In 1998, an elderly woman in a small apartment in Los Angeles opened a newspaper and read that Austria was finally admitting it had illegally inherited art stolen from Jewish families during the war. One of the names in the article was hers. Or rather, her aunt's: Adele Bloch-Bauer, who had died in 1925, thirteen years before the Nazis walked into her family's Vienna apartment and took everything worth taking, including a golden portrait of Adele herself, painted by Gustav Klimt in 1907.
Maria Altmann was eighty-two that year. She decided to get the painting back. It took her eight more years, one act of Congress-level legal reasoning, and a trip to the United States Supreme Court.
The claim nobody expected to work
Adele Bloch-Bauer had died young, before the war, and left a will asking her husband to eventually donate the Klimt paintings to Austria's state gallery. He never got the chance. Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer fled Vienna in 1938 as the Nazis annexed Austria, and the paintings were seized along with the rest of his property. After the war, Austria kept them, arguing that Adele's original wish, however overtaken by theft, still counted as a bequest. For fifty years, that argument held.
Maria Altmann, Ferdinand's niece and one of the last living heirs, disagreed, and in 1998 she had a document Austria hadn't counted on: newly opened archives showing the Bloch-Bauer family's actual restitution correspondence from the 1940s, which made clear Ferdinand, not Adele, had owned the paintings outright, and that he had never given them to anyone.
She could not afford to sue Austria in an Austrian court, so her lawyer, a young attorney named Randol Schoenberg working largely on contingency, tried something almost nobody thought would survive a motion to dismiss: suing a foreign sovereign nation in United States federal court, arguing the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act allowed it because the property had been taken in violation of international law. Austria's attorneys called it absurd. In 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 that Altmann could proceed. She was eighty-eight years old when the country of her birth agreed to let the matter go to arbitration rather than keep fighting a case it now expected to lose.
What she got back, and what it became
In January 2006, an Austrian arbitration panel ruled that five of the six disputed Klimt paintings, Adele Bloch-Bauer I among them, belonged to Maria Altmann. Austria offered to buy the portrait to keep it from leaving the country. Altmann, by her own account, considered it, and then sold it to cosmetics heir and collector Ronald Lauder for $135 million instead, a record at the time for any painting anywhere. It has hung in Lauder's Neue Galerie in New York since July 2006, under a title the museum itself popularized once a film told the story: not Adele Bloch-Bauer I, but Woman in Gold, the name the Nazis had already tried to give it in 1941 when they displayed it in Vienna's Belvedere with Adele's Jewish identity scrubbed from the wall label.
The reflection worth sitting with
The painting itself has not changed since 1907. What changed, twice, is who was allowed to say her name next to it. In 1941, the state that stole her portrait erased Adele Bloch-Bauer from her own likeness and called her Woman in Gold, a woman generically beautiful, safely anonymous, no longer Jewish, no longer anyone's aunt. In 2006, when the painting finally returned to the family, the market kept the same title anyway, because by then it sold tickets. Even the correction carries a trace of the erasure it's correcting.
Maria Altmann died in 2011, five years after the arbitration, having spent the last third of her life pursuing a portrait she remembered from her childhood, hanging on a wall in an apartment she was forced to leave at twenty-two. She never asked for an apology. She asked for the painting, on the theory that a family's actual history outranks a state's convenient one, and after eight years, a law that had never worked before, and one Supreme Court ruling, it did.
Next issue
Four Sundays, one artist: the ceilings he bought back, a frieze that outlived the room it was painted for, a summer practice nobody fought over, and a portrait that went to the Supreme Court. Next month: a new artist, the same rule, look slowly.
Continue the story
Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907. Oil, silver and gold on canvas. Neue Galerie, New York. Public domain (artist died 1918); image via Wikimedia Commons.