Stolen, Smuggled, Sold

by Nancy Moses

  As we sleuths follow the goods, we will confront our own values and views on who should own these problematic objects. Here you, the reader, and I, the author, will listen to every point of view. We will keep an open mind. We will ponder, debate, and discuss. You and I might agree about who is the rightful owner of each found treasure, or maybe we won’t. Who knows?

  What I do know is that the return of cultural treasure is a gigantic and mesmerizing topic that reaches from earliest days of humankind up to the most recent online posting in the international press. Collecting institutions around the world are filled with objects that have breaks in the chain of ownership, suspicious ownership records, or no provenance at all; there’s much too much to squeeze into one small book.

  Therefore, my hope for Stolen, Smuggled, Sold is very modest. I hope that the next time you go to a museum and see something that sparks your interest, you will ask yourself: How did this get here? Who does it belong to? And is that the way it ought to be?

  Notes

  1. Robert K. Wittman with John Shiffman, Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World’s Stolen Treasures (New York: Broadway Books, 2010).

  2. Jeannette Greenfield, The Return of Cultural Treasures, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

  3. Vernon Silver, “Tomb-Robbing Trials Name Getty, Metropolitan, Princeton Museums,” October 21, 2005, Bloomberg.com, http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=email_us&refer=&sid=aThsZ_9K56sQ.

  Chapter 1

  The Lady in the Jeweled Dog Collar

  She’s a golden goddess, a dazzler in her gold jewels, slim gold gown, and cape, a Mona Lisa smile on her lush, red lips. Millions have fallen in love with this painting of an Austrian socialite by the eccentric artist who may have been her lover. What makes it more remarkable still is its story: the painting was abandoned when its owner fled the Nazis, sold to the Austrian national art museum, won back by its owner’s heirs in a battle that went all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, and bought for a record price by a billionaire collector.

  This is Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer 1 by the Austrian painter Gustav Klimt. It hangs in the Neue Galerie, a jewel box of a museum with a tony address across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The December day I first visited, the Neue was filled with well-dressed patrons in somber greys and blacks, staring at paintings with their audio guides in hand or gossiping over dense coffee and delightful pastries in the museum’s lovely Viennese cafe. Nearby was the curving marble staircase that led to the second floor galley dedicated to Austrian artwork.

  The painting commands the room. It’s about five feet square but seems larger, flanked by a pair of sleek sculptures of male nudes. Klimt painted Adele with dreamy bedroom eyes, flushed cheeks, and an enigmatic smile, with a dense crown of black hair and a jewel-encrusted choker around her long neck. Her head, neck, shoulders, arms, and folded hands appear three-dimensional, surrounded by a dizzying syncopation of gold and silver patterns against a mottled golden wall. The patterns nearly engulf the woman, blurring the lines between figure, garments, and backdrop.

  I stared at the painting, then walked around the mauve and grey gallery, past paintings of society women Adele likely knew and places she may have visited; past porcelain clocks and mirrors and a regal robe-like dress by one of Adele’s favorite designers, Emilie Flöge, who was Gustav Klimt’s sister-in-law. I then returned to the portrait. The more I looked at Adele, the more Adeles I saw: a glittering Byzantine mosaic Madonna, a hot damsel strangled by her glittering dog collar, a Jewish princess of Vienna’s Golden Age, a pathetic relic from the world that the Nazis destroyed. Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer 1 is a stunner on its surface with a darker, more ominous meaning lurking below.

  I actually had seen her before, and chances are you have, too, since Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer 1 is one of the most heavily merchandised images in the world. Glamorous Adele has appeared on t-shirts, mugs, key chains, umbrellas, playing cards, and more. A poster bearing her image graced many a college girl’s dormitory wall in the 1960s, including mine at Syracuse University. I thought I knew Adele from such frequent encounters, but when I saw the actual portrait, large and extravagant, she morphed into an object of mystery. What was her life like in turn-of-the-century Vienna, I wondered? What inspired Klimt to capture her likeness in such a peculiar portrait? What happened to the painting during World War II, when the Nazis annexed Austria? How did it get from Vienna to Manhattan?

