Stolen, Smuggled, Sold

by Nancy Moses

  Five years after Klimt delivered Adele’s first portrait, Ferdinand commissioned a second. Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer 2 is a staid society lady with a body as stiff as a dressmaker’s mannequin. The first portrait’s glittering backdrop of gold and silver leaf became blocks of chalky blue, green, and mauve, with faint flowers and hints of Asian horsemen. Something is missing in this second painting. The heat is gone.

  Gustav Klimt died six years after completing Adele’s second portrait. In 1918, he suffered a major stroke that paralyzed his right side and made painting impossible, contracted influenza, and was gone.[5] By that time, Austria had lost World War I, the Hapsburg Empire was ending, and life in Vienna had become precarious. Younger painters with a darker palette and deeper emotions had come on the scene, rendering Klimt’s exuberant Symbolism passé. Klimt was never really part of any particular school or movement. He never changed with the times or gained disciples. His style was uniquely his own.

  Adele Bloch-Bauer died of encephalitis in 1925 at the age of forty-three, leaving her grieving husband as her sole heir. In her will, written two years earlier, she had requested that Ferdinand leave the two portraits and four landscapes by Klimt to the Austrian National Museum, called the Belvedere because of its location in Vienna’s Belvedere Castle. Adele’s request made sense,[6] because Ferdinand had contributed funds to the Belvedere for the purchase of a Klimt mural and loaned Adele Bloch-Bauer 1, Adele Bloch-Bauer 2, and four Klimt landscapes to the museum for about a year while the Palais Bloch-Bauer was being renovated. Her husband ignored Adele’s wishes, choosing instead to hang her portraits and the other Klimts in a sort of shrine at Palais Bloch-Bauer dedicated to his beloved dead wife.

  Ferdinand’s world shattered on March 12, 1938, when the German army entered Austria. Nazis called this the Anschluss, which in German means “connection” or “link-up.” No fighting took place; not a shot was fired. Instead, two hundred thousand cheering, flag-waving Viennese greeted the triumphant Hitler as he drove through the city. At the time, 10 percent of Vienna residents were Jews or people with one Jewish parent. Within days, the Nazis instituted anti-Semitic laws, barring Jews from positions of public trust, demanding they wear distinguishing yellow stars on their clothing, and requiring them to register all of their property and pay exorbitant taxes. Artwork that the Nazis determined to be of national interest was confiscated. By the end of the summer of 1938, the Nazis had opened a concentration camp near Linz, the first of more than sixty throughout Austria. November saw the Kristallnacht pogroms, in which most of Vienna’s synagogues and many Jewish-owned businesses were burned and vandalized as the fire fighters and public looked on.

  Ferdinand fled Austria on the eve of the Anschluss. Within six weeks, the Nazis filed criminal tax evasion charges against him. By the summer of 1939, hundreds of Jewish-owned factories and thousands of businesses had been closed or confiscated by the government, including the Bloch-Bauer empire, which became the property of a powerful German industrialist.

  It is easy to understand why Ferdinand left in March of 1938. The question is why he stayed until then. Why did Ferdinand remain in Vienna until the eve of the German invasion? What compelled him and so many others to stay as Hitler captured power just across the German border and began to fulfill his pledge to destroy the Jewish race? From my comfortable vantage some eighty years later, I can only speculate on why Jews—especially people of means, like Ferdinand—remained in Austria. Anti-Semitism was nothing new in Vienna: perhaps Ferdinand thought the Nazis were little more than a splinter faction that would soon dissipate. Maybe he was counting on his wealth and prominence to protect him. Maybe he could not imagine any circumstance in which his life would no longer be within his control and his fate would lie in others’ hands. Whatever the reason, Ferdinand remained in Palais Bloch-Bauer until the very last possible moment—and then abandoned everything.

  He wasn’t alone in his decision to stay. Thirty percent of Vienna’s Jews remained in place. They were soon deported to concentration camps in Austria or to Dachau or Buchenwald, or sent to labor camps in Russia, or murdered. By the end of World War II, only five thousand Jews remained in all of Austria.

