Woman Seeks Return of Art Seized by Nazis

A West Los Angeles woman sued the Austrian government in federal court here this week, seeking to recover six paintings by Gustav Klimt that she alleges have been improperly held ever since Austrian Nazis seized them from her uncle in 1939.

The paintings being sought by Maria Altmann, 84, are in the government-run Austrian Gallery in Vienna and are worth about $150 million, according to an Austrian art expert in New York.

One of the works, a full-length gold painting of Altmann’s deceased aunt, the prominent art collector Adele Bloch-Bauer, is considered one of Klimt’s two best-known paintings and is valued at $50 million to $60 million.

“Since the revelation two years ago that these paintings were illegally withheld from Mrs. Altmann after [World War II], we have attempted to negotiate with the Austrian government for their return,” said Altmann’s attorney, E. Randol Schoenberg of Los Angeles. “But all our efforts were rebuffed and we were given no other option but to file a lawsuit.”

Werner Brandstetter, the Austrian consul general in Los Angeles, said that a special commission set up by the Education and Culture Ministry in Austria had concluded that although the Altmanns were entitled to recover some pieces of art, they did not have a valid claim to the Bloch-Bauer portrait or the other five paintings at issue in the suit.

According to the Austrians, Bloch-Bauer, who died in 1925, had requested in her will that her husband, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, give the Klimt paintings to the Austrian Gallery after his death. Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer had been Klimt’s patron and had displayed the six paintings in a special room dedicated to his wife in their palatial home after she died.

Altmann asserts that Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer--an Austrian sugar magnate, who fled from Austria when the Nazis took over the country and died in 1945 in Zurich--specified in his will that his substantial estate would be divided among two nieces and a nephew. Of the three, only Altmann is still living.

“All of his possessions had been taken away from him by the Nazis,” Altmann said. “His intention was that my brother, sister and I would inherit whatever was recovered after the war.”

When Bloch-Bauer fled Austria in 1938, the Nazis seized his house and vast art collection. Some of his 19th century paintings were sent to Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering, one of Hitler’s chief aides.

A Nazi lawyer, Erich Fuhrer, traded the most valuable portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer and a landscape called Apple Tree 1 to the Austrian Gallery in return for another painting the family donated to the museum in 1936. Three of the four other paintings now at issue, including a second portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, were sold and Fuhrer kept one for himself.

Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer received no compensation for the expropriated artwork or his large home.

After the war ended, the Austrian government declared that all transactions motivated by discriminatory ideology were null and void, but that did not help Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer’s heirs.

Two years ago, the Austrian government enacted a statute specifically providing for the restitution of art objects looted during the Nazi era. The Altmann family has recovered some pieces, including valuable porcelains, as a part of that process. But the most valuable works were not returned, Schoenberg said.

“I would give the Austrian government an A-plus for enacting the law but a C-minus for implementing it,” said Jane Kallir, co-director of the St. Etienne Gallery in New York.

The Austrian Gallery, which is a co-defendant in the lawsuit, cited Adele Bloch-Bauer’s will when it first declined to relinquish the paintings in 1947. A lawyer hired by Bloch-Bauer’s heirs had doubts about the government’s interpretation of the will but agreed to it so that the Austrian Gallery and Austria’s Federal Monument Office would not oppose the return of other artworks to the heirs, according to the lawsuit.

Altmann’s suit contends that the provision of Adele Bloch-Bauer’s will being relied on by the Austrian government was simply a request to her husband and certainly not legally binding. The suit is buttressed on that point by an opinion from an Austrian legal scholar.

“My uncle certainly would have wanted us to inherit his property and never would have donated anything to Austria after the way he had been treated,” Altmann said Friday.

Schoenberg said that he initially planned to file the suit in an Austrian court but decided not to because of a requirement that a plaintiff post a very substantial bond at the start of the suit. He said that, given the value of the paintings at issue, the amount of the bond would have exceeded Altmann’s net worth.

Filing the suit in a U.S. court is appropriate because Altmann lives here and because the Austrian government conducts business and owns property in Los Angeles, he said. It is likely, however, that the Austrian government will challenge the jurisdiction of a U.S. court to consider the case, given that it involves paintings in Austria and a will that was prepared in Zurich.

Altmann’s suit marks the latest chapter in the legal and political battle of Austrian Holocaust survivors and their heirs to gain compensation for various wrongs. In January, a federal judge in New York approved a $40-million settlement of a class-action lawsuit against Bank Austria, which formally apologized on behalf of subsidiaries that looted assets from Jewish account holders during World War II.

In July, the Austrian Parliament passed a bill to compensate victims of Nazi forced labor during World War II. The measure, however, does not provide any compensation for individuals whose assets were “Aryanized” during the Nazi era.