by Nancy Moses
Schoenberg appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court in October of 2003 representing Marie Altmann in her suit against the Austrian government. Eight months later, the Justices ruled, six to three, in favor of Altman in the Court’s first ruling about any Nazi-era claims.
Although Altmann won the case, she did not automatically win back her possessions, for the ruling merely allowed her to sue the Austrian government in Austrian federal court. She was almost ninety years old; she had been fighting for more than seven years. In spring of 2005, she and the Austrian government agreed to go to binding arbitration before a panel of three Austrian arbitrators chosen by both parties—an option that her attorney had offered long before. In January, 2006, the three-judge arbitration panel unanimously ruled in favor[8] of returning Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer 1 and four other Klimts to the Bloch-Bauer heirs. That year, the Bloch-Bauer heirs also recovered $21.9 million in compensation for their company and their Vienna palace.
After almost sixty years as one of Austria’s most beloved paintings, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer 1 was returning to its owner. Vienna gave her a royal send-off, posting oversized images of Adele with the words “Ciao Adele” on bus shelters throughout the city. Austria was not left bereft of Klimt paintings, however. One of Gustav Klimt’s sons, Gustav Ucicky, had acquired numerous Klimt works from the Nazi-looted collections of Jewish families and had bequeathed many to the Belvedere upon his death in 1961.
Ronald S. Lauder had been watching the story unfold. An heir to the vast Estee Lauder cosmetic fortune and one of the world’s wealthiest men, Lauder had long been active in Jewish causes, philanthropy, and art, and had served briefly as U.S. ambassador to Austria. Lauder had begun collecting twentieth century German and Austrian art in his teenage years, and in 2001 he and Serge Sabarsky, a specialist in the genre, opened the Neue Galerie to display the collection.
Lauder had met Marie Altmann, and she had visited the Neue Gallery when it opened. According to a story in The New York Times, Altmann said she was especially receptive to Lauder because he constantly kept in touch with her during the long years the family spent trying to reclaim its artwork. “He was incredibly generous and constantly supportive,” she said.
In April 2005, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer 1 and the other Klimts were displayed in public again, first at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and later at Lauder’s Neue Galerie. In June 2006, Lauder purchased the painting through Christy’s for $135 million, the highest sum ever paid for a painting at that time.
“This is our Mona Lisa,”[9] the proud Lauder announced. “This is the great picture of our time . . . there is no better painting.”
Gustav Klimt as significant as Leonardo Di Vinci? Adele Bloch-Bauer 1 as important as the iconic Mona Lisa? I don’t think so. If Adele is a Mona Lisa, she’s a Mona Lisa in bondage.
Regardless of personal views, though, it is clear that the worth of the painting well exceeds its dollar value. Adele gave the families of Holocaust victims hope that they could claim their possessions from recalcitrant governments. Its importance as a symbol, an artwork, and a cultural treasure put the world on notice. But all of this was a byproduct, not Schoenberg’s primary intent. “We realized the case would be emblematic, but I didn’t try this case for everyone,” he said. “Each painting has its own story; each case has to be tried one at a time. Some argued at the time that there would be a flood of cases of heirs trying to claim their artworks, but these cases are very rare.”
I wondered why the Bloch-Bauer heirs would spend years reclaiming a painting only to promptly sell it. Schoenberg had a ready answer.
“Well, think about it. There were a number of heirs, and all of them had agreed what to do. It scared them to think about having a fifty-million-dollar or one-hundred-million-dollar painting hanging on the wall: the insurance alone would be astronomical.
People often ask, why didn’t they donate the paintings?” he continued. “It seems strange to me that anyone would even raise this question. This was their inheritance, their possession. Why should they give away something so valuable? They did want to make sure that the gold painting was sold to a public museum, which they accomplished. The others are now in private collections, which makes sense, since they always were in private hands.”
“Why don’t more families try to get their possessions back?” I asked.
“Most of the big items stolen from Jews were dealt with in the immediate post-war period,” he answered. “Much of the rest has not appreciated in value. And these artworks are hard to connect to their owners because there is no record of ownership, as there was in the case of the Klimt paintings. There are only a very small number of very valuable, important paintings.”
“How about paintings in museums?” I asked.
“Museum-quality paintings?” Schoenberg responded. “Now we’re talking about only the upper one percent of all of the art. You must remember that museums are institutions, and, as you know, there are hundreds of paintings in storage for every one on display. If a museum loses a painting here or there, who cares? Of course,” he added, “that’s not how museums see it.”
Litigation to reclaim a piece of art is not for those with a faint heart or limited income. Bringing a court case is expensive, time-consuming, and frustrating. Heirs do it, though, for emotional reasons: because they promised their family members, because they cannot stand to see anyone else own it or to let the Nazis win, or because objects connect people with their past in a way nothing else can. A painting holds memories: you remember the wall where it hung in your parents’ home, or the art exhibition where you first saw it, or the vacation when you purchased it. The Nazis stole more than artworks from Jewish families; they stole the sweet memories these works stirred.