  When Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer fled the Nazis, all his treasure remained behind: the priceless Austrian porcelain collection, the Old Master paintings and prints, and all of the paintings by Klimt, including Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer 1 and 2. He escaped to his castle in Czechoslovakia, but was soon forced to flee in advance of Hitler’s invasion of that country. He eventually settled in Switzerland. Nazi policy was to Aryanize the property of Jews, first by paying them a small fraction of its value, later by taking it outright. Ferdinand’s homes became government property: the offices of the German Railroad moved into Palais Bloch-Bauer in central Vienna and a succession of Nazi officers occupied the castle. Ferdinand died in Zurich in November of 1945 at age eighty-one, bitter and broken. His will left his Bloch-Bauer nephews and nieces with a problematic legacy: a vast conglomerate, a castle, a palace, and prized porcelains, books, and paintings including Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer 1, all in Nazi hands. Ferdinand’s Jewish friends and neighbors suffered similar losses: their businesses stolen and their treasures looted, forced to pay exorbitant sums for exit visas or sent to death camps. In her meticulously researched book, Was Einmal War, art historian Sophie Lillie tracks the sad path of the Bloch-Bauer’s and 147 other exemplary art collections owned by the Jews of Vienna.

  The fate of Ferdinand’s heirs speaks to those turbulent times. His three nephews, Karl, Robert, and Leopold, fled to Canada in 1938, where they changed their names. Leopold and his brother-in-law started a furniture and paneling veneer company that quickly grew into Canada’s leading forest-product company. Robert, who changed his last name to Bentley, joined the British army. Their sister Louise fled to Zagreb with her husband, who was later murdered by Communist partisans. She eventually remarried and joined her family in Canada. The experience of the final heir, Marie Bloch-Bauer Altman, was the most harrowing. Her husband was arrested in Austria soon after the Nazis arrived in 1938 and was held hostage at the Dachau concentration camp until the family agreed to transfer the Bloch-Bauer holdings to the Germans. Marie and her husband then fled for their lives, leaving all their possessions behind, eventually settling in California in 1942. She became a U.S. citizen three years later.

  Once in control of Austria, the Nazis determined the fate of the Bloch-Bauer treasures. Three nineteenth-century Austrian paintings became trophies in Hitler’s private collection, and others were placed in storage for the grand Führermuseum in Linz that Hitler envisioned as a showcase for his artistic vision and might. Other items from the Bloch-Bauer collection were claimed by high-ranking officers or given to museums. Some of Ferdinand’s valuable Austrian porcelain was sent to a number of institutions and the rest was sold. Hitler found Klimt’s work degenerate, so Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer 1 and 2 and the other Klimt paintings were assigned to Erich Fuhrer, a prominent Nazi attorney and rabid anti-Semite with an apt name and an especially low moral threshold. Fuhrer sold Adele 1 and four other Klimt paintings to the Belvedere. The fact that the German government, not Fuhrer, owned the paintings was evidently not an issue to him or the museum. Adele 1 next appeared in a retrospective exhibition of Klimt’s work in 1943, under the name “portrait of a lady against gold background” to hide Adele’s Jewish origins.

  As the war in Europe concluded, the Allies realized that the Nazis had plundered hundreds of thousands of paintings, sculpture, rare books, and other works of art from countries they had occupied. No one knows how much was looted. Estimates run as high as 650,000 artworks came from Jews, worth billions of dollars. In the chaos, the safety of these works became a matter of international concern. With the blessing of General Eisenhower and President Roosevelt, the U.S. military assembled a corps of some 350 art historians, professors, and museum curators, called the Monument Men, and charged them with securing and returning the treasures to their original
owners. In Austria alone, the Monument Men uncovered more than 6,500 art works, including masterpieces by Michelangelo, Vermeer, and Jan van Eyck, slated for the Führermuseum. The Nazis had stored them in a complex of salt mines in Altaussee, Austria, and the miners had saved the paintings by ignoring the German military’s orders to bomb the mine.

  Erich Fuhrer fled Vienna when Soviet and American forces entered Austria in the spring of 1945, abandoning the fourteen paintings owned by Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer that Fuhrer had hung in his apartment.[7] Fuhrer was captured and put on trial. He testified that he was holding the paintings for Bloch-Bauer, but the courts didn’t believe him, so he was sentenced to three years in prison.

