High-Stakes Battle Erupts Over Famous Paintings

Clad in gold leaf, the portrait is an art nouveau Mona Lisa, a national treasure.

For one Jewish family, however, it is an ugly example of Austria refusing to return what was stolen by the Nazis.

The family of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the woman portrayed in the Gustav Klimt painting, fled Austria after the Nazis seized power. But the Austrian government says it owns the painting and four others--based on the will of Adele herself, who died long before the Nazi takeover.

The stakes are high--for the Austrian government, for the heirs of the Bloch-Bauer family and for the art world, which has been stunned by recent claims from heirs of Holocaust victims on paintings and other treasures displayed for decades in some of the globe’s great museums.

Last year, the Seattle Art Museum returned Henri Matisse’s “Odalisque,” valued at $2 million, to the heirs of French art dealer Paul Rosenberg. His descendants have also recovered Monet’s “Nympheas, 1904” (Waterlilies) after they saw it on display at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts on loan from a French gallery in Caen.

For the heirs of the Bloch-Bauer family, the Klimt paintings represent a family fortune estimated at $150 million and a huge moral wrong that needs righting.

Austria considers the paintings part of its national identity. Klimt was a founder of the Vienna Secession art movement, which for many became synonymous with Jugendstil, the German and central European version of art nouveau.

Adele represented the cream of Viennese society--her shock of black hair, full lips, strong hands and expressive brown eyes set against Klimt’s gold and gilt latticework. One of two Adele portraits in question is worth $50 million alone and is among the most frequently reproduced paintings of all time.

For such a prize, the state is ready to take some knocks--including accusations that it is refusing to honor its own 1998 restitution law obliging it to return property looted by the Nazis.

The stage is set for a nasty legal battle over the two Adele portraits and three Klimt landscapes hanging in Vienna’s ornate Belvedere palace gallery.

Ownership promises to be difficult to decide. The protagonists died long ago--Adele in 1925 of meningitis; her husband, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, in 1945, penniless in Switzerland, where he fled after the Nazis took over in 1938.

That was also when Maria Altmann fled, by way of Germany. Adele’s niece--one of her heirs--was 22 when she and her husband, Fritz, slipped over barbed wire to the Netherlands.

It was October 1938. The real horrors would begin a month later, with “Kristallnacht”--the Night of Crystal, or breaking glass--when Jewish businesses all over Germany and Austria were demolished in anti-Jewish pogroms.

Even before that, Fritz spent time in the Dachau concentration camp before being ransomed by his brother. Maria Altmann remembers men coming, “stripping me of my engagement ring, taking Aunt Adele’s diamond necklace and slipping them into their pockets, and other men, in uniform, taking our new car--pushing it because they couldn’t find the keys.”

“Material goods meant nothing to me,” she says. “I was afraid for our lives.”

Fifty-one years later, the question is whether the Klimts were part of the Nazi looting.

Adele’s will, drawn up in 1923, asked her husband to “leave my two portraits” and the landscapes to the Austrian State Gallery in Vienna.

The Austrian government argues that by referring to the paintings as “my portraits,” Adele established ownership and thus could give them freely to Austria. Because the other paintings are also part of her bequest, the government maintains they must be treated the same way.

“This particular case was decided . . . long before” the Nazis took over, Culture Minister Elisabeth Gehrer contends.

Thus, she says, the paintings are not governed by the restitution law that led, for instance, to the return of paintings, furniture and ornaments taken from the Austrian branch of the Rothschild banking dynasty. They fetched $90.7 million at an auction last year.

But lawyers for the heirs--Altmann and descendants of other nieces and nephews--disagree. They say Adele was unlikely to have owned any paintings while her husband was alive. Husbands had ownership of joint property in those days.

The phrase “my two portraits,” lawyers argue, means “the two pictures of me.” Since Adele did not own the portraits, lawyer E. Randol Schoenberg of Los Angeles argues, the will is merely a request and not legally binding.

If so, the case is simple, the heirs say: After Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer fled Austria, the family lost the paintings when the Nazis seized his estate. Therefore, they fall under the restitution law.

“I can well imagine that--had she lived and had she seen what happened to her belongings, and that they had to flee for their lives--she would not have written the will,” said Altmann, 83, of Los Angeles.