| | Restituted
Objects Each object tells a story. Some are still missing,
some are restituted or resolved, and some have cases still pending. The circumstances
of looting and the efforts for recovery are just as fascinating as the famous
works of art themselves.
Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907
 From
her portrait, it’s easy to see that Adele Bloch-Bauer was an elegant woman. She
and her husband Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer were prominent members of fin-de-siècle
Viennese society. Ferdinand was president of Austria’s largest sugar refinery
and both he and Adele were well known patrons of the arts. Adele held weekly salon
gatherings where her guests included the likes of musicians Gustav and Alma Mahler,
Richard Strauss and artists Gustav Klimt and Oskar Kokoschka. The Bloch-Bauers
had an incredible collection of Austrian art, including several paintings by Klimt.
Adele and Klimt were good friends and there were rumours that the two were lovers.
His most famous portrait, Adele Bloch-Bauer I, took three years to complete
and involved creating several preparatory sketches.
Adele
died in 1925 and in her will she asked Ferdinand to leave the Klimt paintings
to the Austrian State. This was before Anschluss in 1938, when Ferdinand fled
to Switzerland and had to leave all his possessions behind. Ferdinand passed away
in 1945 and named his niece Maria Altmann and her siblings as his heirs. After
the war, all of Ferdinand’s property was gone and his family was told that they
had no claim to the Klimt paintings because they had been donated to the Austrian
state under the terms of Adele’s will. Since the family had not seen the will,
they assumed that this was the truth. Then, in the late
1990s, the Austrian federal archives were opened to the public for the first time
and the truth came out about how the Austrians acquired the Klimt paintings. There
is evidence showing that Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I was purchased by the
Austrian state museum, the Belvedere, from a Nazi lawyer and that Adele’s will
was not legally binding. Since Ferdinand commissioned and paid for the paintings,
they belonged to him. Maria Altmann enlisted an old family
friend, Randol Schoenberg, as her lawyer. Schoenberg, who is the grandson of Austrian
composer Arnold Schoenberg, has strong ties to fin-de-siècle Vienna as well. When
negotiations were unsuccessful, Mrs Altmann decided to sue the Austrian government
for the painting, but was told that she would need to put up a percentage of the
value of the works before she could even bring the case to court, which would
be equivalent to a half million dollars. She and Schoenberg took the unprecedented
step of suing the Austrian government in the U.S.A. The Austrians tried to block
this, and the case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in
June 2004 that Maria Altmann can sue the Austrian government. After another year
without a resolution, both parties agreed to a binding arbitration. In
early 2006, the 90 year old Mrs. Altmann won her case and was given back the Klimt
paintings. Later that year, cosmetics billionaire Ronald Lauder bought Portrait
of Adele Bloch-Bauer I for a reported $135 million, making it the most expensive
painting ever. This seminal Klimt work is now on permanent display at the Neue
Gallery in New York city. | |
Gustav
Klimt, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I Ernst
Ludwig Kirchner, Street Scene, Berlin Henri
Matisse, Odalisque Edvard
Munch, Summer Night on the Beach Nicholas
de Nuefchatel, Portrait of Jan van Eversdyck Egon
Schiele, Autumn Sun (Herbstonne)
|
