Fighting for Her Past

Adele Bloch-Bauer was a beautiful young society woman born into a wealthy Jewish family in an era that dictated that she not attend university, as she desired, but make a suitable marriage.

She married a Czech sugar baron and sought her education where she could, as a renowned Vienna hostess of distinguished gatherings where Gustav Mahler mingled with fellow composer Richard Strauss and the fashionable artist Gustav Klimt--with whom she shared a special rapport.

It was Klimt who captured her restless spirit, in a shimmery 1907 painting--arguably, Austrian art experts say, his most significant “gold” portrait--that was seized from Bloch-Bauer’s husband by the Nazis.

Now her niece, Maria Altmann, 85, is fighting to claim ownership of the celebrated “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I.”

The painting is one of six Klimts--a collection the family values at $150 million--that Altmann aims to recover through a federal lawsuit in Los Angeles. If they cannot be returned, she hopes to be compensated for their loss.

The dispute, scheduled to come before a U.S. judge on April 30, is one of many that haunt European countries where Jewish citizens were dispossessed and deported to Nazi death camps.

Austria maintains that Adele Bloch-Bauer willed the paintings to the Austrian Gallery.

“It’s not a Holocaust-related claim,” said Peter Moser, the Austrian ambassador to the United States, during a visit last week to Los Angeles. “It should be tried in Austria.”

Los Angeles attorneys representing Austria are asking the judge to dismiss the case, saying the United States has no jurisdiction and that the Vienna government and the museum enjoy immunity under U.S. statute.

Altmann’s attorney, E. Randol Schoenberg, countered that, in some cases, a U.S. citizen has the right to sue a foreign state for property taken in violation of international law.

Altmann contends that her aunt’s will was a nonbinding request to her uncle, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer. She says the paintings were not donated after he died, as her aunt asked, but seized in the Nazi “Aryanization” of Jewish property after he fled in 1938. When he died, nearly penniless, seven years later, he had no intention of giving away the works, she said.

To Altmann, the paintings are fragments of a life in Vienna that the Nazis destroyed, and a chapter of family history that opens with the relationship between Klimt and the wealthy patroness whose portrait he painted twice.

“It’s a very complicated story,” Altmann began, on a hushed afternoon at her Cheviot Hills home. “Everything they say about my aunt having a wild affair with Klimt, this is all not completely true. I was 9 when she died. I asked my mother if [my aunt] had an affair with Klimt. My mother--she was very Victorian--said, ‘How dare you say that? It was an intellectual friendship.’ ”

Adele and Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer lived in an elegant Vienna palais. Their home was well known to artists and intellectuals in a city famed for a dazzling cultural life in which Jews played a central role.

Klimt was a celebrated artist whose themes of eroticism and moral ambivalence had already aroused controversy. His mistresses were legend.

Bloch-Bauer, then 25, was the kind of unconventional woman Klimt loved to paint. She was elegant, arrogant, intense. She smoked.

Klimt’s first portrait of her caused a sensation. Critics compared its metallic gold surface to Greek Orthodox icons. A newspaper called Bloch-Bauer “an idol in a golden shrine,” Tobias G. Natter, who oversees the collection of 20th century art at the Austrian Gallery, said at a recent lecture at the UCLA Hammer Museum.

Klimt gained greater recognition with “The Kiss,” which depicts a man embracing a woman who, some speculate, was also Bloch-Bauer. Klimt would paint a second Bloch-Bauer portrait, but the first one retained its own cachet.

“The picture suggests Adele Bloch-Bauer’s restlessness, and also her denial of society’s expectations,” Natter said as the ghostly illuminated image of Bloch-Bauer loomed above him on the wall.

In youthful photos, Altmann shares her aunt’s striking beauty. Adele was her mother’s sister, Ferdinand her father’s brother. Her aunt remained childless, after three stillbirths.

“She was not a maternal person. She was totally intellectual,” Altmann said. “I was a little intimidated by her. She blossomed when she was with people who were learned, but a child was the last thing she was interested in. She was not what you would call a happy woman.”

Altmann’s warm serenity contrasts with the glittering but cool characterizations of her glamorous aunt, though Altmann seems to share her stubborn passion for a cause.

“They will delay, delay, delay, hoping I will die,” Altmann, now a widow, said of the dispute. “But I will do them the pleasure of staying alive.”

Adele Bloch-Bauer was only 43 when she died of meningitis in 1925. Her will asked her husband to donate money to workers movements, libraries and orphans.

“I ask my husband to leave my two portraits and the four landscapes of Gustav Klimt to the Austrian Gallery in Vienna,” it said, according to the lawsuit.

Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer was said to be deeply in love with his wife, and he put the six Klimts in a memorial room. He donated another Klimt to the Vienna museum in 1936. Austrian diplomats cite that as an implicit recognition of her will.

“That’s wishful thinking,” Schoenberg said.

