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Los Angeles (dpa) - Nearly seven decades after they were stolen by the Nazis, five paintings by the Austrian Jugendstil master painter Gustav Klimt are on display in Los Angeles after their dramatic return to the family that owned them, news reports said Wednesday.
The paintings, among the artist's most spectacular, include one of Adele Bloch-Bauer, a Jewish Austrian socialite and late aunt of a Los Angeles woman, according to the Los Angeles Daily News. She was also possibly Klimt's lover, reports say.
"To see them here is a dream come true," Maria Altmann, the niece, was quoted as telling reporters at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Tuesday.
Altmann's uncle was a prominent Viennese businessman, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, who commissioned the 1907 painting and a second portrait of his wife. The portraits, along with three recovered landscapes, hung in a memorial room in his house in Vienna after his wife died in 1925.
The five paintings could be worth up to 300 million dollars, according to figures cited during the eight-year legal battle to recover the artworks.
While other pieces of the Bloch-Bauer collection that were confiscated by the Nazis have been returned to the family, the Austrian government insisted that the prize Klimt pieces, on display at a public museum in Vienna, had been bequeathed to the nation when Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer died in 1945 in Switzerland in near poverty, reports have said.
But evidence that such directions were often coerced played a role in Altmann's regaining the paintings, after the Austrian government began considering restitution in 1998. Altmann hired a lawyer, who fought her case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which finally ruled she could sue the Austrian government.
Bloch-Bauer fled Austria to Switzerland when the Nazis invaded in 1938. Altmann, his niece, married Fritz Altmann in 1937. He was detained at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, but was released after the family paid a ransom. He and Maria escaped to the United States.
"Los Angeles has been my hometown for so long, so to have them here is beyond words. I'm going to come here very often and bring friends to see them," she was quoted as saying.
The lawyer who represented her was E. Randol Schoenberg, the grandson of composer Arnold Schoenberg whose family also fled the Nazis from Vienna and settled in Los Angeles.
Copyright 2006 dpa Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH
