A portrait of perseverance

It was a family legend: the glamorous aunt, Adele Bloch-Bauer, honored with a shimmering gold portrait by Gustav Klimt, with whom she may have shared more than a passion for art during Vienna’s belle epoque.

“Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” passed from family treasure into history when the Nazis took over Austria, seized the painting and made it the centerpiece of the biggest Klimt show ever, while concealing the Jewish ethnicity by calling it simply “Lady in Gold.”

History will visit the painting again today, when it will be at the heart of the first Holocaust art theft case to reach the U.S. Supreme Court.

The court’s decision on the case of “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” -- and five other Klimt paintings valued at $150 million -- could affect the fate of other attempts to win indemnification for Holocaust-era claims.

However, the Supreme Court hearing will not deal with the merits of the case to recover ownership of the paintings, filed by Bloch-Bauer’s Los Angeles-based niece, Maria Altmann, who alleges the paintings were illegally acquired by the Austrian Gallery after they were seized by the Nazis. Instead, U.S. justices will hear arguments over whether U.S. courts have jurisdiction over the case.

For Altmann, the hearing is a setback in a case that has dragged on for years. A U.S. court in Los Angeles and the San Francisco-based U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled the case could go forward in the United States. Altmann, who turned 88 last week, is the last surviving heir of the Bloch-Bauers -- and the last family witness of the shimmering pre-Nazi era when her brilliant aunt was a strong force in the artistic and intellectual circles of Vienna’s belle epoque.

She believes Vienna’s appeals have been a stalling tactic designed to keep the case tied up indefinitely. “I will not do them the pleasure of dying,” Altmann said at her Cheviot Hills home, flanked by birthday bouquets of pink roses and asters from her children and grandchildren, whom she said would continue the case if need be. Austria’s attorney contends that the earlier federal court rulings are based on the mistaken premise that World War II events can be judged retroactively according to contemporary laws.

“The decisions are wrong as a matter of law,” said Scott Cooper, of Proskauer Rose in Century City, who will argue the case for Austria. “It has always been the law in the United States that a change in law does not apply to conduct that is already completed.”

Cooper contends that the paintings were willed to the Austrian Gallery by Adele Bloch-Bauer and that her husband, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, agreed to turn over the paintings upon his death.

The Bloch-Bauer case is being closely watched by governments worldwide, who are concerned they too could be exposed to such lawsuits, as well as by museums and art dealers.

“These kinds of lawsuits are changing the way the art business is conducted,” said Michael Bazyler, a Whittier Law School professor who wrote about the Altmann case in his book, “Holocaust Justice.” “Prior to this litigation, the policy seemed to be ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ ” he said. “Museums, galleries and collectors are becoming much more careful when they purchase art to determine it does not have a checkered provenance.”

The wrangle over her painting could hardly be more removed from the glittering moment of history in which it was created, a time when Bloch-Bauer was the orchestrator of one of Vienna’s most vibrant artistic and intellectual salons.

Her adoring husband commissioned the Klimt portrait. Later, he ordered a second, and he collected several landscapes. Adele Bloch-Bauer died at age 43 of meningitis in 1925. Two years before, she had asked her husband to donate the Klimts to the Austrian Gallery, and according to Austria, he agreed to do it upon his own death.

But Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer was forced to give up the paintings prematurely when the Nazis marched into Austria in 1938 and seized his home, business and other possessions. He fled into exile.

Altmann said a letter by Bloch-Bauer proves he had no intention of bequeathing the paintings to Nazi Austria.

“In Vienna and Bohemia, they took everything away from me,” Bloch-Bauer wrote Austrian artist Oskar Kokoschka in 1941. “Perhaps I will get the 2 [Klimt] portraits of my poor wife and my portrait. I should find out about that this week. Otherwise, I am totally impoverished.”

