PIACENZA, Italy (AP) — Art experts have confirmed that a painting discovered hidden inside an Italian art gallery’s walls last month is Gustav Klimt’s “Portrait of a Lady,” which was stolen from the gallery nearly 23 years ago.
The authentication of the painting announced Friday solved one of the art world’s mysteries - where did the missing work end up? - but left several questions unanswered, including who took it and whether it ever left the museum’s property.
A gardener at the Ricci Oddi Modern Art Gallery in the northern city of Piacenza who was clearing away ivy noticed a small panel door on a wall outside and opened it. Inside the space, he found a plastic bag containing a painting that appeared to be the missing masterpiece.
“It’s with no small emotion that I can tell you the work is authentic,” Piacenza Prosecutor Ornella Chicca told reporters on Friday.
“Portrait of a Lady” depicts a young woman sensually glancing over her shoulder against a green background. Klimt finished the painting in 1917, the year before he died. The Ricci Oddi gallery acquired it in 1925 and reported it missing in February 1997.
Since the gardener’s discovery on Dec. 10, the canvas was kept in a vault of a local branch of Italy’s central bank while experts used infrared radiation and other non-invasive techniques to determine if it was the original “Portrait of a Lady.”
Experts said the painting was in remarkably good condition. One of the few signs of damage was a scratch near the edge of the canvas that may have resulted “from a clumsy effort to remove the portrait from its frame,” said Anna Selleri, an art restorer from the National Gallery in Bologna.
“Portrait of a Lady” was officially listed as missing on Feb. 22, 1997 but might have been snatched from a gallery wall a few days earlier, during the exhibit preparation work.
So who stole the painting? Chicca said police were studying some traces of organic material on the recovered canvas in hopes they might provide leads.
As for why and when the painting ended up behind a wall, journalist Anne-Marie O’Connor, the author of a book about the dramatic fortunes of Klimt’s “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer,” has an educated theory.
When “Portrait of a Lady” was taken, the value of Klimt’s paintings was “soaring,” O’Connor said in a phone interview from London.. Perhaps whoever took the painting stowed it behind the gallery’s walls while waiting for news to die down but the stolen work proved “too hot to handle.”
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| The Lady in Gold |
O’Connor’s 2012 book “The Lady In Gold” chronicled the successful effort by a woman to gain back Klimt’s “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer.”
That portrait was snatched from the Bloch-Bauer home in Vienna in 1941 by a Nazi officer. The woman, Bloch-Bauer’s niece, later sold the painting to cosmetics mogul Ronald Lauder in 2006 for $135 million.
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Article rom Associated Press (edited)
