One-Sentence Story: Without Words

When I was in in my late twenties and in Vienna—on what was my very first trip to Europe—I went by myself to a museum of early twentieth century art, a museum that no longer has the collection it had then because much the work displayed there originally had been looted from Jews during the Holocaust (eventually many important works would be returned to the original owners or their heirs, but when I went there in the mid-eighties, the collection the museum had of Gustav Klimt’s work was still intact, so to speak, and there were rooms and rooms of his work) and when I saw Gustav Klimt’s paintings actually hanging there on the walls of the museum I was completely overwhelmed, swept away, overpowered because paintings that I had previously seen before only in reproductions—and which in print had seemed to me merely colorful, clever, and well designed—were in real life so astonishingly warm, alive, sensual, and gorgeous that seeing them was a revelation, and because I was alone, I had no one to discuss this experience with, so instead I was able to have a wordless communion with a dead artist, as close to a spiritual experience as I ever had (if I were making a scrapbook of my life, I would put a Klimt image, perhaps the woman with the gold fish, in it) so that's why I was without words when many years later an Austrian painter I met at a party referred to me—because of my looks I assumed—my wild curly hair and strong features so obviously Jewish?—as “the Klimt woman.”

by Nina Zolotow

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