The Beethoven Frieze was painted to be destroyed. It outlived everyone who owned it.

Last Sunday ended with Klimt returning thirty thousand crowns to the state and walking out of the Secession he had founded. This is what he made inside that building three years before he left it, a painting that was supposed to last ten weeks, and what happened to it in the ninety years after: a salt mine, a seizure, a sale nobody wanted, and a restitution board that looked at all of it in 2015 and said no.

In 1902, Klimt painted a 34-metre frieze directly onto the walls of a room in Vienna's Secession building, for a single exhibition honoring Beethoven that ran ten weeks. It was never meant to survive the show. Secession exhibitions were temporary by design, walls repainted and reused for the next one, and Klimt's frieze, done in casein paint and gold leaf straight onto a lath-and-plaster support, existed as a specific, disposable answer to a specific architectural moment: three walls wrapping around a statue of Beethoven by Max Klinger, an allegorical journey through the Ninth Symphony, ending with the line everyone came to see, a chorus of figures embracing beneath the words "This kiss to all the world."

It should have been demolished with the rest of the installation. Instead, a collector named Carl Reininghaus bought it after the show closed, kept it intact, and in 1915 sold it to August and Serena Lederer, two of Klimt's most important patrons, who had it carefully removed from the Secession's walls in sections and installed in their own home.

Because August Lederer was Jewish, the Nazis seized the family's collection in 1938. Serena Lederer fled to Hungary. The frieze survived the war hidden in the Altaussee salt mine, the same vast underground depot where retreating German forces stockpiled looted art across Europe, and Allied forces recovered it in 1945.

Returned is the wrong word for what happened next. The frieze went back to Serena's son, Erich Lederer, but Austria's export laws for culturally significant work meant he could not simply take it home to Switzerland. He spent years negotiating with a state that controlled the only door his own property could legally leave through, and in 1973 he sold the frieze back to the Secession for roughly 15 million shillings, about $750,000, a price his family has since called far below its worth, agreed to under pressure from a government that held every card.

In 2013, some of Erich Lederer's heirs asked Austria's Art Restitution Advisory Board to reconsider, arguing the 1973 sale was itself a forced transaction and should be treated as part of the original Nazi-era injustice. In 2015, the board disagreed. Its finding: Erich Lederer had negotiated the price and terms voluntarily, however constrained his options were, and a voluntary postwar sale does not qualify for restitution the way the original 1938 seizure would have. The frieze stayed in Austria. It is still on permanent public view in the Secession's basement today, the room it was born in and was never supposed to leave.

Restitution law asks a narrow legal question, whether a specific transfer of property met a specific definition of theft, and narrow legal questions have a way of producing outcomes that feel morally incomplete regardless of which way they go. Erich Lederer's claim failed because the transaction being judged was not the 1938 seizure but the sale of 1973, a sale under duress from a government export monopoly, but a sale, with his name on it. The frieze he negotiated to keep in some form of family agency, however coerced, is the same frieze his heirs later argued he never should have had to negotiate at all. Both readings are defensible. Only one of them is currently law. On the last Sunday of this month, a different family, a different Klimt, and the opposite outcome.

Next week: away from Vienna's scandals entirely, to the summers Klimt spent almost alone at a lake, painting nothing but trees, and what a man that famous does with the one part of his work nobody was fighting over.

WATCH · The full Klimt exhibition: twenty masterpieces, sixty minutes, one painting at a time

SEE · The Beethoven Frieze in the Secession basement, Vienna

LISTEN · Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, the work the frieze was painted around

Watch the Klimt exhibition

Gustav Klimt, Beethoven Frieze (Longing for Happiness), 1902. Casein, gold leaf and semi-precious stones on plaster. Secession, Vienna. Public domain (artist died 1918); image via Wikimedia Commons.