  I stopped at the museum’s bookstore and purchased a few of the many books about the artist, the painting, and its path through time, including one published by the Neue itself. I went home and began reading: piles of books, scores of websites, as I sunk deeper and deeper into the morbid morass of Holocaust art.

  Holocaust art is a genre distinguished not by what is on the canvas but rather by what is missing in its provenance, the chain of ownership records from the artist forward. For Holocaust art, the chain of ownership breaks around the beginning of Hitler’s rise to power and picks up again around the end of war. The field of Holocaust art is a sad and eerie place: its books, articles, films, exhibit catalogues, and growing body of case law document the crushingly tragic experiences of millions of human beings and the problematic disposition of their most treasured possessions.

  I was shocked to learn that many American art museums own Holocaust art, and that you can actually see it listed on the web. When I heard about this at a museum conference, I immediately went online to the websites of a number of leading art museums. I typed in the word “provenance,” and up on my computer screen came photographs of painting after painting, along with descriptions of the museum’s Nazi-era provenance research. According to the Association of Art Museum Directors, out of the eighteen million objects in American art museums, approximately twenty-five thousand “require further study into their ownership history during the Nazi era.” Between 1998 and July 2006, only twenty-two of the twenty-five thousand works were returned to the heirs of Holocaust victims[1] or, because of settlements reached with the heirs, remain in the museum. That is hardly a record of which to be proud.

  These stolen artworks haunted me and tied me to their dead owners, to the comfortable homes of the Jewish professionals, merchants, and others of means on the cusp of the war. It’s impossible to comprehend six million Holocaust victims, but I can imagine a single family living in a flat in Munich or Paris or Vienna, cowering by the windows as their city is invaded, frantically packing up a couple of suitcases, mournfully abandoning their paintings as they close the door on their lives, some getting safely away, others trapped and murdered by the Nazis. I imagine the survivors of the war, learning decades later that the beloved painting that once hung over the fireplace in their flat is now hanging on the walls of an art museum in Memphis or Milwaukee or Melbourne. Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer 1 was one of the lucky few that made it back to its family of origin.

  Adele Bauer lived like a princess in Vienna at its most glorious moment, the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She was born in Vienna in 1881 into a wealthy, well-placed family, her father a distinguished banker and her uncle a titled nobleman and advisor to the Bavarian king. At age eighteen, in Vienna’s main synagogue, she married Ferdinand Bloch, a wealthy industrialist and major art collector who was seventeen years her senior. Adele’s sister Theresa had wed Ferdinand’s brother Gustav a year before. By the time the Bauer girls married, their father and brother had died. Because there was no one to carry on the distinguished Bauer name, both couples decided to use the hyphenated surname of Bloch-Bauer. Adele and Ferdinand had no children, but were very close to Theresa and Gustav’s children: Karl, Robert, Leopold, Luisa, and Maria, who show up later in the story. Within a couple of years, Ferdinand had acquired a castle near Prague and a stylish mansion in the center of Vienna: the Palais Bloch-Bauer.

  The Austro-Hungarian Empire was Europe’s second largest and third most populous nation, with twelve recognized languages. The
remarkable sixty-eight-year reign of Emperor Franz Josef I brought it unprecedented political stability and economic prosperity. Vienna was its cultural and commercial core, as brilliant as Paris in the 1930s or Manhattan in the 1960s. Gone were the ancient walls that had long surrounded Vienna’s core, replaced by the wide and elegant Ringstrasse, home to major cultural and educational institutions and lavish apartment houses. Just imagine how exhilarating it must have been in Vienna at this moment: to pass Sigmund Freud and his wife strolling along the Ringstrasse, to sit in the audience at the premiere of Richard Strauss’ opera Salome at the new Opera Hall, to shop for the latest gowns at the Flöge sisters’ exclusive salon. You might stop by a fashionable Viennese cafe for a Turkish coffee and piece of strudel and find yourself eavesdropping on a conversation between composers Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg, writers Franz Kafka and Stefan Zweig, or three Nobel prize-winning physicians. All these people lived in Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer’s Vienna. Some of these luminaries frequented their salon. Many were Jews.

