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December 16, 2001

Whose Art is It Anyway?

Gustav Klimt's portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer hangs in Austria's national
gallery. Now her family wants it back.

By ANNE MARIE O'CONNOR, Times Staff Writer

meaning cannot be divorced from history.


language and by the sheer sensuality of art.

eyes and ears.

of them Jewish, whose husbands commissioned portraits by the brilliant

in the international imbroglio over art looted by the Nazis?

debated as fiercely today as the moment it was unveiled.

It is a weeknight in Westwood, and a corps of committed art lovers is

the painting, just as Vienna's hidebound society contained the forces of

the portrait of her aunt and five other Klimt paintings.

Maria pauses a moment, trying to decide where to start.

friendship.' "

her face thoughtfully.

uncomfortable questions, to imagine the unimaginable, to push history

Wealthy Jews were among the city's most prominent citizens and generous
What she really wanted was to study.

Respectable women didn't frequent cafes--Vienna's most populist cultural

Adele wed a Czech sugar magnate, Ferdinand Bloch, a man twice her age. It
was a good match, if not a particularly romantic one. Ferdinand was a
cultured man; one of his best friends was a revered Czech intellectual, Jan
Masaryk, who was on his way to becoming his country's first president.
Ferdinand was also a wealthy man of a nouveau riche class unburdened by
artistocratic convention, though he had acquired some aristocratic
trappings--a summer castle near Prague--and, perhaps, some pretensions. A
sepia photograph shows Ferdinand in a fashionable Hapsburg pose, in a
hunting costume with a rifle and a downed stag.

Adele's betrothal was viewed as a joining of dynastic families, an
impression strengthened by the fact that Adele's sister, Therese, had
married Ferdinand's brother Gustav. Adele and Therese's four brothers had
died--of tuberculosis, cancer, even a duel--so the Bloch brothers agreed to
a joint surname.

Adele and Therese, Maria explains, "were as different as night and day."
Therese was charming and flirtatious, thrilled to lead the waltz at the
annual ball of the concert hall. But "the balls bored Adele to death!" Maria
recalls. "She was only interested in intellectual gatherings."

The Bloch-Bauer brothers, too, were opposites. Gustav, a lawyer, was the bon
vivant who spent his nights at the opera and his days in cafes. Ferdinand
was a workaholic with a passion for hunting, art and politics--and for his
beautiful teenage bride.

Ferdinand delighted Adele, shortly after their marriage, by commissioning a
portrait of her by Gustav Klimt. It was no small gift. A Klimt commission,
at the time, cost a quarter of the price of a well-appointed, furnished
country villa. Klimt was the painter of the moment, the bete noire of the
Austrian cultural establishment. He bit the hand that fed him by answering a
prestigious state art commission with imagery so erotic and deviant that it
is startling even today. Yet such high jinks endeared him to Vienna's
emerging intellectual class; his paintings of prominent women conferred a
mutual cachet akin to a Warhol pop portrait.

The artist's libidinous charms were almost as famous as his irreverence.
Vienna femme fatale Alma Mahler credited Klimt with her sensual awakening.
His mistresses were legend, and people said he wore nothing at all under his
painter's smock.

Klimt made several studies of Adele--starting as early as 1900--then more,
until there were hundreds of sketches. Adele and Ferdinand became habitues
in Klimt's circle, a coalescing new world peopled by Gustav and Alma Mahler
and their friend Arnold Schoenberg, who was conceiving the atonal symphonies
that would startle the world in just a few years. People couldn't help
noticing that Adele and Klimt shared a special rapport.

Perhaps it was this friendship that allowed Klimt to capture Adele's
restless spirit with his shimmery 1907 portrait. When it was unveiled in
Vienna, it was an immediate sensation. A newspaper said the painting
elevated Adele to "an idol in a golden shrine." Critics compared its gold
leaf surface to Greek Orthodox icons. To others, the metallic crust
suggested the hard, glittering surfaces of upper-class society and the
fragile humanity underneath. At 26, Adele was an instant celebrity.

The portrait put her in the company of some of the most remarkable women of
her time: art patronesses, orchestrators of salons where famous composers
mingled with such remarkable women as pioneer female journalist Berta
Zuckerkandl, who embraced Klimt as the creator of a modern image of women.
Klimt may have been shunned by arts bureaucrats, but this son of a failed
gold engraver was now ensconced in an admiring and generous circle of
patrons. Klimt assured his reputation in 1908 with another sensual gold
painting, "The Kiss," an image of a man embracing a woman who bore a strong
likeness to Adele. People saw a likeness too in Klimt's gold portrait of
Judith, the biblical femme fatale, whom he cast as a bare-breasted sexual
provocateur. This Judith wore the same gold collar Adele wore in her

Some see these as clues. But others believe Klimt and Adele enjoyed nothing
more than a deep friendship misunderstood by a society unaccustomed to
intellectual bonds between men and women.

