3-Strand Jasper, Jade, Amethyst, Pearl and Hematite Necklace

Inspired by Gustav Klimt, a stunning 3-necklace of small Brown Jasper beads alternating with small White pearls, natural Green Jade and Amethyst beads, blue faceted and gold plated Hematite discs, on a gold plated S-clasp.

Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) was an Austrian symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Art Nouveau movement.

Famed for his world-renowned golden era painting, his demure, often erotic and surreal paintings moved boldly away from traditional styles and passionately into the fires of suggestion, sexual expression and female identity.

Many of the paintings from his “Golden Phase” included gold leaf and the works most popularly associated with this period are the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) seen here, The Kiss (1907–08) and the Tree of Life (1909) in our next post.

The Adele Bloch-Bauer painting was stolen by the Nazis in 1941 and displayed at the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere. In 1998 Hubertus Czernin, the Austrian investigative journalist, established that the Galerie Belvedere contained several works stolen from Jewish owners in the war and that the gallery had refused to return the art to their original owners. One of Adele’s nieces, Maria Altmann, hired the lawyer E. Randol Schoenberg to make a claim against the Galerie for the return of five works by Klimt. After a seven-year legal claim, which included a hearing in front of the Supreme Court of the United States, an arbitration committee in Vienna agreed that the painting, and others, had been stolen from the family and that it should be returned to Altmann. She sold it the same year for $135 million, at the time a record price for a painting to the businessman and art collector Ronald Lauder, who placed the work in the Neue Galerie, the New York-based gallery he co-founded.

This necklace is an homage to Gustav Klimt, Adele Bloch-Bauer and Maria Altmann, for their genius, their beauty and their courage to pursue justice! ✨