On May 17 – 2015, JPC hosted Anne-Marie O’Connor, veteran journalist and author of The Woman in Gold – the award-winning story of the gold portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the beautiful Muse who Gustav Klimt painted into history as a sensual Mona Lisa of turn-of-the-century Vienna; its fate under Nazi rule, and the battle that revealed its unknown story of heroism and shimmering genius.
Anne-Marie O’Connor is a veteran foreign correspondent and culture writer who has covered everything from post-Soviet Cuba to American artists and intellectuals. She covered the wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala as a Reuters bureau chief in Central America; the Shining Path guerrillas in Peru, coups in Haiti and U.S. interventions in Haiti and Panama; and covered Cuba and Haiti for a newspaper chain.
The Lady in Gold
This is the award-winning story of the gold portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the beautiful Muse who Gustav Klimt painted into history as a sensual Mona Lisa of turn-of-the-century Vienna; its fate under Nazi rule, and the battle that revealed its unknown story of heroism and shimmering genius. It is alsothe untold story of Gustav Klimt, and his portrait models: thearts patrons and intellectual women who were co-creators of modernism in Vienna. Some were co-creators of modernism inVienna. Some were romantically linked to Klimt. One may have been his daughter. Their lives unfolded in the glamorous Vienna of Sigmund Freud, Mark Twain, Hedy Lamarr and Billy Wilder, a lost world that ended with the arrival of Hitler. For years this story languished in obscurity, until the battle to recover Klimt paintings stolen by the Nazis brought these stories to light, along with a rich trove of lost letters and journals about life with Gustav Klimt.
Anne-Marie O’Connor is a veteran foreign correspondent and culture writer who has covered everything from post-Soviet Cuba to American artists and intellectuals. O’Connor attended Vassar and the San Francisco Art Institute and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, where she and fellow students co-created an award-winning documentary on the repression of mural artists after the1973 military coup in Chile She covered the wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala as a Reuters bureau chief in Central America; the Shining Path guerrillas in Peru, coups in Haiti and U.S. interventions in Haiti and Panama; and covered Cuba and Haiti for a newspaper chain. At the Los Angeles Times she chronicled the violence of Mexico’s Arellano-Felix drug cartel, U.S. political convention; and profiled such figures as Nelson Mandela, George Soros, Joan Didion, John McCain, and Maya Lin. Her story on Maria Altmann’s effort to recover the family Klimt collection appeared in the Los Angeles Times Magazine in 2001. She has written for Esquire, The Nation, and The Christian Science Monitor.
