Art & Auction

Vienna – Having failed to recover most of the art collection that their family lost in the World War II era, the heirs of Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer are making another valiant effort to recover that property by suing in the U.S. The claim, which is expected to be filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California later this spring, concerns six paintings by Gustav Klimt that were once owned by Bloch-Bauer, a Jew who had made a fortune in the sugar-beet business. The paintings came into the Austrian state’s hands in 1938, when Bloch-Bauer’s enter estate was “Aryanized” and liquidated to pay an extortionate tax levied by the Nazis, as he fled abroad after the March 1938 Anschluss.  (See Art & Auction, September 15.)

Dispersed around the world, the Bloch-Bauer heirs have been trying to recover the paintings for two years. The family is represented by Los Angeles attorney E. Randol Schoenberg, grandson of the emigré composer Arnold Schoenberg. One of the Bloch-Bauer heirs, 84-year-old Maria Altmann, has been living in Los Angeles since the war.

Citing a 1998 Austrian law expediting the return of property now in Austrian public collections to the heirs of Holocaust victims, the Bloch-Bauer family and Schoenberg requested that the Klimts--now in the collection of the Austrian National Gallery, or Belvedere--be handed over. Yet in June, the Beirat, a state-appointed commission set up to examine individual claims under the new restitution law, said that the paintings had been donated to the Belvedere in the 1925 will of Adele Bloch-Bauer, an arts patron who hosted a salon that Klimt visited frequently. Adele, who also posed for some of Klimt’s most famous portraits, died in 1927.

The Bloch-Bauer family contends that documents show that the paintings were not Adele’s to give, but belonged to her husband. Ferdinand, who survived her.  In her 1925 will, Schoenberg points out, Adele only wrote that she hoped that her husband would ultimately donate the six Klimts to the Belvedere. Before his death in Switzerland in 1945, however, Ferdinand, who had no children, willed his property to a nephew and two of his nieces.  The paintings were not donated, as the Beirat claims, but seized from the family, Schoenberg says.

Under the restitution law, Schoenberg maintains the six paintings, which include Portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl, not mentioned in Adele’s will be presumed to have been stolen by the Nazis, must now be returned to the heirs.

After the war, when Bloch-Bauer’s nephew, Robert Bentley, tried to retrieve his uncle’s confiscated property, his Austrian lawyer told him that getting the Klimts from the Belvedere would be impossible. The lawyer advised Bentley to donate the paintings to the Belvedere in exchange for export permits to take other Bloch-Bauer property out of Austria.  Schoenberg argues that because the Austrian lawyer misinformed Bentley and had him sign away his rights to the paintings without consulting the other heirs, that agreement is invalid.

Thanks to the restitution law, the family has recovered remnants of its 400-piece porcelain collection and 16 Klimt drawings that were in the Belvedere, which were returned in November.  The drawings went on view in New York in the show entitled “Art Saved From Europe” at Galerie St. Etienne this past winter.

When the Beirat ruled against their claim for the Klimts and the heirs expressed their disappointment, Austrian Cultural Minister, Elisabeth Gehrer, suggested that the family sue the Belvedere. (Similar suggestions have been made to other families making such claims.)  But the heirs say that the minister was actually telling them to go fly a kite, since suing in Austria is prohibitively expensive. Before the proceedings begin, plaintiffs must pay court costs, which are computed as a percentage of the value of the value of the property in question.  Based on the estimate of the Klimts’ value at $110 million to $160 million and their court costs of $1.43 million, Schoenberg explains, the family applied for a waiver in order to bring the case at a lower cost.

A court in Vienna then required all the Bloch-Bauer heirs to disclose the financial holdings – the equivalent of a financial strip search, the family says – and demanded a deposit of more than $200,000 to cover some of the costs before proceedings could begin.  But on inspecting the disclosure forms this spring, Austrian officials noticed that the heirs had not listed the drawings and porcelain that had been recently returned from state collections.  The officials accused the heirs of perjury for not including the value of this property on the forms, and threatened them with fines and prosecution. Schoenberg says that the family had prepared the forms in September to October 1999, before the porcelain and drawings were restituted.

Stressing that all other approaches have been exhausted or rejected by the Austrian authorities, Schoenberg says that “the Austrian officials are basically cowards,” noting that both Altmann’s visit to officials in Vienna in spring 1999 after the restitution law was passed and the family’s offer to negotiate to keep the paintings in Vienna in exchange for some compensation have been fruitless. Schoenberg accuses Austrian officials of hiding behind legal procedure to avoid any discussion of returning the Klimts. Skeptics wonder whether such a tone will help recover property from Austria, where the legal system is less adversarial than the U.S.’s, and disputes are resolved quietly. The attorney has now decided to abandon the idea of suing in Austria, unless the government agrees to lower the court costs.

Yet suing in the U.S., while less expensive that doing so in Austria, may prove difficult. Suing a foreign government is usually not allowed in U.S. courts, although Schoenberg insists that a precedent exists for suing for infractions committed by foreign governmental institutions doing business in the U.S.  In this case, he says, given that the Belvedere has been asking U.S. museums to loan Klimt works to its upcoming exhibition “Gustav Klimt and the Image of Women” in October, the claim would rest on the fact that a foreign museum doing business in the U.S. is holding property that is claimed by an American citizen.