Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, painted in Vienna in 1907 and stolen by the Reich after the Anschluss of March 1938 from the Bloch-Bauer family apartment at Elisabethstrasse 18 in Vienna, became the most famous restitution case of the postwar period. The painting, known as the Woman in Gold, was returned to the family’s heir Maria Altmann in January 2006 after a seven-year legal battle that went to the United States Supreme Court. Altmann sold the painting in June 2006 to the cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder for one hundred and thirty five million dollars, the highest price paid for a painting at that point. The painting now hangs at the Neue Galerie in New York. The case has become the standard reference point for what restitution can look like when the legal system, the public will and the surviving family come together. It has also become the standard reference for how slow and how hard the work is.
Adele Bloch-Bauer was the wife of the Vienna sugar industrialist Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer. The couple were patrons of Klimt and the Vienna Secession. Klimt painted Adele twice, in 1907 and in 1912; both portraits hung in the family apartment along with three Klimt landscapes and a substantial collection of nineteenth century French and Austrian painting. Adele died of meningitis in 1925 at the age of forty three. Her will requested that her husband donate the Klimt paintings to the Austrian state gallery on his death. Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer accepted the request as moral guidance but did not formally execute it. The paintings remained in the family apartment until the Anschluss.
The Anschluss was followed within weeks by the confiscation of the Bloch-Bauer apartment, the family’s sugar refinery and the family’s art collection. Ferdinand fled to Czechoslovakia and from there to Switzerland. The Vienna apartment was taken over by SS officials and the contents inventoried by the Vienna Reichsstatthalter office. The Klimt portraits and the family Jewellery were among the highest-value items. The first Klimt portrait went to the Belvedere, the Austrian state gallery, in 1941; the second Klimt portrait, three Klimt landscapes and other works also went to the Belvedere or to other Austrian state collections. The official record at the Belvedere recorded the works as fulfilment of Adele Bloch-Bauer’s testamentary wishes, an interpretation that the Austrian state would maintain for the next sixty years.
Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer died in Switzerland in 1945. His will named his three nieces and his nephew, including Maria Bloch-Bauer Altmann, who had escaped from Vienna in 1938 with her husband Fritz Altmann after his temporary detention at Dachau. Altmann settled in Los Angeles and worked as a dress designer for the rest of her life. The Klimt paintings stayed at the Belvedere. The Austrian state passed a string of postwar laws on art restitution, all of them carefully drafted to leave the Belvedere holdings intact. The 1969 Bundesgesetz on Restitution required claimants to surrender any other works they might claim from Austrian collections in order to be allowed to take certain works home. The law was a deliberate barrier.
The case opened in 1998 after the Austrian journalist Hubertus Czernin, working through the Belvedere’s recently declassified provenance files, established that the Bloch-Bauer paintings had not been donated under Adele’s will but confiscated under the Anschluss. The new Austrian art restitution law of 1998, which followed the Washington Principles of December 1998, established an Austrian Art Restitution Advisory Board to review such cases. The board reviewed the Bloch-Bauer claim in 1999 and rejected it. Maria Altmann then sued the Republic of Austria in the United States Federal District Court for the Central District of California, on the argument that Austria had waived sovereign immunity by commercial conduct in the United States. The case went up to the United States Supreme Court, which ruled seven to two in June 2004 that the case could proceed in American courts. The two parties then agreed to binding arbitration in Vienna under three Austrian arbitrators. The arbitrators ruled in January 2006 that all five Klimt paintings should be returned to Maria Altmann.
Altmann sold the first Klimt portrait in June 2006 to Ronald Lauder for one hundred and thirty five million dollars. She sold the four other Klimt works at Christie’s in November 2006 for around three hundred and twenty five million dollars in aggregate. The proceeds were divided among the Bloch-Bauer family heirs. Altmann gave a significant portion to charity, including to the Holocaust Museum Los Angeles and to the Los Angeles Music Center. She died in February 2011 at the age of ninety four.
The case is the subject of Anne-Marie O’Connor’s 2012 book The Lady in Gold and the 2015 Helen Mirren film Woman in Gold. Both works tell the story largely from Altmann’s side, with the Austrian state in the role of the lengthy obstruction. The case is also the subject of the steady twenty-year debate over what just and fair really means in the Washington Principles framework. The Bloch-Bauer case settled because the family had the resources to litigate in two countries for seven years, and because Austria had a particular vulnerability to American court jurisdiction. Most claimant families do not have those advantages. The Klimt case is, in this sense, the exception and the inspiration; the rule is harder.
See also
- Switzerland
- The Washington Principles 1998
- Fuhrermuseum Project
- The Monuments Men
- The Gurlitt Collection
- The Jews of Vienna
Sources
- Anne-Marie O’Connor, The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt’s Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, Knopf, 2012
- Hubertus Czernin, Die Fälschung: Der Fall Bloch-Bauer und das Werk Gustav Klimts, Czernin Verlag, 1999
- United States Supreme Court, Republic of Austria v. Altmann, 541 U.S. 677 (2004)
- Austrian Art Restitution Advisory Board, decision and arbitration documents, Bloch-Bauer case
- Sophie Lillie, Was einmal war: Handbuch der enteigneten Kunstsammlungen Wiens, Czernin Verlag, 2003
- Neue Galerie New York, Bloch-Bauer collection materials