A New Klimt Film

A new film is opening soon about a controversy surrounding Gustav Klimt’s 1907 masterpiece, “Portrait of Adèle Bloch-Bauer I,” and I look forward to seeing it.

A poem I wrote, published in The Malahat Review’s issue 177, looks at a study Klimt had done for the “Portrait of Adèle Bloch-Bauer I”.

Here is a short description of the film on Wikipedia: a “British-American drama film directed by Simon Curtis and written by Alexi Kaye Campbell. The film stars Helen Mirren, Ryan Reynolds, Daniel Brühl, Katie Holmes, Tatiana Maslany, Max Irons, Charles Dance, Elizabeth McGovern, and Jonathan Pryce.

The film is based on the true story of the late Maria Altmann, an elderly Holocaust survivor living in Los Angeles who, together with her young lawyer, E. Randol Schoenberg, fought the government of Austria for almost a decade to reclaim Gustav Klimt‘s iconic painting of her aunt, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, which was confiscated from her relatives by the Nazis in Vienna just prior to World War II. Altmann took her legal battle all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States, which ruled in her favor in Republic of Austria v. Altmann (2004).”

(text source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman_in_Gold)

(image credit: Antje Traue and Moritz Bleibtreu in the movie “Woman in Gold.” (Robert Viglasky, The Weinstein Company))