'A Wish Came True'
An L.A. Museum Displays Klimt Paintings Taken by Nazis and Restored to Family

By William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 5, 2006

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).

As Barron points out, Gustav Klimt is most famous now for his psychological paintings of women, some of them in erotic drawings and oils, and others in more formal (but often still sensual) portraits, including the commissioned work he did of the wealthy wives of Viennese bankers, merchants and industrialists, who often came from prominent Jewish families.

Art historians and critics differ in their opinion of the messages of the Adele Bloch-Bauer painting. Is she embraced in gold? Or entombed? Where some see a sumptuous dissolve and opulence and ease, others see Adele as imprisoned -- held in a static pose, divorced from nature, choked by wealth, by finery, by things. And her face? Does it show a quiet warmth? Or resignation?

Early 20th-century Vienna was just the kind of place where these analytical mind games would have resonated. At the time of Klimt, his city was exploding with modernist challenges to the formal academy and the status quo. There were new kinds of journalism and architecture. It was the time when Sigmund Freud wrote his "Interpretation of Dreams." When Ludwig Wittgenstein was reworking philosophy. And composers Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg were remaking music. The coffeehouses, salons and theater were filled with shared talk of social revolution. "The culture makers in the city of Freud," wrote the historian Carl E. Schorske in his work on Vienna, "defined themselves in terms of a kind of collective Oedipal revolt."

Klimt himself was at the center of new art and artistic controversy (he got into trouble for pushing the boundaries of old Viennese taste). While he was famous, Klimt remains something of a cipher. The son of a goldsmith, he began his career as an artisan-decorator himself, before bursting onto the art scene with daring commissions that often focused on nude, erotic, sometimes plainly sexual females. He never married, was a bohemian who consorted with his models and was often found in his studio, draped in a painter's smock or Arab burnoose, with nothing on underneath. Upon his death from a stroke in 1918, at age 56, a trove of erotic drawings was found, including a number depicting his models pleasuring themselves (also at his death, several mistresses came forward with 14 children they claimed Klimt fathered).

Maria Altmann, born in 1916 in Vienna, was of course too young to remember Klimt, but she recalls her Sunday visits to Adele and her husband Ferdinand's mansion on one of the best streets in the city, a short walk to the Opera House, and filled with the couple's collections of porcelain, furniture, tapestries and the Klimts.

"It is true, they call it the palais , and I hate the word 'servants,' but she and Ferdinand had them. There were butlers and maids and an old cook," Altmann recalled on an afternoon a few days before the exhibition opened, as she drank a cup of tea and nibbled on Swiss chocolates. "We lived among antiques, but what do children know of antiques? We were wealthy, but I did not know."

Altmann recalls that her aunt was envious of Maria's mother, because she did not have any children herself, having lost them to miscarriage and a stillbirth. "So, then, she had no use for children," Altmann says. She probably even disliked the Sunday afternoon teas. "She was very different from my mother, the social butterfly. Adele wanted to surround herself with brains, with artists and intellectuals. I don't think she was very happy at home."

It has long been rumored, although never proved through letters or diaries, that Adele and Klimt carried on a long affair. It would have been in keeping with the fervor of the times, and Klimt's reputation, and further, there are clues. A painting by Klimt in 1901, "Judith With the Head of Holofernes," uses a model for the ecstatic biblical femme fatale Judith that greatly resembles Bloch-Bauer, right down to the same necklace. Laura Payne, author of "Essential Klimt," wrote that the work is also considered one of the artist's most erotic paintings.

Adele Bloch-Bauer died of meningitis in 1925 at age 43. Her husband, Ferdinand, memorialized her by keeping fresh flowers in her bedroom at the palais , where he also hung the Klimt portraits. It was from these walls that the art was seized by the Nazis.

After the annexation of Austria by Germany in March 1938, Ferdinand fled first to his castle outside Prague and then to Switzerland, leaving the Klimts behind. (During the war, Ferdinand's Czech castle was used to house Reinhard Heydrich, one of Hitler's planners of the Nazi's "final solution" to exterminate the Jews of Europe.)

For her wedding, Maria Altmann had been given a necklace that once belonged to Adele; the Gestapo took it, and according to the Altmann's attorney the jewelry went to the wife of the Luftwaffe commander Hermann Goering as a present for his wife. Altmann's husband was briefly jailed in Dachau, but was ransomed out by his brother. The Altmanns escaped from Berlin, via the Netherlands and London, and settled in Los Angeles in 1942.

During the war, the Nazis Aryanized the Bloch-Bauer factories, took Ferdinand's stock, confiscated the palais (which was used by the Austrian national railway, but has just this year been returned to the family). The Klimts and other collections were plundered -- and given to the Austrian Gallery or sold. The Nazi method was to place huge tax bills on all of Ferdinand's holdings and then order his properties and paintings liquidated.

Over the years, the heirs recovered various items from the scattered Bloch-Bauer estate. But they could not recover the Klimt paintings, because the Austrian government maintained that Adele had directed her husband to bequeath the art to the nation at his death (he died in 1945 in Zurich, almost penniless). Of course, this 1923 request was made before the rise of Hitler and the German annexation of Austria; it is doubtful that Adele would have wanted to leave the paintings to an entity culpable for the extermination of Austria's Jews.

Maria Altmann and the four other heirs were without much hope until an Austrian journalist named Hubertus Czernin wrote a series of articles in 1998, based upon recently opened Austrian art archives from the war years, which showed that the Klimt donations the government had received were coerced. Altmann's attorney, Randol Schoenberg (the grandson of composer Arnold Schoenberg), used a new restitution law to seek their return after first winning a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, enabling him to pursue the case in U.S. courts.

Both sides, however, agreed for the case to be heard in binding arbitration before a panel of three Austrian judges. "The Austrian government was arrogant," Czernin says. "They couldn't believe that they would lose because they couldn't believe they had done something so wrong." But the judges concluded unanimously in January that the Klimts had been looted.

And so here they are in Los Angeles. Schoenberg says the family has not decided what to do with the paintings -- whether they will be sold, donated or both, and to whom. "They're taking their time," Schoenberg says. "It's been 68 years, and a long legal ordeal, and they are just getting used to the idea that they won."

At the opening exhibition Tuesday, Martin Weiss, the consul general of Austria, attended the festivities. He sought to move on. "Both sides thought they were right," Weiss says of the Austrian claim that Adele wanted the paintings to stay in Vienna. "But it was good that the decision that was reached was reached by an Austrian court, and we can accept that." He smiled diplomatically. "It's a good day for L.A."