The Lady in Gold (15 page)

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.