Yours for a price

AT the Cheviot Hills home of Maria Altmann, the phone rings and rings. Each time, a machine answers with the jaunty voice of a 90-year-old woman who has had a very good June.

“Hello. This is Maria. I will be out of town for a couple of weeks. My statement on the painting is that it was important to the heirs and to my aunt Adele that the painting be displayed in a museum. We chose a museum that is a bridge between Europe and the United States.”

“The painting” is now the costliest artwork known in the world: a sensuous Gustav Klimt portrait of Altmann’s aunt that the family peddled for more than $104 million, perhaps $135 million, to the Neue Galerie, a small New York museum founded by cosmetics billionaire Ronald S. Lauder.

To get the artwork from Altmann’s family, Lauder’s people prevailed over several of the world’s wealthiest collectors and several major institutions, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which has been displaying the painting and four other family-owned Klimts since early April.

Now, with those other Klimts headed for a likely sale, collectors and museum leaders are looking closely at the last deal to see how the next ones might go. Though the details of the negotiation and purchase have been closely guarded and Lauder was unavailable for comment, several sources close to the deal and art-world insiders say there are at least two lessons here.

First: Altmann and her four fellow heirs in the Bloch-Bauer clan do not appear to have fallen off a turnip truck. For one thing, their instincts have been sharpened by seven years of legal skirmishing against the government of Austria. Also, though the long fight for the paintings ended just five months ago, at least some of the heirs also have shared in earlier restitution awards.

Second: Lauder won the prize with a stealth campaign. While many in the art world whispered that his separation last year from his wife, Jo Carole, might restrict his access to wheelbarrows full of cash, he quietly orchestrated a campaign on two fronts. With one hand, he had his museum staff laying closely guarded plans to succeed LACMA as temporary exhibitor of the five Klimts. What many staffers at the Neue Galerie and LACMA didn’t know until the closing days of the deal was the depth of Lauder’s second level of secret haggling with the heirs.

“I consider it a stunning move for him and, quite frankly, it’s exactly where the painting should be,” said Douglas Chrismas, owner of Ace Gallery in Los Angeles. Chrismas said Lauder “has built this museum as a flagship of this period of art. It would be incorrect for that painting to be anywhere else in the United States.”

The painting “Adele Bloch-Bauer I,” which Klimt made in 1907, glitters with gold and signals the arrival of Modernism in Europe, but it’s also been touched by some of the 20th century’s ugliest history. The canvas is one of six seized by Nazis from Vienna’s Bloch-Bauer family in 1938. After a long legal battle, five were returned to the family’s heirs in January.

Tenacious lawyer

In their battles for restitution from Austria, they chose Los Angeles attorney E. Randol Schoenberg, already a family friend, as their principal warrior. At the time, Schoenberg was not quite 32, seven years out of law school. But over the next seven years, in courtrooms on two continents, including the U.S. Supreme Court, Schoenberg got results. The Klimts were the biggest victory, but not the only one.

On Altmann’s behalf, Schoenberg has also won a quarter interest -- estimated value: $1.5 million -- in a historic Vienna building. On behalf of the Bloch-Bauer heirs, he won a settlement from Austrian banks -- amount not disclosed -- and 19 pieces of porcelain and 16 Klimt drawings with a collective value “in the $600,000 range,” Schoenberg said.

But the biggest win came on April 14, 2005, from the Claims Resolution Tribunal, a fund established to settle lawsuits against Swiss banks over their actions during World War II.

In that case, Schoenberg got a dozen family members -- including the five involved in the Klimt paintings -- a payment of $21.8 million. Bloch-Bauer heirs shared that amount with heirs of Otto Pick, a partner of Bloch-Bauer in the Austrian sugar industry before the war.

Apart from Altmann, the Klimt-owning heirs have shunned the spotlight. Two live in Vancouver, one in eastern Canada and one in Northern California. All are 60 or older.

At Schoenberg’s suggestion, Steve Thomas, a Los Angeles attorney and partner in Irell & Manella, entered the picture in late February. The attorney, who has specialized in art deals for more than a decade, said he spent all of March meeting family members, tutoring them in the subtleties of the art world, handling logistics of moving the paintings to Los Angeles and negotiating with LACMA over the show here.

