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May 09, 2001

AUSTRIAN EXPATRIATE CAN SUE IN U.S.
       Judge OKs American Heir's Pursuit of Nazi-Nabbed Klimt Paintings

By Donna Huffaker
Daily Journal Staff Writer

        LOS ANGELES - The American heir to paintings stolen by Nazis during World War II may  fight to retrieve the paintings in a U.S. court, a federal judge has ruled.

        The ruling is the first major hurdle Maria Altmann, 85, has overcome in her quest to retrieve six Gustav Klimt paintings valued at $150 million.

        The paintings, which once belonged to Altmann's aunt and uncle, now hang in the Austrian Gallery, which until recently was owned by the Austrian government.

        The government still owns the paintings in the gallery, according to Altmann's lawsuit.

        Altmann will continue fighting for the looted artwork because her family did not donate the paintings to the gallery, she said recently. The gallery obtained, and is keeping, the paintings illegally, according to Altmann.

        "This is about justice," Altmann said in an interview in her Cheviot Hills home, where a replica of Klimt's gold portrait of Altmann's aunt, Adele Bloch-Bauer, hangs in the living room.

        "It's totally wrong that they're keeping something that isn't theirs and using the paintings to lure people to the gallery," she said.

        Los Angeles attorney E. Randol  Schoenberg filed Altmann's lawsuit against the Republic of Austria and the Austrian Gallery in federal court last year. Maria V. Altmann v. Republic of Austria, 00-08913 (C.D. Cal., filed Aug. 22, 2000).

        Austria countered that the U.S. courts have no jurisdiction over it as a sovereign foreign state. Representing the Republic of Austria, attorney Scott Cooper of the Los Angeles firm Proskauer Rose filed a motion to dismiss the case.

        U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper denied the motion, ruling jurisdiction is appropriate under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976. The law allows an exception for immunity in cases where stolen property violates international law.

        In a ruling Friday, Cooper found Altmann alleged a "substantial and non-frivolous claim that a taking in violation of international law occurred on at least two occasions," first, when the Nazis seized the paintings from Altmann's uncle, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, in 1938 and again when the Austrian government refused to return the artworks to his heirs following World War II.

        Cooper's ruling marks the only time the United States has held a foreign state subject to a U.S. court involving Holocaust claims, Schoenberg said. Such claims generally are settled before they reach a judge.

        Attorney Scott Cooper said Tuesday he plans to appeal the judge's ruling. Cooper believes the judge applied a number of legal principles that are inconsistent with controlling authority, and it's on that area of the law that the plaintiffs and defendants disagree.

        "We've raised a jurisdictional issue having to do with the functional rules in American courts not adjudicating claims against foreign sovereigns," Scott Cooper said. "There are narrow exceptions, but we believe none of them apply to this case."

        Schoenberg said he believes "defense tactics, all along, have been to delay and delay and hope [Altmann] dies."

        Scott Cooper denies Schoenberg's allegations.

        "That [allegation] is mean-spirited and wrong and there's no support for that," Cooper said, noting that all the property and the evidence in this case exists in Austria.

        Arguing that the case should be relocated to Austria is "hardly a procedural trick," he said.

        Schoenberg said it could take another 18 months for the 9th U.S. Circuit  Court of Appeal to review Judge  Cooper's ruling and then additional months before the first piece of evidence is entered at trial.

         Judge  Cooper's ruling further states that "Austrian courts provide an inadequate forum for resolution of [Altmann's] claims,"  and denied the Republic's request to transfer the case to an Austrian court.

        In 1999, after Altmann saw her aunt's will for the first time, she filed an application for litigation assistance in Austria to reduce Austrian court costs. Winning a partial cost waiver, Altmann still would have to drain her entire life's savings, Schoenberg said. And Austria appealed even that partial financial break, he added.

        Thus began Altmann's legal battle.

        Born in Vienna, Austria, Altmann visited her aunt and uncle at their Czechoslovakian summer castle at least twice a month. Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer supported the Austrian arts and bought the Klimt paintings about 1920, Altmann said, remembering the pieces that hung on the castle's opulent walls. Austrian art experts say Klimt's most significant painting was the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, a beautiful young society woman born into a wealthy Jewish family who married a Czech sugar baron.

        Altmann's aunt died in 1923 of meningitis.

        In her will, she requested that her husband leave the Klimt paintings to the Austrian Gallery after his death. In his will, which he wrote two days before his death in 1945, he left everything to his nieces and nephews. The document does not mention the paintings.

        "The Nazis stole the paintings and every piece of furniture out of his house in 1938," Altmann said. "The Gallery claims [the paintings] were willed to them. They were never willed to them."

        Her aunt's will requested that her husband donate the Klimts, she acknowledged.

        But, she said, "there's a big difference between a request and an obligation. And that's the whole thing."

        The Klimts represent only a part of what the family lost to the Nazis in war-torn  Austria.

        When the Nazis invaded Austria in 1938, Altmann and her husband, Fritz, had just returned from their honeymoon. The Gestapo wrenched the engagement ring from her finger, seized all of her jewelry, including her aunt's diamond necklace,  and imprisoned her husband at Dachau, a concentration camp, for several months.

        In exchange for the profitable knitting factory in Paris that his brother owned, the Nazis released Fritz Altmann, and the couple escaped from Austria. They relocated to the United States in 1940 and settled in Los Angeles County in 1942. Maria Altmann became a U.S. citizen in 1945.

        Altmann would accept $150 million in lieu of the collection, she said.

        Not that the defense has offered that, she laughed.

        She reached across her coffee table and retrieved a memento from the Austrian Gallery - a round, coaster-like print of Adele Bloch-Bauer's  face. The Gallery also sells her  image, as painted by Klimt, on T-shirts, umbrellas and magnets. Even the Gallery's guidebook features the "gold" portrait on the cover.

        "They're a national treasure," she said. "But they stole them. And that's wrong."

        It wasn't until late 1998 that Altmann saw her aunt's will. As soon as she read the word "request," she said, she knew the paintings belonged to her family, and she is the last surviving heir. Altmann began the uphill legal battle across the world more than two years ago and will wait patiently through the appellate process, she said.

        The senior citizen who escaped Hitler has no intention of giving up.

        "I won't give [the defense] the pleasure of croaking," Altmann said.