Maria Bloch-Bauer Altmann never wanted a fight.
In fact, she never wanted Gustav Klimt’s celebrated portrait of her aunt, Adele Bloch-Bauer, to leave Austria, the country Altmann had escaped during the Holocaust.
Altmann told me so in no uncertain terms in 2004, as we sat in her Los Angeles living room near a reproduction of the painting at the center of “Woman in Gold,” a new film about Altmann’s yearslong struggle to reclaim her family’s Nazi-looted property.
But the Austrian government fought Altmann every step of the way, all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court and for years beyond. For Austrian officials didn’t simply want to keep the family’s art inside Austria for future generations to cherish. No, the Austrian government vigorously disputed Altmann’s ownership of “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” and several other Klimt works, valued at approximately $150 million, while denying the Holocaust underpinnings of this case.
And that made Altmann mad.
At first, when she went to meet Austrian officials about her family’s art in the late 1990s, “they couldn’t have been nicer,” she said, as we sipped beverages in her LA home. I was covering the saga for the Tribune, and she was generous with her time in speaking about it.
She had traveled to Vienna with her son because in 1998 the Austrian Culture Ministry had opened its archives to researchers for the first time, after authorities in New York had seized two allegedly looted Egon Schiele paintings on loan to the Museum of Modern Art.
A brilliant Austrian journalist, Hubertus Czernin, dived in and found documents that Altmann had never seen, including the last wills of her aunt and uncle and a collection of letters between the family’s Vienna attorney and Austrian officials discussing restitution of the art after the war. Czernin’s expose (strangely omitted from the film) caused a sensation, documenting how Austria’s postwar government allowed survivors and their heirs to take some artworks out of the country only if they agreed to leave others behind with the National Gallery. Extortion, in effect.
The contretemps prompted the Austrian government to pass a new set of restitution laws, which led Altmann to try to reclaim her family’s art — fully 60 years after she had escaped with a single family heirloom: a pair of Adele Bloch-Bauer’s diamond earrings Altmann told me she had hidden in her bra.
After Altmann’s first visit to Vienna she told her son, “‘We have no problem,'” she said to me, regarding her hopes of reclaiming “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” and the other works. “‘They seem totally ready to negotiate.’ I came back (to LA), and I wrote them a letter and said that when you come hopefully to the right decision, I, as the last (surviving) Bloch-Bauer, will see to it that the gold portrait, being a national treasure, will never leave Austria. I didn’t say in which way. I didn’t say that they will buy it, or whether I will donate it.
“And they didn’t even have the courtesy to answer the letter of an old lady!” Altmann continued “At that time, I was 82.”
She was about to turn 88 when we met, and she was fully aware that time was running out.
Altmann’s attorney, E. Randol Schoenberg, for years tried to get the Austrians to come to a compromise with Altmann that would allow the Klimt paintings to stay in Austria. But “all the attempts that Randy made to negotiate fell on ice, on rocks,” Altmann told me. What Austrian officialdom never understood was that Altmann didn’t want the paintings. She wanted justice.
“Look,” she said to me. “If they would have once come and said, ‘We know these paintings are not ours, but, look, they are national treasures for us. Can you sit down and negotiate?’
“Not once did they even attempt it or answer a letter of mine, let alone a number of letters. … They feel they got away with and they (feel they) will get away with it, and they will pat themselves on their back, and this is what makes me so angry.
“They are getting away with a lie … saying, ‘It’s not yours. It’s ours.'”
Indeed, though all parties agreed that the paintings and other Bloch-Bauer family property had been looted by the Nazis, the Austrian government maintained that the legal case had nothing to do with the original theft of the art or with the Austrian National Gallery’s acquisition of stolen works. The Austrians maintained that this case was really about last wills and testaments.
Journalist Czernin had uncovered the wills of the original owners of the art works. Adele Bloch-Bauer, who had died of meningitis in 1925 at age 34, two years earlier had written a will requesting that her husband, Czech sugar magnate Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, bequeath the paintings to the Austrian National Gallery. Once the Germans annexed Austria, in 1938, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer fled to Switzerland, where he lived out the war in extreme poverty and duress.
