LACMA to show Klimts

FIVE multimillion-dollar paintings by Austrian artist Gustav Klimt -- looted by the Nazis and recently returned by the Austrian government to the family of Maria Altmann in Los Angeles -- will go on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Two portraits of Altmann’s aunt, Adele Bloch-Bauer, and three landscapes will be exhibited from April 4 through June 30.

“It’s a great thing for Los Angeles,” said Michael Govan, who was recently appointed director of LACMA and will take charge of the museum April 1 -- three days before the exhibition opens. “There are so many of these stories about works moving around and leaving. It’s nice to see such extraordinary works arriving in Los Angeles.”

Altmann fought a seven-year legal battle for the paintings on behalf of her family. One of five heirs to the works -- valued at about $300 million -- she led the fight because the others live in Canada, which does not sue foreign governments, she said.

The exhibition was initiated by Stephanie Barron, LACMA’s senior curator of modern art, in January after an Austrian arbitration court ordered its government to turn over the paintings to Altmann, whose family fled Vienna in 1938. Barron proposed the show in a letter to Altmann’s attorney, Randol Schoenberg, who presented the idea to Altmann.

“LACMA was kind enough to offer, and I thought it was a beautiful thing,” Altmann said. “The paintings have been in Vienna for 68 years, and people in Europe saw them all the time. I thought it would be a beautiful thing to show them in this country.”

The museum paid for transportation and to insure the paintings, she said, adding that the most famous work -- a 1907 portrait of Bloch-Bauer known as the best of Klimt’s highly coveted “gold paintings” -- “is protected like the Hope diamond.”

The Austrian government had hoped to buy back the paintings, but officials said they couldn’t afford the $300-million price tag.

The exhibition at LACMA is “a privilege and an opportunity,” Barron said. “Klimt paintings are incredibly famous, but they are very rare in the United States. There are a few on the East Coast, none on the West Coast.” The nature of the exhibition has yet to be decided, she said, but the paintings may be shown with works from the same period in the museum’s collection.

Klimt, who lived from 1862 to 1918, is known for ornamental figurative works and mosaic-like landscapes. His paintings, executed with a profusion of flickering patterns in shallow space, epitomize turn-of-the-century artistic splendor in Vienna.

The Altmann family paintings, made between 1903 and 1916, were willed to Maria and two of her siblings by their uncle. But the artworks had been taken by the Nazis. Until the recent resolution of the legal battle, they were a major tourist attraction at the Gallery Belvedere in Vienna.

Some of the works have been exhibited in the United States, but the LACMA show will be the first in the U.S. to display them together. Together, they will provide a multifaceted view of the artist’s work.

The “gold painting,” titled “Adele Bloch-Bauer I,” which portrays a feminine beauty dissolving into gold patterning, is one of the three remaining paintings in Klimt’s best-known style. The second portrait depicts Bloch-Bauer in a broad-brimmed hat and vivid colors. “Beechwood” is a woodland scene of tree trunks rising from a bed of fallen leaves. In “Apple Tree,” a tree fills most of the picture. “Houses in Unterach on the Attersee” portrays a hillside of houses in a bold, architectonic style.

The exhibition is sure to raise questions about the possibility that the paintings might join the Los Angeles museum’s permanent collection.

That will be up to the heirs, and no decision has been made, Schoenberg said.

But the museum’s staff can hope. “Should there be some way to make this exhibition something that would be forever available,” Barron said, “that would be extraordinary.”