Today, seven decades after the end of World War II, one would think that the issues surrounding Holocaust art would be settled; if anything, they have become more heated. Wesley Fisher, director of research for the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, deals with these on a daily basis.
“Guidelines from the American Alliance of Museums apply to work that changed hands in Europe between 1933 and 1945,” he told me. “These are the works posted on the websites of art museums. But how do you prove whether a painting or other piece of art was looted from Jewish families and belongs to their heirs?”
Recently, experts have begun to link works of art with families by studying the original records of Nazi looting, and the Nazis kept very detailed records. But proving that the artwork in the records belongs to the heirs of the murdered Jews is a whole other thing, because many families did not have records on their artwork or, if they did, the records were lost in the war.
I thought about my family’s modest collection of paintings, none of them documented. If we had lived in Vienna in 1938, my family would have been forced to abandon it all, and if we had survived the war, there would have been no way to prove it was ours.
Fisher believes that the Klimts were very important. They set the precedent of bringing a suit against a foreign government under the exception to the Foreign Immunities Act that has been used by Jewish heirs to gain restitution of their family’s artworks. Today, European museums have changed their policies towards restitution, and Austria is leading the way. Austrian museums conduct provenance research and have all sorts of mechanisms to return Holocaust art to the families that owned it.
Here in America, we are lagging behind. It is a sad irony that the association representing the largest number of U.S. museums is working to close the loophole in the Foreign Immunities Act in order to discourage suits. Often, when a museum is faced with a claim from an heir, it brings a lawsuit to “quiet the table” by forcing the heir into a costly court battle. Wesley Fisher thinks the only way to change this behavior is by training the next generation of museum curators to believe that there are more important things than holding onto a collection at all costs.
Maria Altmann died at the age of 94 in February 2011. The day a
fter she died, a brief interview of her, talking about Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer 1, appeared on YouTube.[10]
“The picture does itself have its own story—of where it lived in luxury in a private home, and then how it was robbed from that house, and then it was hidden, and then it lived in the museum. And now it travels to another country to be seen by other people, more people, and that’s very beautiful for me.”
Gustav Klimt is long gone, though not forgotten. In 2013, Vienna celebrated his 150th birthday with an original musical production and an exhibit at the Belvedere, which owns a number of paintings by Gustav Klimt: one from the collection of Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, others from collections of Jewish families who died during the Holocaust.
Today, E. Randol Schoenberg is of counsel to the law firm he founded, Burris, Schoenberg & Walden, LLP, where he made a career specializing in cases involving plundered art and the recovery of property stolen by the Nazi authorities. He received enough in the settlement of the Bloch-Bauer claim to help fund a Holocaust museum in Los Angeles.
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer 1 is back where she started, supported by a wealthy Jewish industrialist, ensconced in a lavish mansion, and surrounded by the style she loved and the women she knew. She is in good company, since the Neue Galerie now owns more Klimt paintings and drawings than any other museum in the nation.
The Neue also controls the rights to the painting and continues Austria’s tradition of licensing Adele kitsch. So, if you, like so many others, fall in love with Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer 1, you can visit the painting, read a book or two, or buy any of the t-shirts, mugs, key chains, and other items that bear her image.
Notes
1. Association of Art Museum Directors, “Art Museums and the Identification and Restitution of Works Stolen By the Nazis,” (May 2007).
2. Rebecca Weiner, “The Virtual Jewish History Tour,” Jewish Virtual Library.
3. Sophie Lillie and Georg Gaugusch, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (New York: Neue Galerie New York, 2007), 38.
4. Nina Kränsel, Gustav Klimt (Munich: Prestel, 2007), 31.
5. Ibid., 103.
6. Lillie and Gaugusch, Portrait, 62–63.
7. Ibid., 76.
8. “E. Randol Schoenberg,” http://www.bslaw.net/schoenberg.html.
9. Carol Vogel, “Lauder Pays $135 Million, a Record, for a Klimt Portrait,” The New York Times, June 19, 2006.
10. “Ms. Maria Altmann Talking About The Gold Portrait by Gustav Klimt,” February 8, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsSnR0IygJ8.
Chapter 2
The Case of the Missing Masterpiece
Donna Carcaci Rhodes never expected to receive this phone call, especially during her first weeks in the job. “My name is David Bloom,” the voice said, “and I work in the manuscript department of Freeman’s auction house in Philadelphia. I have in my possession the original typescript for The Good Earth. Would you be interested in buying it for the Pearl Buck House?”
“My first thought was that it was my brother playing a joke,” Donna told me. “The Good Earth had gone missing forty years before.” To Rhodes, curator of the Pearl Buck House, the whereabouts of this manuscript was one of the greatest mysteries of the twentieth century.
