After years of ‘hiding,” Klimt work is a star in Rome show

By FRANCES D’EMILIO
Associated Press

ROME (AP) — Mystery still swirls around Gustav Klimt’s “Portrait of a Lady” nearly a quarter-century after the painting was stolen from an Italian museum. Who stole the 1917 artwork and how it wound up stashed inside the museum’s outer walls before a gardener accidentally discovered it in December 2019 are still unknown. But the portrait of a young woman with a sensuous side glance will be part of a major Klimt exhibition that opens in Rome on Wednesday. The painting disappeared from the Ricci Oddi Modern Art Gallery in Piacenza in 1997, and had been back on display for a matter of weeks when the gallery had to close as part of Italy’s first coronavirus lockdown.