Art historians were not the only ones left to sort out the waltz of
intimacies. The indiscretions of the Vienna intelligentsia were open
secrets. If Schoenberg's atonal compositions provoked scuffles at 1908
premieres, his marriage raised no less a ruckus. His wife Mathilde was
involved with the young painter Richard Gerstl, who took his life when she
went back to her husband.

Publicly, though, decorum was as rigid as the gold mosaic on Adele's
portrait. Viennese playwright Arthur Schnitzler mapped out the tensions of
this social schizophrenia in a story, made into the Stanley Kubrick film
"Eyes Wide Shut," of how one man's fears of his wife's infidelities become
inseparable from reality.

In this confusing milieu, Sigmund Freud became the confidant for the sexual
anxieties of a generation of Vienna women. And Klimt's studio became a
refuge for Adele and her friends, who hung around to talk and drink coffee.
In a puritanical society hostile to the body, Klimt's world was a haven of

Maria, the youngest child of Therese and Gustav Bloch-Bauer, remembers her
aunt in a long black dress, a gold cigarette holder dangling defiantly from
her hand in the Vienna drawing room where Adele staged her famous salons.
Adele would hold forth from one of her gilt Empire chairs, framed by glass
cabinets filled with porcelain gilded with the mythical heroes and beasts of
ancient Greece and Rome. She told people she was an atheist. To Maria, she
was glamorous, aloof--and more than a little intimidating. Less evident to a
child like Maria were Adele's disappointments: Her attempts to have children
ended with two stillborn babies and a son, Fritz, who lived only three days.

"She blossomed when she was with people who were learned," Maria says. But
"she was not what you would call a happy woman."

Yet Adele had succeeded in becoming an anchor of Vienna's artistic life.
Klimt had died by then, after a stroke in 1918, and there were new faces in
her salon, such as Richard Strauss and Chancellor Karl Renner, a Social
Democrat who became president of Austria after World War II.

If other, unseen impulses still laid claim to Adele's heart, they never
strayed far from her ideals. Adele was now a socialist. Maria still
remembers how Adele's maid warned a relative to remove a stack of letters
from her mistress's bedside. The letters were from a progressive champion of
Vienna's poor, one of the people--dismissed as "Jew lackeys"--who helped
earn the city the nickname "Red Vienna." Adele was reading the letters while
ill on a winter day in 1925. She put them down and drifted off into a
feverish coma. She died a few days later, at 43, of meningitis.

Her cerebral brand of existentialism left a lasting impression on Maria, who
still has a letter Adele wrote to Maria's brother Robert: "If fate has given
me friends who may be counted intellectually and ethically as extraordinary,
then I owe these friendships to one of my main qualities: the strongest

"You have to learn to see. If you can appreciate what has quality and what
is worthless in art,' you will appreciate it in people," Adele wrote,
signing her letter: "Hugs from your Buddha."

After Adele's death, Ferdinand complied with her wishes, detailed in writing
in 1923, that he donate money in her name to workers' movements and
orphanages. Adele had also asked her husband to donate the Klimts to the
Austrian Gallery upon Ferdinand's death--a request that would have lasting

Ferdinand never really stopped grieving. He turned Adele's bedroom into a
shrine. He instructed his servants to keep fresh-cut flowers in vases by
Adele's bed. He hung the gold portrait in the room along with a
less-idealized 1912 Klimt painting of an older Adele, her teeth stained by
smoking, that some would call evidence of the end of the affair. They were
flanked by other Klimts, one a landscape of the gardens of Ferdinand's Czech
castle. On Adele's bedside table, Ferdinand left a photograph of the artist,
smiling, a kitten in his arms.

For years, Ferdinand would visit the room and gaze at the portrait of the
bride he had outlived, and of the golden moment when Vienna rivaled Paris,
and Austria boasted the glittering prophets of intellectual and artistic

Randol Schoenberg, a Los Angeles lawyer, paces around his Wilshire Boulevard
law office. Kinetic and intense, he yanks art tomes and history books from
his shelves to illustrate his points. Framed by a view of the Santa Monica
Mountains, Schoenberg spreads a century of photographs on his desk as though
he is introducing the cast of a Russian novel.