“In Vienna and Bohemia, they took away everything from me,” he wrote artist Oskar Kokoschka on April 2, 1941. “Perhaps I will get the 2 portraits of my poor wife (by Klimt) and my portrait. I should find out about that this week! Otherwise I am totally impoverished.”
He died shortly after the war — a “broken, broken-hearted man,” Altmann told me on another occasion. His will left the art works to Altmann and her siblings.
In the Altmann case, the Austrian government maintained that Adele Bloch-Bauer’s will was pre-eminent and the Holocaust-era theft of the artworks irrelevant.
“This case doesn’t have anything to do with World War II,” Gottfried Toman, director of the Austrian office of state attorneys, told me in 2004.
“It deals with Austrian law of succession, the right to succeed under a last will. We are willing to face our history, and of course we have to take the responsibility of this history. But you cannot slip under the context of stolen WWII art things not related to WWII.”
Documents showed, however, that Germans met with Austrian officials to divide up the Bloch-Bauer art collection, with Austria’s National Gallery receiving the “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” and other works. Some of the pieces were purchased, though at prices not set by Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, who did not receive the money.
And what of Adele Bloch-Bauer’s 1923 will, bequeathing the paintings to the Austrian National Gallery?
“The thought that she would have wanted to have left them there after what happened (during the Holocaust) is out of the question anyway,” Altmann said to me.
In 1948, Bloch-Bauer family members who had survived the war were granted permission to take several works of art out of the country, providing they left the Klimt paintings behind.
For Altmann, this case was all about the war and the Holocaust, for she remembered well what happened when the Nazis arrived in Vienna on March 12, 1938.
The Austrian populace “greeted them with church bells ringing and women throwing flowers at the soldiers,” Altmann told me. She had married Fritz Altmann just months before, and he was sent to the Dachau labor camp as hostage for the family bank accounts, she told me.
After his assets were transferred to the Germans, he was released, and the two lived under house arrest.
“We made three attempts of escape, and thank God they didn’t find out, and the third one worked, and we escaped over the Dutch border and then went to England,” said Altmann, who eventually arrived in Los Angeles.
Had they not fled, “I probably would have been killed,” said Altmann.
To her, therefore, the stolen art had everything to do with the Holocaust and Austria’s complicity in it.
But Altmann saw no hope for her case in Austria, its laws requiring that she put up more than $1 million (which she didn’t have) to pursue her rights.
She found some encouragement, however, from lawyer Schoenberg, a grandson of the great Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg, who himself fled in 1933 for America. Because the Austrian National Gallery did business in the United States, Schoenberg believed the Austrian government could be sued in the United States under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, passed in 1976 to articulate foreign governments’ rights here. Schoenberg contended that the FSIA could be applied retroactively to events of the late 1930s and ’40s, if certain conditions were met.
Two federal courts agreed that Altmann, an American citizen, could sue Austria under the FSIA. The Austrian government declined to negotiate with Altmann and appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which found in her favor.
When the Austrian government finally agreed to arbitration, its restitution panel concurred with Altmann that Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer rightfully owned the works and had left them to his heirs.
The Altmann family sold “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” to Ronald Lauder for $135 million, and it’s now on view at the Neue Galerie in New York.
Unfortunately, other European countries also have refused to relinquish looted works of art by declaring them “national treasures.” But if these are indeed cultural icons to be kept in their home nations, why not simply pay the owners the international market value outright?
When governments mandate that works must stay in their country of origin or be sold at bargain-basement prices, as often is the case, the art essentially is being looted once again.
Altmann’s case was the rare, spectacular success, made possible by an indefatigable journalist who found the documents, a creative lawyer who made legal history and a woman who would not give in.
She believed that the Austrian government kept fighting her because “they’re hoping I croak,” she said to me.
But she drew consolation from everyday Austrians who reached out to her.
“I have letters from people from Austria that found the case,” she told me. “Young people, and they said, ‘We are ashamed. What can we do to help?'”
Altmann died in 2011 at age 94, but no one did more to help the cause of retrieving looted art — and justice — than she.
Twitter @howardreich
