He dreamed of being an opera singer and toyed with the affections of Maria Bloch-Bauer. (Illustration Credit 20.2)

  As Fritz said his goodbyes, he treated Maria affectionately, like someone’s little sister. Maria hardly listened to what he said, and though she was a lively wit, she struggled to find clever words. Infatuation had made a fool of her. For the next few weeks, Maria made it a point to run into Fritz, at a lunch or recital. Fritz clearly enjoyed the attention of this shapely young beauty, but though he flirted with her, he was casual and aloof.

  At a party at the apartment of mutual friends, Maria told Fritz how she admired the Ractor Raoul Aslan, Austria’s leading man. Aslan had just starred in a stirring theater production of Faust, about the man who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for the granting of all his earthly wishes. The Goethe classic had been given a jolt of relevance by the incendiary new Klaus Mann novel, Mephisto, about a young German actor who advances his career with the help of Nazi Party patrons—betraying his lover, his friends, and his integrity. Mephisto was based on a real-life German actor whose career had been boosted by Emmy Göring, the actress wife of Hermann Göring, commander in chief of the German Luftwaffe.

  Maria, middle left, at a ladies’ lunch with her fashionably thin sister, Luise, middle right, suffering the misery of her first love, ca. 1937. (Illustration Credit 20.3)

  Maria confessed she had
always had a crush on the handsome Aslan. Fritz raised his eyebrows and looked at Maria with amusement. “I wouldn’t get my hopes up,” Fritz said. “He prefers men.”

  Maria stared at Fritz blankly.

  “He’s a homosexual,” Fritz said. He laughed at her surprise. “He’s a friend of mine. It’s quite all right.” He bent over and kissed Maria softly, on both cheeks, French-style, and left the party.

  Maria’s face burned. He had treated her like a child! It wasn’t as if she didn’t know about homosexuality. A childhood friend of hers was already involved with men, and it amused Maria greatly that her mother insisted on pushing him as an eligible suitor. Of course she had heard rumors. Maria was simply disappointed that Raoul Aslan, the great sex symbol, was not interested in women.

  Weeks went by. Finally Maria boldly called Fritz on the telephone. He was friendly, amusing, but cool. He never called to arrange a date. Her sister, Luise, who had always been coy and self-possessed, was dismayed by Maria’s lack of artifice. Men liked elusive girls! Maria should never call Fritz! Maria’s brothers rolled their eyes and told Maria she was crazy. Fritz Altmann was in love with another woman. He would be living with this woman except for one complication: she had a husband. Maria digested the news of this arrangement. She might even have met this woman, at the same parties where she saw Fritz. Yet if the woman was married, there was hope. Each time the butler, Georg, told Maria a young man had called, she was disappointed anew.