As if on cue, a Fedex man shows up with Austria's appeal of a federal
judge's decision to allow the case to go forward in U.S. District Court in
Los Angeles. Lawyers for the defendants, the Austrian Gallery and the
government of Austria, are appealing that decision to the U.S. 9th Circuit
Court of Appeals. Maria is demanding the return of six Bloch-Bauer Klimts
owned by the Austrian Gallery--which she values them at $150 million--or
just compensation. Both sides are scheduled to return to the appeals court
in February. The Austrian appeal is as thick as a phone book. Schoenberg
flips through it and scoffs. "It's all about jurisdiction," he says. "How

If cases like this actually can be won or lost on petty-sounding
technicalities, Schoenberg, 35, doesn't want to hear it. His grandfather,
the composer, fled rising Nazi hostility in Berlin in 1933.

While the Austrians have concentrated on trying to get the lawsuit
dismissed, saying U.S. courts lack jurisdiction, Schoenberg is focusing on
whether the Bloch-Bauers actually willed away the Klimts.

The Austrians say Adele bequeathed the paintings to the national gallery for
delivery after Ferdinand's death. Schoenberg says her request had no legal
authority, and that the art was seized by the Nazis seven years before
Ferdinand's death, violating the terms. The only valid document, Schoenberg
argues, is Ferdinand's will written in exile in Switzerland in 1945--and he
named Maria and two siblings as his heirs.

At lunch in Los Angeles, the Austrian ambassador to Washington, a portly,
amiable diplomat named Peter Moser, says he can see why the Bloch-Bauers are
still upset. "You remember the atrocity, the brutality and the humiliation,
and it's hard to see it in a strictly legal way," Moser says.

He had no precise details on how the paintings, "by coincidence, ended up in
the gallery, where the will said they should."

"It's a legal dispute. It's not a Holocaust-related claim," Moser says. "It
should be tried in Austria."

Maria did try to settle the case in Austria. In 1999, an Austrian minister
granted the family 16 Klimt drawings of Adele and 19 pieces of Ferdinand's
porcelain, but denied the Klimt paintings, saying Adele willed them to the
museum. Maria wanted to file a case on the paintings in Austrian court, but
the law required a deposit of $1.8 million based on the value of the Klimts.
Schoenberg got it reduced to the equally unaffordable $500,000. Last year,
Schoenberg filed the case in U.S. District Court.

Maria sold 11 of the recovered porcelain pieces for $100,000 to pay
Schoenberg's former law firm--a lot of money for a retired dress shop owner
who still works part time from her home selling clothes to older women.

Today, Maria is wearing pink, a silk scarf over her rose sweater, her warm
serenity a contrast to the glittering but cool characterizations of her
aunt. She appears from the kitchen with a plate of tiny sausages, a lovely
gesture, but so Old World. No one serves sausage in Los Angeles. She's
describing her August trip to Vienna. There a guard at the Austrian Gallery
tried to stop her from being photographed with the portrait of Adele. "I
told him, 'that painting belongs to me,' " Maria says, with a feisty smile.
"They delay, delay, delay, hoping I will die. But I will do them the
pleasure of staying alive." Maria may have inherited something from her aunt
after all.

If Klimt and Schoenberg were Austrian prophets of the 20th century, so was
Adolf Hitler. Like Trotsky, Hitler came to Vienna in 1907. Born in a small
Austrian town near the Bavarian border, Hitler had been studying in Linz,
where schoolchildren shouted out "Heil," a signature salutation adopted by
anti-Semitic Austrian politicians. Hitler was dismissed from high school for
bad grades. He headed to Vienna and its famous Ringstrasse, where he gazed
at the lights and the well-dressed people and vowed to become a member of
this charmed circle of high culture parading into the opera.

But when he applied to the Vienna art academy, he failed the drawing exam.
He moved into a homeless shelter and immersed himself in Austria's rising
anti-Semitic politics, which embraced the swastika symbol, advocated
tattooing gypsies and called for segregating the "master race" from Austrian
Jews. Such anti-Semitism prompted Gustav Mahler to leave Vienna for a post
at the New York Metropolitan Opera in 1907.

Despite such fertile soil, Hitler's destiny failed to take root there.
Rejected by the Austrian army for his weak physique, he enlisted in Germany
and applied for citizenship. He would return in 1938.

Maria Altmann can't remember hearing an anti-Semitic slur during her
sheltered childhood in the 1920s and '30s. Her family lived in a fashionable
district of the city. Her sister and three brothers were waited on by a
cook, kitchen maid, chambermaid, and butler. Maria was looked after by a
beloved governess, Emma, a young Lutheran woman from Poland.

