Second Chances: Recovered Treasure
Alison Lloyd's newsletter #40
Scroll down for
stories of serendipity to colour your day
and gorgeous pics
Misadventures of my own
Once upon a time, travelling interstate overnight, I left my wedding dress behind on a bus. I’d laid it longwise in the overhead luggage rack, and forgot it. Very careless, I know! I can only say I was very tired and a wee bit distracted with my thoughts…
Around the same era, before I owned a car, my bicycle was stolen from outside my work. Front desk security hadn’t seen anything, but they took my phone number just in case.
Last week I lost a pair of glasses in a car park on a rainy night. By the time I got home, I had visions (slightly blurry visions!) of my specs run over by a car, smashed to smithereens.
What do these stories have in common? I got the objects back! To my amazement and delight. My glasses were picked up and recognised. My bright yellow bicycle was spotted by a security guard, tossed over the fence into Manuka Oval. (For cricket fans, that’s the sporting ground in Canberra where the Prime Minister’s XI play off every year.) My wedding dress was found by the bus cleaners, before the bus took off again across the country.
A Lost Masterpiece
My possessions were missing for 24 hours or so. Sadly, many great artworks are also ‘lost or stolen, or strayed’, like James James Morrison’s mother in A.A, Milne’s wonderful poem. They ‘go down to the end of the town’ and are not heard of again.
But in January this year, a treasure of the art world resurfaced after nearly a hundred years.
The Portrait of Fraulein Lieser, by Gustav Klimt, was last seen publicly in 1925. It was listed in art catalogues as ‘lost’, presumed destroyed in WWII.
So where was it all this time? That’s a mystery. Or a secret.
We do know it will be auctioned later this month, under the rules of an international agreement to return art stolen by the Nazis. The auction house spokesman said, “It was acquired by a legal predecessor of the consignor in the 1960s and went to the current owner through three successive inheritances." That explanation is clear as mud to me. It suggests that an anonymous inheritor doesn’t want to be identified, given the painting’s likely theft by his or her family.
But at least the painting is back.
The ‘Forest Gnome’
Gustav Klimt was the son of an Austrian goldsmith. He went to a school for craftsmen, rather than artists, which gave him many of the techniques he used in his paintings, but also set him apart from the elite society he painted for. He was an odd, shy, intense man. The locals where he took his summer holidays called him ‘Waldschrat’ — the ‘forest gnome’. He liked to get around in a smock, without underwear reputedly. He never married, but was supposed to have fathered fourteen children. He took little part in their upbringing, although he did support his own mother, his unmarried sisters, and the widow of a brother. The borderline pornography of some of his drawings is also uncomfortable viewing for me.
Regardless, his paintings are wonderful. They are alive with colour, shape and texture. Klimt helps me and many others see beauty. For that, his work is precious.
Another Missing Masterpiece
The Portrait of Fraulein Lieser isn’t the only Klimt portrait to go missing. In 1997, Portrait of a Lady (1916-1917) was stolen from an Italian museum. The thieves made a hole in the roof, lowered a length of fishing line and hooked the painting out.
In December 2019, the gallery did some maintenance work on its grounds. When they cleared ivy from an outside wall, they found a metal panel. Behind the panel was an alcove. In the alcove was stashed a garbage bag, in which was the missing portrait. It had been removed from its frame, but was otherwise undamaged. In a nifty bit of forensic work, the painting’s authenticity was proved by x-ray analysis revealing an earlier version of the portrait underneath.
A pair of thieves soon fessed up to the local paper. The thieves said they first stored the Portrait of a Lady elsewhere, then put it back in the museum wall 20 years after their crime, when they could no longer be prosecuted.
Another piece of lost art treasure restored to the world! We lose a lot of stuff to time and misadventure. When we get it back, it feels kind of miraculous, and all the more precious. Not everything we think is lost is gone forever. Sometimes the impossible happens.
I wonder if you’ve ever lost something good, and got it back again?
And speaking of good stuff for you, I like the look of the excellent prizes in this free comp:
Also, if art interests you, watch this recent video essay, from a creative member of my family:
If you are new to my newsletter, and wondering what this edition has to do with my writing, the short answer is not much directly. I’ve been writing a novel set in the late nineteenth century, the same time Klimt began painting, so there is that. But really, I just like telling stories from history. And I like to bring you bits of beauty and meaning, because I don’t think we can live without it.
If you want to browse past editions, like the Easter extra I sent a couple of weeks back, you can read them here.
Feel free to email me back or leave a comment:
Great information! I love History 😀
Thank you for the beautiful Klimt paintings (neither of which were known to me) and the details about his life. I wouldn't say I exactly lost the objects I'm thinking of, but I abandoned them when I moved from my parents' house to Belgium in 1980, leaving my old room behind. I guess I never went back to recover any of my stuff, so eventually my parents cleared out my room. Many years later, I discovered while staying with my parents that at least some of my books were still in their garage, including an illustrated book of Hans Christian Andersen tales that had done much to stimulate my imagination as a culture-starved child (my parents, being war children, were entirely practical and material). Naturally this book is now in my possession, along with a couple of others. I used the Nightingale tale in Lady Odelia's Secret, basing some of the fictional paintings in that book on the illustrations in mine.
Many years after that, while clearing out my parents' house for sale, I discovered more books from my childhood. The thing is, books were pretty much never on display in my parents' house, and these were kept in the back of wardrobes and in boxes and so on, so I wonder why they ever kept them. But they did, and I'm glad, although I also wonder sometimes why I'm keeping them. Perhaps it's because I have so few tangible memories of the time before I moved to Belgium?