'A Wish Came True'

An L.A. Museum Displays Klimt Paintings Taken by Nazis and Restored to Family

LOS ANGELES, April 4

Maria Altmann says the portrait of her Auntie Adele somehow looks bigger than she remembered, as the Gustav Klimt masterpiece of a sensual lady bound in gold was unveiled here at the county art museum Tuesday, almost seven decades after it was stolen from her family by the Nazis following their march into Vienna.

The story of this Klimt painting -- its creation, its subject, its looting, the discovery of the theft and the legal battle to have the art returned -- reads like a sweeping, romantic epic of loss and redemption, a tale that spans the hothouse salons of fin-de-siecle Vienna, the darkness of the Holocaust and the U.S. Supreme Court.

The five paintings now on display, including the 1907 gold portrait of a wealthy, headstrong Viennese Jewish socialite, comprise one of the most watched and valuable Nazi art restitution events in recent memory. That socialite, Adele Bloch-Bauer, was a model, patron and perhaps a lover of Klimt.

Together, the five canvases, according to art appraisals conducted during the course of the legal case, may carry a value of $300 million -- although a price for the main portrait is admittedly a guess, because works of its notoriety and renown rarely appear at auction.

"How do you come to a figure? The paintings, especially the portraits, are iconic masterpieces of 20th-century art. They are just the rarest of the rare, and they are beyond the art market," says Stephanie Barron, senior curator of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which will display the paintings until June 30 and would clearly like the Klimts to find a permanent home here.

Maria Altmann is 90. She is a little hard of hearing, and when we visited her middle-class home in Los Angeles a few days before the Klimt show opened, she pressed her hand to a wall to steady her balance. But her memory is sharp, as she displays.

At the museum Tuesday, she was dressed in a mint-green pantsuit with pearls at her neck. "I am just so happy," Altmann tells an audience of patrons, curators and journalists before a tour of the exhibition. Altmann speaks a prewar Viennese German rarely heard these days even in Austria -- and even after six decades in Los Angeles (where she worked as a dressmaker, sometimes out of her home), her English retains the waltz of her native tongue. Happy, she says, "that today after so many years a wish came true," and she reminds the audience that it was 68 years ago that "the paintings were stolen from my auntie's house."

Altmann is asked whether she bears any resentment toward the Austrian government, which fought so hard to keep the paintings in the Austrian Gallery of the Belvedere Palace, a federal museum in Vienna, where they have been hanging since soon after the war ended. "No," she answers. "I am a person who tries not resent. But it has been difficult for me. I was angry at times."

She says she thinks her Aunt Adele would have liked to see her portrait hanging here in Los Angeles. "She was ahead of her time," Altmann says. "She would have loved to live as a woman in America now," where she would not have been the frustrated, childless wife of an industrialist 17 years her senior. She would have gone to university and into politics, Altmann imagines, "not be enclosed in teas and ladies' parties."

In the exhibit hall, Altmann poses for the clicking cameras of reporters beneath the portrait of Bloch-Bauer, which is a thing to behold. Unlike the poster reproductions that have adorned a generation of dorm rooms, the gold in the actual painting appears to throb with light.

"It's so beautiful, but it also has an edge, you know?" says Barron, the curator. "It is undeniably a masterpiece, but it's also the kind of painting that the public falls in love with. It's absolutely glorious, and so are the others," which include another portrait of Adele, this one a feast of primary colors painted in 1912, and the three landscapes, depicting a beech forest, an apple tree and view from Lake Atter, where Klimt spent his summers (with his lifelong mistress, among others).