History in a frame

NOW THAT Gustav Klimt’s iconic portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer will be leaving its temporary perch in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for a permanent home in cosmetics magnate Ronald Lauder’s Neue Galerie in New York, I have been thinking of the painting’s last place of residence, the Belvedere Gallery here. For it was in that very building, 92 years ago next week, that the chain of events that led us to where we are was set into motion.

Back then, the Belvedere was a palace, not a museum -- home to the thoroughly unlikable and gruff Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The archduke was 40 years old in 1914 and was Austria-Hungary’s heir to the throne (as a result of the suicide of his cousin, Crown Prince Rudolf, at his hunting lodge in Mayerling in 1889). Franz Ferdinand understood better than many that the empire ruled by his uncle, the octogenarian Franz Josef, could not last without serious democratic reforms; he and his shadow Cabinet planned for the day that they would leave the grand halls of the Belvedere for the even grander halls of the Hofburg Palace.

But shortly before noon on June 28, when Franz Ferdinand and his wife were out of town, having gone to Sarajevo to observe military maneuvers, a telephone call came in to the palace with the grim news that both had been shot and killed. Within hours, those who had been working in the Belvedere were to pack their bags, return to their homes and watch as World War I clicked inexorably into place. Millions were to be killed and, at war’s end, the once-great Austro-Hungarian Empire would be divided into a myriad of successor states.

In 1918, when the war had ended, Franz Ferdinand’s Belvedere became a museum, and quite a good one. (It was the same year, incidentally, that Klimt, the great Viennese painter, died.) The wife of Viennese sugar magnate Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer liked the museum so much that she wrote it was her wish that her husband would someday bequeath the spectacular portrait Klimt had painted of her to the Belvedere.

When she died in 1925 of meningitis at the age of 43, Adele Bloch-Bauer had, of course, no inkling that 13 years later, her husband would flee the country or that the Nazis (who came to power just two decades after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) would help themselves to the portrait and four other Klimt paintings. (The 66,000 Austrian Jews who didn’t flee in time were sent to their deaths.) When Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer died in Switzerland in 1946, he left the Klimts to his brother’s three children, not to those who “inherited” the Nazis ill-gotten gains.

The Belvedere continued to play its role in Austria’s history. The Second Republic of Austria was born there, for the palace was where the Soviets, the Americans, the French and the British agreed in 1955 to end their post-World War II occupation of the country. Turned into a museum once again, Adele Bloch-Bauer’s portrait graced one of its galleries.

Austria spent the next three decades lying to itself and the world about its role in the Holocaust. Austrians viewed themselves as the first victim, believing that because their country had been subsumed into the Third Reich, one could not blame them for anything that happened during the war.

But when Austrians elected Kurt Waldheim president in 1986, the world turned away in disgust. Slowly, Austrian teachers, journalists and historians began peeling the scales from their countrymen’s eyes (much as Germans had done some decades earlier).

Young people asked their parents and grandparents uncomfortable questions. Holocaust education began being offered in every school district in the country. Documentaries on the subject filled the airwaves.

The parliament passed restitution laws that have seen more than $500 million paid to the Nazis’ victims and their families. Districts throughout Vienna put up plaques where synagogues once stood.

Which brings us back to Belvedere Palace, Franz Ferdinand’s old home. A few months ago, after a ruling by an Austrian arbitration board in favor of the last of Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer’s living nieces, Klimt’s portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (along with the four other paintings) was finally removed from the Belvedere’s walls, and it, like so many Austrian and German Jews in the 1930s, found refuge in California.

Later this month, however, Adele’s portrait will move once again, probably for the last time, to New York. It will hang in a museum on Fifth Avenue dedicated to German and Austrian expressionism. (It was purchased for $135 million by Lauder, an American Jew, a former U.S. ambassador to Austria and the museum’s founder.)

And in a gallery of exquisite paintings and drawings, all representing that time of intellectual and cultural ferment in Central Europe, one of the period’s most iconic images will take pride of place.