  Immediately after the war, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer’s nephew, Robert Bentley, returned to Austria as a British officer, hired an attorney, and began what was to become a thirty-year battle to reclaim his family’s possessions. He could not secure the family’s companies or castle in Czechoslovakia because both were located in the Russian zone, outside of Austrian control. He could not reclaim the Palais Bloch-Bauer because its occupant, the Austrian railroad, refused to give it up. Bentley’s attempt to reclaim Adele Bloch-Bauer 1 and the rest of Ferdinand’s beloved treasures were also thwarted by Austrian red tape. By this time, Austria had passed a law that declared all transactions motivated by Nazi ideology to be null and void, but the law failed to compel the government to take action. Another law prohibited export of any artwork deemed important to the Austrian cultural heritage, as defined by the Federal Monuments Agency. Works by Klimt were considered vital to Austrian cultural heritage, so the Bloch-Bauer heirs could not obtain exit visas for Adele Bloch-Bauer 1 or any of the other Klimt paintings. When Bentley’s attorney approached the director of the Belvedere, he was informed that the museum owned the Klimts, since Adele, in her will, had bequeathed them to the Belvedere.

  When Bentley and his siblings realized the impossibility of obtaining export visas for their precious Klimts, they took the route employed by so many of their Jewish countrymen whose property had fallen into Nazi hands. They agreed to accept their losses and use the paintings as leverage to extract other family property. In 1948, the family reluctantly acceded to Austria’s claim so Adele Bloch-Bauer 1 and the other Klimts remained the property of the Austrian state. Bentley then quickly petitioned the Monuments Office for export licenses for all of the rest of the Bloch-Bauer property that remained in Austria. The petition was summarily denied. The family was left with nothing.

  For years, Austria stonewalled Jewish families’ attempts to reclaim their possessions. Although thousands of artworks found by U.S. forces were transferred to the Austrian government in 1952, it made no effort to find the owners. In 1969, public pressure finally forced the Austrian government to publish a list of more than 8,400 objects owned by the Federal Office of Monuments. Fewer than 550 were ever claimed and returned. The rest were stored in a monastery in Mauerbach, Austria, and largely forgotten.

  As this story unfolded in Austria, thousands of paintings, sculptures, antiquities, and other treasures with no provenance records began appearing in auction houses and dealers’ showrooms in Europe and around the world. Art museum and private collectors were eager to purchase them at bargain prices. Although these transactions took place decades ago, directors of art museums still do not want to talk on the record about this. But as one of them recently told me off the record, “Dealers would say the paintings had been owned by an important British family which had discovered them in the basement of their manor home, but there seemed to be too many making that claim.”

  In 1984, Art News, a leading American art magazine, published a story titled “A Legacy of Shame,” which documented, for the first time, Austria’s culpability in refusing the claims of Jewish families to their stolen art treasures. Within a few years, an embarrassed Austrian government had returned another three hundred objects to heirs, auctioned off those artworks remaining, and assigned the proceeds of the sale to the Jewish community of Austria and other Holocaust victims.

  It was another fourteen years before Austria made its records available. In 1998, in response to substantial public pressure, the government passed the Art Restitution Act, which opened the government’s archives for the first time. Immediately, Hubertus Czernin, an Austrian investigative newspaper reporter, applied for access to the Belvedere’s archives. There he discovered irrefutable proof of the director’s collusion with the Nazis. Moreover, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer 1 had not been donated in 1936, as claimed in the Belvedere’s literature. Instead, the museum had purchased it and the other Klimts owned by Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer from Erich Fuhrer during the war. Moreover, the records revealed that Adele had never bequeathed the paintings to the Belvedere, as the museum had always alleged. In fact, she had never even owned them. Her 1923 will, the one cited by the museum as proof of its ownership rights, was not binding because her husband, Ferdinand, legally owned the paintings. The Belvedere’s director had known this all along and had covered it up.