She shows me fragile pages of an old leather book filled with
black-and-white photographs. Here is one of Maria Bloch-Bauer, a girl
becoming a woman, at the opera, smiling behind the long red velvet curtains
of a private balcony. In another, the year of her debutante ball, she is
draped in an off-the-shoulder silk organza gown, with the provocative stare
of a starlet. Like her mother, Maria was a bit of a flirt.

"I was so spoiled," Maria sighs.

Now her eyes linger on another photograph, of herself in an ivory wedding
gown, kneeling before a white marble fireplace with gilded Corinthian
detailing. She is surrounded by roses.

In December 1937, Maria married Fritz Altmann, a friend of her brother
Leopold. Maria's uncle Ferdinand presented Adele's diamond necklace and
earrings as a wedding gift. The couple honeymooned for a month in Paris and
St. Moritz, returning to a new apartment in Vienna, where they lived as
newlyweds for 10 days.

Many people know about Hitler's invasion of austria from "the Sound of
noble and unwilling nation. The reality was far less flattering.

the Nazis, a welcome that encouraged Hitler's decision to declare the
string quartet.


Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer's art collection was so enormous and important that
Nazi officials, including representatives of what is now called the Austrian

was most interested in Ferdinand's Austrian Masters collection. Some Nazis
his significance. The Austrian Gallery snapped up the gold portrait of
"Heil Hitler."


Maria Altmann's eyes darken and her features take on the watchfulness of a
soldier who hears the sound of approaching artillery.

her husband Fritz off to Dachau as a hostage.


of his life had been cut," she says.

Her uncle Ferdinand fled his summer castle near Prague as the Nazis
Final Solution. Ferdinand's Vienna palais became a German railway
Nazis soldiers or scrub the sidewalks.

brook and under the barbed wire to Holland.

The rest of the Bloch-Bauers scattered like rain.

Maria's brother Leopold was arrested and brought before a Gestapo officer.
exposure, and carried him to safety.



Leopold fled.

reluctantly, as if the events can be revoked by silence.

Her sister Luise, like Maria a great beauty, had married a Jewish baron and
settled near Zagreb. There they lined up with their two children to board
the train to the death camps, but at the last minute, a friend alerted a
Gestapo officer who had long lusted after Luise. "I will save your friend,"
the Gestapo officer said, "but will she be nice to me afterward?"

Luise's family lived under "protective custody." After the war ended in
1945, the next self-appointed heirs to history, Communist partisans, marched
into town. The Communists called a tribunal and declared Luise's husband an
enemy of the people. They walked him out to the woods on a chilly winter
dawn and shot him in the back. Luise tried to escape Yugoslavia with her
children, but she was caught and jailed.

Maria pauses, picking up a glass paperweight of her aunt's portrait and
rubbing it like a talisman.

"So you see," Maria says, "I haven't lived through anything."

Luise did get out of Yugoslavia, with a new husband. Her daughter married an
Austrian prince.

Let it never be said that the Bloch-Bauers were conquered.

In wartime Vienna, artistic and intellectual circles were plundered, and
some of the remarkable patronesses who would be known as "Klimt's Women"
found themselves fighting for their lives. Amalie Zuckerkandl converted to
Judaism to marry a distinguished surgeon who was a close friend of Klimt.
Klimt had painted Amalie with upswept hair and bare shoulders. She was
deported in 1942 with her daughter Nora to die in the Belzec death camp.
Elisabeth Lederer, the daughter of another Klimt subject, Susana Lederer,
was a sculptor who had joined a Protestant church and married a Gentile
baron. Klimt had also painted Elisabeth, with Chinese dragons swirling in
her wake.

A Nazi court divorced Elisabeth, and it became clear that her life was in
jeopardy. That's when Klimt's roguish reputation came in handy. Elisabeth
somehow obtained a certificate stating that Klimt--and not her Jewish
father--was her true biological parent. Her mother and other "witnesses"
supported this. Investigators studied family photos and handwriting. An art
historian said Elisabeth's sculptures betrayed no "Jewish characteristics"
and "in her artistic works, there is no expression of a purely Jewish
nature." The conclusion? "Descent from Klimt is not improbable." Elisabeth
was saved, although she would die at age 50, in 1944.

As such hells played out in private, the Nazis organized a Klimt exhibit in
1943 in Vienna that is still the largest ever staged. They hid the Jewish
identities of the Klimt women, deracinating Adele with a placard reading
simply: "Lady in Gold."

