East Region

Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I by Gustav Klimt, 1907. Oil, silver, and gold on canvas. 140 cm x 140 cm. Neue Galerie New York. Acquired through the generosity of Ronald S. Lauder, the Heirs of the Estates of Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer, and the Estée Lauder Fund.

Poem Rationale

Ferdinand Block-Bauer, a Jewish banker and sugar producer, commissioned Gustav Klimt to produce his wife's portrait in 1903. Adele died in 1925, and the couple never had children; however, art curation and collection was a passion that bonded them. For the purpose of my poem, I imagined what it would have been like to know Adele through the eyes of her child, dreaming of the affluence and beauty captured in the portrait's gilded style before the onset of WWII. I took inspiration from the garment and color palette featured in the painting to create a story about a vibrant woman living decadently in Paris. Additionally, this portrait's journey from the Block-Bauers to the Nazis to the Austrian government and back colored my rendition of reclaiming a lost heritage. 

The Nazis stole the art collection of the Block-Bauer's in 1941. After the paintings were reclaimed from nazi officers at the end of the war, hundreds of thousands of works, including Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, were relocated to museums in Austria and Switzerland for research and display. Simon Curtis's 2015 movie Woman in Gold depicts Mrs. Bloch-Bauer's niece Maria Altmann (played by Helen Mirren) in her 1998 lawsuit to return the artwork seized in WWII to the families of origin. The poem's pain and loss embody Maria Altmann's experience in the ravages of the Holocaust as a residual toothache. The speaker experiences tooth pain and dreams of broken teeth, which affects the ability to communicate without discomfort while also symbolizing the loss of control. Kristallnacht, or the "Night of Broken Glass," is referenced in the poem to recall the vandalism of Jewish homes and businesses and the shards of glass that littered the streets after the violence. French and Hebrew are featured in the poem to express the confusion, anger, and grief experienced with the loss of community and culture in which one language and one retelling are incapable of expressing.