  For, along with being one of the world’s most spirited cities, fin-de-siècle Vienna was also among those most welcoming to Jews. During Franz Joseph I’s reign, Jews were granted full citizenship rights and thousands flocked to the capital city from the far-flung reaches of the empire. The Jewish population of Vienna, 6,200 in 1860, swelled to 147,000 by the turn of the century.[2] Vienna’s Jews created a complete infrastructure: a Jewish newspaper, a Jewish hospital, a Jewish Gymnasium and Pedagogium, splendid synagogues, and the world’s first Jewish museum. More than half of Vienna’s lawyers and doctors were Jewish, as were sizable percentages of university faculty members, bankers, artists, and businessmen. There were Jewish counts, dukes, and heads of the chamber of commerce.

  Not everyone welcomed them. Jews first arrived in Austria in the late twelfth century and from then on had endured at least three cycles of acceptance, threat, and, ultimately, expulsion. Despite their financial gains, fancy titles, and influence, Jews knew they would never really be accepted by mainstream Austrian culture. The mayor of Ferdinand and Adele’s Vienna was Karl Lueger, an outspoken anti-Semite whom the Viennese repeatedly re-elected. I was surprised to learn that one of Mayor Lueger’s greatest admirers was a thin, sallow young man named Adolph Hitler, who arrived in 1908 with the dream of becoming a great artist but ended up on the streets selling his postcard drawings of Vienna. From this precarious perch, young Hitler watched glittering Vienna and listened to Lueger’s powerful anti-Semitic rhetoric. Later, when Hitler was elected Germany’s führer, his passion for art became state policy, and his conquering army looted such massive quantities of paintings and other treasures that salt mines, railroad cars, and synagogues were repurposed to store them all.

  Photographs of Adele Bloch-Bauer show an intense, stern woman with a crown of dense dark hair, luminous eyes, an aquiline nose, and perfect lips. In fin-de-siècle Vienna, Jewish socialites rarely sought out university education, so Adele became something of a parlor activist and patroness. She advocated for worker’s education, social reform,[3] and women’s suffrage; supported socialist causes; and, with her husband, collected art, especially by Austrian artists. The salon at Palais Bloch-Bauer drew intellectuals, politicians, collectors, and artists, who came to discuss the affairs of the day and admire the treasures that Ferdinand had acquired: exquisite porcelain from the Imperial Viennese Manufactory, modernist sculpture, Old Master paintings, and early hand-colored engravings of Vienna scenes. The jewels of his collection were the works of Gustav Klimt, Vienna’s best-known artist. Ferdinand owned a number of Klimt’s sketches and seven of his paintings—two portraits of Adele, one of another Viennese Jewish woman, and four luminous landscapes.

  Adele and Gustav Klimt had met before she was married, and he frequently attended the Bloch-Bauer salon. He had been raised in poverty—his father was a struggling gold engraver—in a suburb of Vienna. At age fourteen, Gustav’s drawings so impressed his teachers that they secured a scholarship for him at the new School of Arts and Crafts. There, he and his brother Ernst, equally talented, joined the ranks of students studying to become decorative artists. The Klimt boys were desperately poor, and when a sympathetic teacher recognized their need and talent, he hired them and a fellow student, Franz Matsch, as apprentices. Soon after graduating from the School of Arts and Crafts, the Klimt brothers and Matsch founded their own studio, Künstler Compagnie, and during the next ten years scored a string of commissions painting historical murals, colorful ceilings, and decorative trims on important public buildings along the Ringstrasse. Their rapid ascent from poverty to prosperity was solidified when Ernst Klimt married Helene Flöge, whose sister Emilie owned one of Vienna’s most fashionable dress shops and became Gustav’s lifelong friend.

  A few years later, Gustav’s father and his brother Ernst died, leaving the artist as the sole support of his mother, sister, and sister-in-law. No one knows how Gustav felt in his new role as the head of the household—he was not much of a writer—but it seems likely that family responsibility came at personal cost. Gustav never married or traveled much outside Austria, and every evening he returned home to the family table.