Maria's uncle Ferdinand escaped Czechoslovakia for Switzerland, where he
moved into a small Zurich hotel. His art collection, which would fetch
hundreds of millions of dollars today, was scattered among many greedy

He struggled in vain to recover a few possessions at the end of World War
II. He rewrote his will, naming his niece, Maria, her sister and a brother
as his heirs. He died nearly penniless a few months after the war ended, in
1945. His ashes were sent to rest beside Adele's.

"He died alone and lonely, a broken man," Maria erupts, her eyes snapping
with outrage. "Adele's wishes were a request, not an obligation, to share
her love of the Klimts with her beloved Viennese. What love could my uncle
have for Austria after they robbed him of everything? He had no intention of
giving the Klimts to those people."

"This art was dragged out of the house by people who murdered their friends.
Would Adele want the things she treasured left [in Austria] after that?"

Austrian arts officials realized that the Bloch-Bauer "acquisitions" left
them in a sensitive position. The postwar director of the Austrian Gallery,
Dr. Karl Garzarolli, revealed his concerns in a March 1948 letter
reproaching his Nazi-era predecessor, Bruno Grimschitz: "Neither a
court-authorized nor a notarized or other personal declaration of Ferdinand
Bloch-Bauer exists, which in my opinion you certainly should have obtained.
I find myself in an extremely difficult situation. I cannot understand why
even during the Nazi era an incontestable declaration of gift in favor of
the state was never obtained from Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer.

"In any case, the situation is growing into a sea snake."

Government officials revealed none of Garzarolli's concerns when Maria's
brothers tried to get some of the art back just after the war. The letter
might never have come to light had it had not been for an Austrian
investigative journalist, Hubertus Czernin. After Austria passed a
restitution law in 1998 for victims of Nazi art thefts, Czernin began to dig
into old records at the Austrian Gallery. The records became a book, "The
Forgery: the Bloch-Bauer Case and the Work of Gustav Klimt," that traced how
paperwork on the paintings had been falsified to hide the thefts.

At the UCLA Hammer Museum, the Austrian art expert has clicked through
slides of most of Klimt's portraits and reached Adele's. He gives little
hint of the controversy. "The portrait suggests Adele Bloch-Bauer's
restlessness, and also her denial of society's expectations," the lecturer,
Tobias Natter, is saying.

Natter is the director of the Austrian Gallery's modern art collection, but
he is as formally attired as a time-traveler from Victorian Vienna. He looks
away as I press forward with my notebook to ask him about Adele, and his
handlers hustle him off.

Natter has faced this before. He himself resurrected the stories behind the
paintings, as the chief curator of the remarkable exhibition "Klimt's
Women." It opened in Vienna in September 2000 with a beautiful poster of
Klimt's "Lady with Hat and Feather Boa"--a work that heirs immediately came
forward to reclaim. "The figure's bedroom eyes no longer seemed to signify
an erotic gaze," quipped Leo Lensing in the Times Literary Supplement, "but
rather to convey something more akin to anxious anticipation, as if she were
waiting to be picked up by her rightful owners."

Adele's gold portrait was at center stage of the exhibit, and in a book that
accompanied the show, Natter acknowledged its confiscation by the Nazis and
Maria's lawsuit. Its inclusion drew more barbs. Vienna culture reporter
Joachim Riedl compared Austria to a "gangster's moll, parading around after
a bloody robbery with jewelry that she insists the victims actually gave her
as a present."

When the exhibition moved to Canada, Adele's gold portrait stayed in Vienna.
Authorities said it was too fragile to move. But international art experts
said Austria was reluctant to risk letting the paintings out of the country
in an era when stolen art is being seized from museum walls by courts that
are increasingly sympathetic to victims of Nazi theft.

A few months after his Los Angeles lecture, Natter takes a leave from the
Austrian Gallery. He's not sure he's going back. When I finally track him
down, waiting for a plane in the Vienna airport, he admits he is haunted by
the mysteries behind the Klimts. But he does not want to discuss the

The public wrangle seems a strange fate for a work of art so intimate. The
portrait of Adele is not a field of lilies or a starry night. Here, in her
naked eyes, lies a story that is more diary than novel. A painting comes
from a time and place. Those who have heard the lovely, tragic story of the
portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer can never again see her as simply a "Lady in

Ultimately, old age and death may be the final arbitrator of this legal
battle. But Adele will live on. Her portrait is, perhaps, more incendiary
and meaningful today than when it was painted. Frozen in Vienna's golden
moment, she has achieved her dream of immortality, more than she ever

And that is the power of art.