  By the time Hubertus Czernin’s articles appeared in the press, only one of the Bloch-Bauer heirs remained: Maria Altmann, age eighty-three. She had been nine years old when her aunt died in 1925 and had always believed that her aunt had bequeathed Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer 1 and the other Klimts to the Belvedere. When Altmann learned the truth, she committed herself to reclaiming the portrait and the family’s other property, and soon retained the attorney Randol Schoenberg, whose Austrian grandparents had been family friends.

  “I was a young associate at a large law firm,” Schoenberg recently told me, “and one of the name partners was a German-Jewish immigrant, so he was sympathetic to the cause and gave me a bit of coaching. But no one really knew what to do with a case like Marie Altmann’s or how to do it. There were no road maps for this case, so I had to rely on gut feeling.”

  From a legal standpoint, the Bloch-Bauer case was a long shot. No heir of a Holocaust victim had ever managed to repatriate any possessions from any European museum. Moreover, in civil matters, international law provided few grounds on which citizens of one country could bring suit against another country. The standards set by the 1976 Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act overwhelmingly supported government immunity. The case also carried great financial risk for Altmann and her attorney. According to Austrian law, plaintiffs must deposit with the court the estimated value of the recovery sought, and the court establishes the sum. If Altmann lost the case, under Austrian law she would be responsible for the full payment of her opponent’s legal costs—and Randol Schoenberg, who was taking the case on contingency, would lose years of legal fees.

  Despite these obstacles, Marie Altmann and her attorney were determined to stop Austria from benefitting from the possessions of Austrian Jews whose lives had been destroyed. Even if Altman lost the case, the world would know about the family’s situation. That was of critical importance to her.

  Schoenberg soon formulated his legal strategy. First, he needed to locate a relevant case, a precedent, an attorney’s strongest weapon. Second, he needed to carve a loophole in the international law that would permit Maria Altman to sue the Austrian government. Finally, he needed to circumvent the requirement for a cash advance, set by the court at $1.8 million, a sum well in excess of his client’s financial capacity.

  These were daunting challenges, but Schoenberg was resourceful. He was deeply knowledgeable about the Holocaust and passionate about restitution. He knew, from working for celebrity clients like Michael Jackson, that publicity could influence the outcome of a case. “The Bloch-Bauer case made for a good story,” Schoenberg told me, “so I made sure the press would tell it. Remember, the suit was against the government, not individuals, not corporations. What do politicians care about? It’s votes. The more negative publicity we could stir up, the better our chances.”

  Schoenberg’s final asset was his name, a name that carried a lot of clout in Austria: “My grandfather, the composer Arthur Schoenberg, was arguably the most
well-known Austrian Jewish refugee. Because of who my grandfather was, I receive a level of recognition in Austria that I don’t get here. When I go to Vienna, they have to take me seriously.”

  In other words, when the grandson of Austria’s most famous Jewish refugee brings suit to claim one of Austria’s most beloved paintings, that’s news.

  Schoenberg brought the case before the Austrian Advisory Board, which reviewed the claims of Holocaust victims. When the board ruled against Altmann, he filed a case with the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California seeking legal standing to sue the Austrian government for Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer 1 and five other paintings by Gustav Klimt.

  By this time, he had found a small exception to the 1976 Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. A foreign government—or an agency of a foreign government—cannot claim immunity if two conditions apply. First, the issue must involve property taken in violation of international law. Second, the government or its agency must be engaged in a commercial activity in the United States. Moreover, Schoenberg discovered a Ninth Circuit case that met both conditions. A Jewish family had been able to retrieve a hotel taken from them by the government of Argentina because the hotel had advertised in the United States. That was the precedent he needed.

  The Austrian National Museum, also known as the Belvedere, was an agency of the Austrian government. The letter from Erich Fuhrer in the Belvedere’s own archives proved that the paintings had been stolen, satisfying one condition for the exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. The second condition was that the Belvedere had engaged in commercial activity in the United States, and it had: it had sold the rights to Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer 1 for t-shirts, mugs, key chains, umbrellas, playing cards, and posters, like the one that hung in my freshman dorm room. The Belvedere’s active merchandising of Adele’s image—the Adele kitsch—helped saved the day.