The U.S. Supreme Court hearing will not deal with those issues. Instead, attorneys for both sides will argue the issue of jurisdiction, based on a complex statute, the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. Passed by Congress in 1976, the act protects foreign countries from lawsuits in U.S. courts except under one of its explicitly codified exceptions.

Austria argues that the act entitles it to immunity because the alleged violations occurred years ago. Altmann’s suit, however, contends that the marketing of the paintings’ images in the United States -- where the Bloch-Bauer portrait appears on promotional materials in the U.S. for the Austrian Gallery -- leaves Austria open to U.S. legal action under an exception to the act dealing with the commercialization of property taken in violation of international law.

Academic experts are anything but united over which side is right. “My instinct would be to think that our courts have jurisdiction,” said Robert Benson, a professor at Loyola Marymount law school who teaches international human rights law. “There’s no reason not to haul it into our courts and abide by the honest rules of business.”

“I think the plaintiffs are probably swimming upstream,” said law professor Leila Sadat, an expert on international criminal and human rights law at Washington University, who thinks U.S. officials worry that granting jurisdiction would open U.S. courts to similar lawsuits.

“The issue of sovereign immunity is very subject to politics,” said Mark Zaid, whose $2.7-billion civil suit against Libya on behalf of the families of the victims of the 1988 Pan Am jetliner bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, did prevail on a retroactive use of a 1996 amendment to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. “There are two things that motivate the government: Could the U.S. be sued for similar actions? And what’s the level of friendship with that country?” Zaid said.

The cases are also arousing deep emotions as plaintiffs, many of them elderly, seek “tangible links to lives that were decimated,” according to Sarah Jackson, the Holocaust expert at the Art Loss Register in London. Maria Altmann is no exception.

To her, the Bloch-Bauer Klimts are among the few visible remnants of her happy life as the privileged daughter of a well-to-do, cultured Jewish family in Vienna. As a child, Altmann was in awe of her distinguished, elegant aunt. She grew up hearing whispered stories about her aunt’s relationship with Klimt, who painted his muse as a pale siren, floating on a glittering background of gold.

Life as Altmann knew it ended when Adolf Hitler annexed Austria in 1938. Adele and Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer’s home was “Aryanized.” Friends were sent to death camps. Ferdinand fled to Zurich, and the portrait of his wife was sent to the Austrian Gallery with a cover letter signed, “Heil Hitler.”

When Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer died penniless in a Zurich hotel room in 1945, he had made up a new will, naming Altmann and her now-deceased siblings as heirs.

“Adele loved Vienna,” Altmann said. “But so much changed. So many of her friends committed suicide, were killed, were driven out. To think she would have wanted to leave the paintings to those people!

In Austria, the emblematic gold portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer is considered patrimony, and Klimt has become a talisman of Vienna’s artistic golden age. Even the value of minor Klimts has skyrocketed: A Klimt landscape, the 1914 “Landhaus am Attersee,” recently fetched $29.1 million at Sotheby’s.

Altmann said she would like to see the paintings in Canadian and U.S. museums, such as the Getty. She will attend the Supreme Court hearing with her three sons and two adult grandsons.

If the Supreme Court rules the U.S. has no jurisdiction, “it obviously makes the prosecution of the case very difficult,” said Randol Schoenberg, the attorney representing Altmann. . “It will make it difficult to decide the case on its own merits: Did Adele Bloch-Bauer give Austria the rights to the painting? The answer is no,” he said.

Today, Adele Bloch-Bauer stares out from a Klimt reproduction on Altmann’s living room wall, her level gaze cool, her features decisive. Her portrait faces an original portrait of Adele’s sister -- Altmann’s lovely mother, Therese -- by a lesser artist who rendered Therese as a conventionally feminine vision of pink roses and satin, her blandly demure gaze a contrast to Adele’s fiercely individual stare.

“I don’t think she was beautiful,” Altmann said of her aunt. “But she had so much character. If Adele was alive,” she said, “she would have wanted to argue the case herself.”

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Staff researcher Robin Mayper assisted with this report.