The Lady in Gold, considered an unforgettable masterpiece, one of the twentieth century's most recognizable paintings, made headlines all over the world when Ronald Lauder bought it for $135 million a century after Klimt, the most famous Austrian painter of his time, completed the society portrait. Anne-Marie O'Connor, writer for the Washington Post, formerly of the Los Angeles Times, tells the galvanizing story of the Lady in Gold, Adele Bloch-Bauer,...

This authoritative and generously illustrated book highlights Gustav Klimt's portrayals of women in his work. Klimt was a central figure in Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century, and a crucial link between nineteenth-century Symbolism and Modernism. His sensual portrayals of women are among his most celebrated works and the focus of this book.

"Human Dispositions explores new conventions for posing and positioning human figures in pictorial, architectural, and theatrical space in Europe in the decades leading up to WWI. The author contends that questions of "disposition" are vital to understanding a key transitional period in the history of Western modernism. Around 1885, avant-garde artists began to present human figures in strictly frontal, lateral, and dorsal postures. The effect, compared...