  The Künstler Compagnie specialized in decorative paintings with a quasi-historical, quasi-literary, or fanciful theme, the kind of paintings that set the mood for the opera crowd. But soon after the death of his father and brother, Klimt’s work began to move to a genre, called Symbolism,[4] that was more current and, to many of his patrons, much more confusing. Instead of knights and ladies or portraits of philosophers, he painted towering tangles of naked figures, floating naked women, and viscous voids of stars and fog. He became the leader of the Secessionists, a loose amalgam of artists, architects, potters, goldsmiths, and furniture, book, and fabric designers who were dedicated to moving stodgy Austria into the modern world. His company had accepted a commission to paint three major thematic works for the University of Vienna; he rendered them in his new Symbolist style, causing such a fury of criticism that Klimt kept the works and returned the commission. But while Klimt’s Symbolist paintings were too strange for public commissions, they were just the thing for the multidisciplinary Secessionist exhibitions, and soon the cream of Austrian society was flocking to the shows, including Emperor Franz Joseph.

  To replace his public work, Klimt moved to private commissions, especially portraits of wealthy women. Women had long been his specialty, and he lavished attention on the Biblical heroines, Grecian goddesses, medieval virgins, water nymphs, furies, and ancient crones who populated his tableaus and fantasies. Now he turned his attention to living women whose husbands were eager to pay. Klimt was the artist of choice for Jewish millionaires like Ferdinand, who admired his ability to transform portly matrons into buxom beauties and anorexic virgins into fairy princesses.

  Gustav Klimt was broad-shouldered and stocky, with a mess of curly hair and hypnotic black eyes. His reputation as a seducer was one of Vienna’s most delicious scandals. Visitors to Klimt’s studio reported seeing scantily dressed women and whispered that the great artist himself went naked under his signature floor-length artist’s smock. Scores of Klimt sketches feature women lolling in bed after sexual intercourse, and the record suggests he indulged. After his death, fourteen alleged lovers and their children made claims on his estate.

  Adele’s image begins to appear in Klimt’s paintings around 1901, recognizable by her regal stance, black hair, striking features, and the jewel-encrusted choker, a gift from Ferdinand, that encircles her neck. She appears as Hygeia, the goddess of medicine, in Klimt’s ceiling painting for the University of Vienna, wearing a golden headdress and a golden snake wrapped around her arm. That same year, Klimt used Adele’s image in his painting of the Biblical heroine Judith, the beautiful and virtuous widow who first captivated, then decapitated her husband’s murderer, the Assyrian commander Holofernes. Adele, as Judith, is shown head to waist, with one breast exposed and her hand entwined in her victim’s hair. She is dreamy, post-coit
al, as if she had just risen from her lover’s bed rather than sliced off her enemy’s head.

  Klimt’s third portrayal of Adele is his most famous, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer 1, commissioned by her husband. The artist began sketching in 1903, eventually completing one hundred preliminary sketches, and delivered the painting four years later. Generally acknowledged as the pinnacle of Klimt’s so-called Gold Period, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer 1 celebrates his fluency with gold and silver leaf, which came by way of his goldsmith father. Klimt had recently visited Ravenna, Italy, and the painting was likely inspired by the mosaics he saw there, notably the Byzantine mosaic portrait of Empress Theodora in the church of San Vitale.

  At the same time Klimt was painting Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer 1, he also rendered Adele, in Judith 2, as an icon of blood lust. Her hair, a black swath across the canvas, frames her perfect profile: the black-lined eyes, the scarlet lips, a seductive beauty spot on her chiseled cheekbone. Judith 2’s breasts and torso are naked; her claw-like hands grasp her decapitated victim’s hair. Judith 2 is red-hot. You can almost hear her panting from the excitement of the slaughter.

  In all of these paintings, Klimt sexualizes this wealthy Jewish matron, which has led many to wonder whether he and Adele were lovers. While there is no actual proof, it seems possible, given her unconventional views and devotion to the artist and his reputation as a seducer. Except for his lifelong friend, Emilie Flöge, Adele Bloch-Bauer is the only woman who appears multiple times in his work. But, whether or not the affair existed in the real world, it lived in the world of Klimt’s imagination. Judith 1, Judith 2, and Adele Bloch-Bauer 1 portray a woman whose passion calls out to the painter beyond the picture frame.