She is his muse. He went to see her again, this Sunday, February 2, at the Neue Galerie, his mansion transformed into a museum on the outskirts of Central Park, in New York. Ronald Lauder continues to admire the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, a great Viennese bourgeois painted by Gustav Klimt in 1907. "If Adele Bloch-Bauer was alive, she would live in New York", used to say Ronald Lauder, 76 years old.
Art Nouveau masterpiece commissioned by the rich Viennese Jewish industrialist Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, the oil, gold and silver canvas was spoiled by the Nazis in 1938 and exhibited for decades at the Belvedere Palace in Vienna (Austria). When, after a long legal battle, the painting was returned, in 2006, to his heirs who emigrated to the United States, it was Ronald Lauder who bought it, for 135 million dollars (125 million euros), quite naturally. "I was the first choice of the family: I had a great love for Viennese art, the Neue Galerie was famous and I was involved in the restitution procedure. " And basically, the New York collector, whose fortune is estimated at $ 4.3 billion by the magazine Forbes, finds her in her place in New York. “Vienna, from 1900 to the 1920s, was like New York. The population, the artists, the business mixed, even if there was a little anti-Semitism. Adele Bloch-Bauer was part of this movement. Vienna still has that touch, but New York is THE place ", says Mr. Lauder.
Heir of Estée Lauder
We came to talk about Vienna, Art Nouveau and Europe with this heir of Estée Lauder, founder of the eponymous cosmetics group, which has the most beautiful private collection of Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka. But this Thursday, February 6, at 42e floor of a Manhattan tower from the Ve avenue, it is first of all the tireless defender of the Jewish cause who receives us. President of the World Jewish Congress since 2007, Ronald Lauder worries about a new intifada in Palestine, evokes the election of the Minister-President of Thuringia, in Germany, with the voices of the far right, and takes us into a meeting room to screen the speech he held a week earlier for the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz extermination camp. He wants to be heard. "It's me, speaking with passion. " Lauder comments on his own speech, detailing how he funded the preservation of Auschwitz, which is in danger of falling into disrepair.