By the end of April, Thomas said, he and family members “were getting into serious discussions, building consensus on what they wanted and didn’t want.”

Though these five got “a very small portion” of last year’s Swiss bank restitution payment, “these are not individually wealthy people, like some people might be assuming,” Thomas said. “But they’re very sophisticated.”

Meanwhile, Thomas was talking with Lauder.

Divorce no obstacle

To win over the heirs, Thomas said, Lauder had to commit to public display, not a loan or shared-ownership arrangement, as other prospective buyers proposed. And he had to come up with enough money -- a tough job for many men facing divorce prospects. But Lauder’s wealth has been estimated at $2.7 billion, and he has well informed advisors.

Lauder’s recent frequent companion, Daniella Luxembourg, is a London art dealer who has served as director of Sotheby’s and Phillips auction houses.

“I assumed that he was the most interested party in the world,” LACMA Director Michael Govan said of Lauder. “I just didn’t know how he pieced it together. Nobody knows how he pulled it together.”

Schoenberg said he first met Lauder in 1999, and that the Commission for Art Recovery -- founded and chaired by the billionaire -- had helped pay for an expert opinion in 2002 when Schoenberg’s tug-of-war with Austria over the Klimts was still going on. In February, Schoenberg met with Lauder in Vienna and talked about the paintings.

Plans set in motion

As his campaign to buy the artwork advanced, Lauder set plans in motion for a brief Klimt exhibition at the Neue Galerie, which Thomas says would have gone forward even if Lauder hadn’t completed a purchase. For logistical reasons, LACMA’s top leaders had to know about the Neue Galerie show, but Thomas required that LACMA officials sign agreements to keep mum on the next exhibition site.

“There was a lot of strategy,” Thomas said. “Ronald and I would plan our meetings very carefully to be in places where neither of us would be recognized.”

There were about half a dozen meetings in Los Angeles and New York, at locations Thomas wouldn’t disclose. Meanwhile, he said, staging the exhibition at the museum “aided us in confusing people.... It gave us a good cover.”

While the heirs and Lauder drew closer, other suitors pressed their own cases. Thomas called LACMA’s bid “a very serious effort” that entailed talks with Govan and more than one museum trustee. LACMA’s ambition was to acquire all of the pictures, rather than just one or two.

“We tried a number of different things to work with them,” Thomas said. “But they had limitations on what they were able to offer.” In fact, Thomas said, in the current booming art market, it’s now clear that those five Klimts together amounted to “too large a purchase for any one museum.”

The $135-million figure -- first used by the New York Times, citing anonymous sources -- hasn’t been disputed by anyone close to the deal. But Govan said he does wonder whether that was the highest bid.

“What I don’t know,” he said, “is if they were offered $150 million by a Russian billionaire or someone else.”

Declining to talk specifically, Thomas said the family “could have sold it for more, probably, if they had gone to private collectors” and hadn’t required permanent public display.

Govan noted that in navigating these waters, Altmann “balanced family interests, financial interests and public interests.... If these were her paintings, it may be a different outcome.”

Auction bound?

And what about the other four pictures?

They include a second portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, painted several years later with more greens and black, and no gold; and three landscapes. It was a landscape that fetched the highest price ever paid for a Klimt painting at auction: $29.1 million in November 2003.

Experts have speculated that the four Klimts, sold together or individually, could bring as much as $150 million collectively. Then again, after all the attention paid to the “gold portrait,” they might be seen by some status-minded collectors as a consolation prize.

“I’m not expecting that somebody is going to come in and buy four together,” said Thomas. The family is keeping its options open, he said, but “it would be an auction in November if there was going to be an auction of any one or more of them.”

But the ACE Gallery’s Chrismas said an auction would not be the family’s best option. “I think they are such wonderful paintings that, especially with this benchmark that has been established, the family can have them placed quietly. I’m sure they have lots of offers coming in,” said Chrismas.

Also, he added, “it is not necessary to keep them together. Each of those paintings is a thing unto itself. We are not talking about Monet’s haystacks, where it would be wonderful to have seven of them in a row.”

Asked if LACMA would mount an effort to get one or more of the remaining pictures, Govan said Tuesday, “I don’t know.... We have a board meeting tomorrow. I’m sure it’s going to be a topic of discussion.”

Times staff writer Suzanne Muchnic contributed to this report.