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All hail the Queen! The Weinstein Company has announced that will be honored by the World Jewish Congress for her role in “Woman in Gold.” In the film, Mirren plays Maria Altmann, an Austrian-American fighting to reclaim her family’s Gustav Klimt paintings – including the famous Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I – stolen by the…
If Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunrise” motivated young travelers to chat up random passengers on the train, make an impromptu stop in Vienna, spend the night wandering its streets, and finish off by having sex in the Stadtpark, Simon Curtis’s “Woman in Gold” might serve as inspiration for a different sort of tourist experience. Young American…
Nemo dat quod non habeat You cannot give what you do not have. My father began collecting Egon Schieles in the 1950s, his apartment filled to overflowing with near-pornographic images of cadaverous men and women, many with red hair like Ilona, my new stepmother, a childless, childlike woman as different from my accomplished, emancipated mother…
The Viennese museum that houses one of Gustav Klimt’s greatest artworks says it has evidence that its previous Jewish owner sold it to the Austrian state in an amicable transaction, rather than too cheaply under duress. The Secession museum is defending itself against a claim from some of the heirs of art collector Erich Lederer,…
The director of Vienna’s Leopold Museum, home to extensive collections of work by Austrian artists such as Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt, has quit in a row over Nazi-looted art. Tobias Natter said he could no longer stay at the museum after some of its most senior staff joined a controversial new foundation associated with…
The family of a Holocaust survivor who fled Vienna in 1938 has filed a claim for the return of one of the country’s national treasures. The heirs of Erich Lederer, wealthy Austrian Jews who were important patrons of artist Gustav Klimt, have asked for the restitution of Klimt’s 1902 creation “Beethoven Frieze.” The claims were…
Philip Roth received his Man Booker International Prize June 29 in absentia. Meanwhile, the prize committee is a mess. Robin Cembalest writes about the Klimt-inspired Barbie doll. Is Jean-Luc Godard’s new movie, “Film Socialisme,” anti-Semitic? Menachem Wecker, who has a piece in this week’s Forward about a musical celebration of Bulgarian heroism during the Holocaust,…
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