Looted Klimts reunited with owner

For most of the last 60 years, Maria Altmann did not know that the celebrated Klimt paintings hanging in the Austrian Gallery in Vienna actually belonged to her. And when she learned that they most likely did, she also knew that recovering them was probably impossible.

But in an unexpected turn of events, the ripples of World War II history have washed up on the shore of a California museum, where this week the 90-year-old Altmann came face to face with the sumptuous gold and sinuous lines of Gustav Klimt's portrait of her aunt, Adele Bloch-Bauer, painted in 1907, and on display for the next three months at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

"It's a very happy day," she said, looking poised and younger than her years. "I could not imagine that these paintings would ever really come my way in a peaceful solution."

That they did this golden Klimt and four others, with a total estimated value of some $300 million is due to the enduring nature of family, of memory and, in no small part, of luck. Luck that Altmann was still alive in 1998, when Austria passed a law that made restitution possible. Luck that an enterprising Vienna journalist came across documents indicating that the Klimt paintings probably did not belong to the state. Luck that Altmann found an attorney willing to take on the Austrian government and to compromise when the moment was right.

"In many different ways, Maria is the last of a circle of friends of my maternal grandparents," said E. Randol Schoenberg, Altmann's 39-year-old lawyer, who won the right to sue Austria in the U.S. Supreme Court in 2004. Schoenberg is the grandson of Jewish Viennese composers on both sides of his family, Arnold Schoenberg and Eric Zeisl. The Zeisls and Altmanns were close friends, both in Vienna and in Los Angeles, where they fled Nazi persecution. "It's my own family story, too," Schoenberg said.

The tale of the Klimt paintings is similar to many claims over looted Nazi art, with the notable difference that these canvases are monuments of 20th-century Austrian culture and an integral part of the nation's artistic patrimony. Few believed that Austria would allow them to leave the country.

Until two months ago, the gold portrait of Adele, the wife of the Jewish sugar industrialist Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer and hostess of a famed Vienna salon, had hung in Austrian museums since the early 1940s. The four others returned to Altmann include a later life- size portrait of Adele in thrilling hues of green and lavender, and three Impressionist-style landscapes, of a forest, an apple tree and an Austrian town. The gold painting was originally commissioned by Bloch-Bauer, an avid art collector, for his Vienna palace. Klimt spent three painstaking years on his sensual vision of Adele, her pale face at the center, her hands twisted near her face in a vulnerable gesture. (A film accompanying the exhibition reveals that Adele often twisted her hands because a finger was deformed.) Klimt died suddenly in 1918, and Adele succumbed to meningitis in 1925 at 43, leaving a will that requested that after the death of her husband, the Klimt paintings be left to Austria. Bloch-Bauer hung her portraits and the other Klimts in a special room in his palace as a kind of shrine to his beloved wife. But after Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, he fled without any of his belongings. The new Nazi government levied a bogus tax bill on the industrialist and confiscated his property, placing three of the Klimt paintings in the Austrian Gallery and selling the rest.

Bloch-Bauer spent most of the war in Switzerland. When he died in November 1945, his last will revoked all previous ones and left his entire estate to his heirs, three of the children of his brother, Gustav: Robert, Luise and the youngest, Maria. The Bloch-Bauers had no children. Maria Altmann and her husband, Fritz, had fled Austria during the war and settled in Los Angeles in 1942.

After the war, the family engaged a Viennese lawyer to try to regain their stolen possessions, including paintings, porcelain, palaces and the sugar company. Much of the artwork had been divvied up among the top Nazis. The heirs were able to recover many works from the collection, but at a price. Austrian authorities ruled that Adele had bequeathed the Klimts to Austria and made exit permits for the other works contingent on the heirs' agreement, Schoenberg said. Without access to the relevant documents, the heirs agreed to the ruling, he said.

The situation remained unchanged for decades, until journalists, notably at the New York-based magazine Artnews, began in the mid- 1980s to raise the issue of Austria's unexamined past in regards to looted art. Under pressure, Austria passed laws to permit the reopening of the subject, and in 1998 finally made its archives for accessible to the public.

The Viennese journalist Hubertus Czernin, who had done research on the topic for The Boston Globe, quickly came across the Bloch- Bauer file in the archives, including Adele's will and other relevant documents. "If you read Adele's will in German, it's clear that it was a wish, not a proper donation," Czernin said. Altmann then engaged Schoenberg, who undertook the rather optimistic quest to regain the paintings.

In August 2000, he sued the Austrian government in the United States under a little-used clause in the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. The suit was challenged by Austria but upheld in court and on subsequent appeals, all the way to a decision in the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2004. Instead of pursuing the lawsuit, however, Schoenberg persuaded Altmann to enter into binding arbitration in Austria.

"It was a huge gamble," Schoenberg acknowledged; he argued his case in German last year. And in January of this year, the three- judge panel unanimously decided in favor of Altmann and her fellow heirs, awarding them five of six disputed paintings.

In yet another unexpected turn, Austria in February declined an option to buy the paintings from the Altmanns, for reasons that remain unclear. And so two months ago, the Klimt paintings were packed up and sent to Los Angeles, where they arrived two weeks ago. Altmann and the four heirs of her deceased siblings must decide their eventual fate.

She has made no decision and says only that the paintings should remain in the public eye, not necessarily in Austria, where some officials still want them back. "I feel they had them for 68 years without our permission," Altmann said. "Now they can leave the country with our permission and go to another country." She added, "You know, in Austria they asked, 'Would you loan them to us again?' And I said: 'We loaned them for 68 years. Enough loans.'"

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