Lady in Gold (O'Connor)

Author Bio
Anne-Marie O'Connor is an American journalist and writer who authored the bestselling The Lady in Gold, The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt’s Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. The book is the story of the battle by Vienna emigre Maria Altmann to reclaim five Gustav Klimt paintings from her native Austria in an eight-year legal battle by Los Angeles attorney E. Randol Schoenberg. One of the paintings, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I sold for a record $135 million in 2006.

A longtime journalist in Latin America, O'Connor covered the civil wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador as a Central America bureau chief for Reuters. She was also a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, UPI, and the Cox Newspaper chain. She has also written for Esquire, Christian Science Monitor, and The Nation. She is a speaker on the subject of the Nazi plunder of art and restitution. (From Wikipedia.)

O'Connor first became interested in Maria Altman's story almost by chance: in 2001 she noticed a piece in a Los Angeles community paper about a woman seeking the return of stolen Nazi art. Reading on, O'Connor realized the case involved one of the most famous paintings in the world, one she'd even known from her childhood. She tracked Altman down and began interviewing her. Even though O'Connor felt the case was hopeless, she told her editors at the Los Angeles Times it would make for a fascinating story. (Read the full story at Lauren Zuckerman's Paris Web.)