Summary

Ferdinand BlochBauer, a prominent Jewish Viennese businessman, head of the Austrian sugar industry and a lifelong collector of art, commissioned the well known painter and founder of the Austrian Secession Movement, Gustav Klimt, to do several portraits of his wife Adele. He bought two of these in addition to four landscapes by the same artist. In 1936 he donated one of the landscapes to the Austrian Gallery. The five remaining paintings were hanging in Ferdinand’s home until the day that the Nazis seized its entire contents. 

Adele died in 1925 when the bacillus of the Nazi plague was still dormant. She left a will requesting her husband to leave the Klimt paintings in his will to the Austrian Gallery in Vienna. Ferdinand declared himself willing to do so when his time would come, even though Adele’s request in her will did not have the legal force of a bequest. However, in 1938 when the Nazis invaded the Austrian territory, Ferdinand fled for his life to Switzerland, leaving, of course, all his possessions behind.  He died in exile in 1945 having revoked all previous wills. The reason for this is obvious; he had lost all of his Austrian possessions and therefore the possibility to dispose of them.

The Austrian Government now takes the position that the request of Adele BlochBauer's will has the force of a legacy. This, of course, is absurd.  The paintings belonged to her husband who had commissioned them and paid for them.  Under the most flimsy pretext the Austrian Government has refused to turn over the stolen paintings to the last surviving member of the BlochBauer family, Maria Altmann.  An attempt to take legal action against the Austrian Government was stifled by its demand of a prior deposit of $500,000.  And so, the Klimt paintings are stolen again: the first time by the Nazis in 1938; the second time at the end of World War II when the Austrian Government forbade the export of "Austrian Art"; and the third time now by a flagrant perversion of the law.