While I couldn’t agree that it was one of the greatest mysteries of the twentieth century, I was definitely intrigued by the mysterious disappearance of the original typescript of The Good Earth when I read about it in a June 2007 story in the Philadelphia Inquirer. I knew the book from my high school reading list and from seeing it on the family bookshelf along with other books by Pearl Buck. She was my mother’s favorite author; her strong voice and well-wrought characters spoke to women like my mother, educated women living in solid homes in post–World War II suburbs. Pearl Buck, I knew, was one of the most celebrated authors of the twentieth century, the first American woman to receive both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize.
Reading the Philadelphia Inquirer story more closely, I realized that no one had been prosecuted or convicted for the removal of this iconic and irreplaceable document, valued by the FBI at one hundred thousand dollars.
Who took it? I wondered. Why weren’t they prosecuted? How did this valuable document get to Freeman’s auction house, a couple of blocks from my home in Philadelphia?
These questions started me on the hunt for Pearl Buck and the mysterious person who absconded with her typescript. The trail led from her birth to her death, from America to China and back multiple times, from poverty to worldwide acclaim, though two marriages, eight children, many philanthropic enterprises, and piles of publications. I became immersed in her life, seduced by her powerful presence, and bowled over by the audacity of this rabble-rouser in proper frocks and pearls. Along the way, I searched for clues to her missing typescript.
I started by purchasing a paperback copy of The Good Earth, opening its pages with some trepidation, since books admired in youth can lose their transformational power. Not The Good Earth. This reading was just as enchanting as the first, catching me up from the first page, sweeping me into the lives of farmer Wang Lung, his stalwart, big-footed wife, O-lan, his cranky old father, elegant concubine, children, wastrel uncle, and the many others who populate this captivating novel. The book has a strong narrative line, a cast of memorable characters, and a Biblical cadence that nudges these ordinary lives nearer the mythic, as if Northern China were populated by saints and prophets instead of farmers and fancy girls. Pearl Buck always insisted she only wrote about what she saw, the authentic lives of those 99 percent of the Chinese. But there is something about Wang Lung’s pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps sensibility that seems more American entrepreneur than Chinese peasant farmer.
“The key to Pearl Buck was her unique existence in two separate cultures and her difficulties in coping with either of them,” Peter Conn told me. “She was not in two worlds; she was between two worlds, never comfortable in either of them.”
Conn and I were meeting in his office at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is an emeritus professor of English. He became interested in Pearl Buck when he and his wife adopted an Amerasian child from Welcome House, an adoption service that Pearl Buck established. Conn’s book, Pearl Buck: A Literary Biography, is the best of the many biographies of her.
“She lived a spectacular life,” Conn said. “She invested millions of dollars, hours of time to the causes she cared about most. She was a speaker on behalf of women, minorities, children, and the disabled. Tens of millions of copies of her books were sold. Her perspective on China was unique; it cannot and will not be duplicated.”
Pearl Buck did live a spectacular life—in fact, she lived two spectacular lives, each with more than enough events to fill any single life. Her first forty years were spent in China as a missionary’s daughter, an academic’s wife, and as a missionary and teacher herself. The second forty were spent in the United States as an exceptionally prolific writer, outspoken social critic, and generous champion of worthy causes. The pivotal point between the two lives occurred in March of 1931, when The Good Earth was published.
She was born Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker in 1892, when her parents were on home leave in the United States. Her father, Absalom, and mother, Caroline, called Carie, met in 1880 and married shortly thereafter; he because missionaries need wives and she because she wanted to experience the world beyond her small West Virginia town. The couple had seven children, only three of whom survived to adulthood: Pearl, her older brother Edgar, and her younger sister Grace.
Absalom was a fire-and-brimstones minister who was called to China, he said, to convert the millions of heathens to the ways of Christ. He spent fifty-one years following his calling whenever and wherever it took him, sometime over the objection of the Presbyterian hierarchy, often at the expense of his family, and always at the cost of their creature comforts. He poured so much of his meager salary into his translation of the Bible into vernacular Chinese that the family lived on the edge of poverty.
The Sydenstrikers never fit into the lifestyle of the Western compound whose residents sought to recreate their worlds back home rather than consort with the Chinese. Not Absalom and Carie, who relished their Chinese neighbors. Pearl Buck’s first playmates were Chinese, and from early childhood she was fluent in English and Chinese. She describes living in a “double world, the small white, clean Presbyterian American world of my parents and the big living merry not-too-clean Chinese world, and there was no communications between them. When I was in the Chinese world I was Chinese, I spoke Chinese and behaved as a Chinese and ate as the Chinese did, and I shared their thoughts and feelings. When I was in the American world, I shut the door between.”[2] Her childhood was filled with stories: folk tales of her Chinese nanny and playmates, folk theater performed on city streets, episodic Chinese vernacular novels and the cream of English literature that she found in her family’s library.[3] By age ten, Pearl had decided to become a novelist.[4] There’s a family photograph of little Pearl Sydenstriker from around that time with Alice-in-Wonderland hair and a stiff white frock.