By the 1930s, some Austrians openly resented the prominence of Vienna’s Jews and embraced the Nazis when they marched into the country on March 12, 1938. Hitler, an Austrian native who had once been rejected by a Vienna arts academy, the next day declared the Anschluss, the “union,” with Germany. Jewish intellectuals, such as Sigmund Freud, fled.

“They say now that Austria was a victim of the Nazis. Believe me, there were no victims,” Altmann said. “The women were throwing flowers, the church bells were ringing.”

Maria Altmann and her husband, Fritz, had just returned to Vienna from their honeymoon.

The Gestapo evicted them from their apartment and sent Fritz to the concentration camp at Dachau to pressure his brother to hand over the lucrative accounts of his cashmere sweater factory. The Nazis took clothes, jewelry, furniture. They snatched away Adele Bloch-Bauer’s diamond necklace, a wedding gift from her uncle, and gave it to Hitler’s right-hand man, Hermann Goering.

The Nazis took her father’s Stradivari violin, a gift from another Vienna Jewish family, the Rothschilds. Her father died within a few months.

Altmann’s brother-in-law used the promise of his assets to free her husband, and a peasant helped the couple hike over the German border to Holland. The Altmanns moved to California.

Bloch-Bauer was away at his castle in Czechoslovakia. The Nazis seized his Vienna palais, his valuable porcelain, furniture and paintings.

“The Nazis took the paintings out of the house. They auctioned them off, whatever,” Ambassador Moser agreed. “What did the Nazis want with chinaware? They wanted money, money, money. The Nazis wanted to get rid of the Jews, all of them. It was sheer looting and robbing.”

Bloch-Bauer fled to Switzerland when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia. Nazi commander Reinhardt Heydrich, an architect of Hitler’s “Final Solution,” moved into Bloch-Bauer’s castle until exiled Czech resistance fighters assassinated him in 1942. In retaliation, the Nazis killed all male inhabitants over 16 in the nearby village of Lidice.

Bloch-Bauer’s sugar company, too, was “Aryanized,” and one of his paintings, Altmann insists, wound up in the collection of Hitler himself.

By the time Bloch-Bauer died in a Zurich hotel room in 1945, 65,000 Austrian Jews had been killed. His Vienna mansion became a German rail center and is now the Austrian railway headquarters. His will provided for his family and did not mention the museum, the lawsuit says.

“If somebody comes and steals everything you enjoy, would you want them to take more after you die?” Altmann asked.

Ambassador Moser said he was not sure exactly how the Klimts found their way to the Austrian Gallery, “where according to the last will of Mrs. Bloch-Bauer, they should end up anyway.”

The lawsuit says the Bloch-Bauer estate was liquidated by a Nazi lawyer, Eric Fuhrer, who was arrested after the war.

Fuhrer transferred Klimt’s first portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer to the Austrian Gallery in 1941 with a cover letter signed “Heil Hitler,” the suit says.

The suit says Fuhrer traded the celebrated portrait and another Klimt to the Austrian Gallery in exchange for the Klimt that Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer had donated in 1936. The donated Klimt was then sold to an out-of-wedlock son of Klimt who was a successful Nazi propaganda film director, then bequeathed to the museum after his death in 1961, the suit says.

Altmann is claiming a Klimt portrait of a family friend--Amalie Zuckerkandl, who died with her daughter in a concentration camp--that is not mentioned in Adele Bloch-Bauer’s will at all.

The suit says that in the 1980s, an art dealer gave it to the Austrian Gallery in exchange for an export permit.

Moser said several Austrian Jewish families profess ownership. Attorney Schoenberg says he can prove his client’s claim.

In 1998, the Austrian parliament enacted a law providing for the recovery of art stolen from the Jews by the Nazis or donated under coercion after the war, and 1,000 artworks have been returned , officials say.

“There’s a very genuine effort underway to restore the pieces of art to the rightful owners in a dignified and swift manner,” said Peter Launsky-Tieffenthal, the Austrian Consul General to Los Angeles.

As for the Bloch-Bauer affair, “it’s now a fight between lawyers,” Moser said.

“What we object to is, the situation is portrayed as condoning the Aryanization and the looting and robbing of Jews back in 1938. It has nothing to do with it,” he said. “The whole thing happened in Austria, so why try it here?”

Schoenberg, who is the grandson of another legendary Vienna native, composer Arnold Schoenberg, said he tried to sue in Austria. But Altmann and two other heirs would have had to pay a hefty deposit to cover legal costs that could have totaled $2 million. They filed suit in Los Angeles last August (A copy is posted at https://www.adele.at).

The real, unspoken issue for Austria, Altmann contends, is not the will, but the immense notoriety of the Klimts--particularly the portrait of her aunt. “Of course they don’t want to give it back,” Altmann said. “It’s one of the main attractions of the museum.”

“The other day, a woman came in and said, ‘That’s such a beautiful painting,’ ” Altmann said, standing before the reproduction on her wall.

“I said, ‘That’s my aunt,’ ” she mused, her eyes lingering on Bloch-Bauer’s thoughtful gaze. “She was a modern woman living in the world of yesterday.”