Albanese brings new luster to ‘ Woman in Gold’

‘ Stolen Beauty’ explores painting’s creation, recovery

Maria Altmann is a wealthy 22- year- old newlywed in Vienna in 1938 when the Nazis invade. The family textile factory is seized, her husband, Fritz, is arrested and her home is pillaged of a prized treasure: a portrait of her late aunt, Adele Bloch-Bauer, by Austrian painter Gustav Klimt. Author Laurie Lico Albanese calls Stolen Beauty ( Atria, 320 pp., out of four) “fiction based on fact,” with imagined conversations to flesh out the true story that also was told in Woman in Gold, the 2015 movie starring Helen Mirren as an older Maria who defies the Austrian government to get her painting back. It is a testament to Albanese’s skills as a storyteller that a familiar story gains new power in her telling. Beauty alternates between Maria’s story and that of Adele, a brilliant, headstrong teenager growing up during Vienna’s golden age as a center for art and culture in the early 20th century. At 17, Adele loses her beloved brother Karl to pneumonia. He shared books and philosophy with Adele, and she takes his dying words to heart: “Don’t let them box you in.”

In her sorrow, Adele is drawn to a rich and sophisticated older suitor, Ferdinand Bloch, who introduces her to Vienna’s avante- garde Secessionist artists, including Klimt. Adele loves her Ferry but their match is more a melding of minds than a marriage of passion.

Adele and Ferry become patrons of the arts in Vienna, where the Symbolists and Secessionists are shocking intellectuals with their sensual realism and defiance of tradition. But amid the backdrop of art shows, salons and Sigmund Freud’s dream interpretations, the drumbeats of antiSemitism grow louder with the rise of the Nationalist Socialists.

Klimt offers to paint Adele, and they become lovers, though Adele is but one of many. When Klimt portrays Adele bare-breasted as the biblical Jewish heroine Judith, a clued- in Ferry demands he paint her as again as a queen. Klimt’s shimmering portrait is hailed a masterpiece.

Albanese artfully weaves Adele’s story with Maria’s harrowing life under the Nazis, and reflections on marriage and fidelity. Yet it’s hard to read Stolen Beauty without seeing ugly ech- oes in today’s headlines, with the clarion call of “America first” and immigrants singled out as “the problem.” Seven decades after World War II, have we learned nothing?

AFP/ GETTY IMAGES Gustav Klimt painted Portrait of Adele Bloch- Bauer I in 1907.

MARTHA HINES KOLKO Laurie Lico Albanese