The Lady in Gold

by Anne-marie O'connor

  Was he related to Klimt? He looked up with piercing blue eyes. His glance was fierce and unsmiling. “My grandmother was one of his models,” he said finally. “She is the girl in the Schubert painting. The painting was burned. Many were burned. It was terrible.” The painting of Mizzi Zimmermann, torched at Schloss Immendorf.

  “My father was the son of Klimt,” he said finally.

  His name was Gustav Zimmermann. Gustav didn’t get much out of being the grandson of Austria’s most famous artist. His father was serving in World War I when Klimt died, and was a sergeant in the German army when Gustav was born, in 1939. Gustav had spent his life selling used cars. No one invited him to the Belvedere, or to Klimt film premieres with John Malkovich.

  But for years Gustav had been a lone guardian of the Klimt myth. Klimt’s Josefstädterstrasse studio had been torn down years before. Gustav was a member of a small community group that had saved Klimt’s last studio, not far from the cemetery, from being razed to make way for a shopping mall. His grandmother told him she was already pregnant at the time of the Schubert painting. “She was very young. He liked young girls,” he said ruefully. “He was surely not a bad man. But a really good man? I don’t know.”

  Gustav was helping organize an exhibition of Klimt’s letters to Mizzi. He invited Gustav Ucicky’s widow, Ursula. But she blew him off. “Probably she’s afraid of being asked about the Nazi period and her husband. And she has all those paintings. People are asking questions about paintings like that nowadays,” he said, raising his eyebrows meaningfully.

  He looked at the picture of Adele, yellowed by rain and sun. A warm foehn wind was blowing in from the southern Alps, pushing away the clouds and melting the snow. Suddenly the cemetery glowed with sunlight.

  Later, over dinner at a restaurant overlooking a cobblestone street near St. Stephen’s Cathedral, Gustav spoke of the difficulties of Mizzi’s life as a single mother. She had another son with Klimt, Otto. When little Otto died, Klimt blamed her for not taking him to the doctor soon enough. Gustav studied a picture of Mizzi in the Schubert painting, reproduced in a book on the table, alongside his collection of her letters from Klimt.

  “It was painful for Austria to lose those paintings,” Gustav said. “But it was just. I think Adele’s will was finally interpreted in the right way. Because it was clear that Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer bought the paintings of his wife. He paid for them, and it was clear they were his. If Adele had lived longer, she would have changed her will a thousand times, had she known what was to come.”

  His bright blue eyes were thoughtful. “The funny thing is, the Belvedere didn’t even want most of those paintings in 1938,” Gustav said. “They made the deal with Ucicky where they sold the paintings to pay for the ones they wanted. It’s like a crime story.

  “The truth is, if it weren’t for the restitutions, Austrians would have never known anything about Adele Bloch-Bauer.”

  For Gustav the only mystery left was the nature of the relationship between Adele and his grandfather. “There’s no way of knowing,” he said. He smiled and cocked an eyebrow. “I’m certain he tried.”

  A Reckoning

  For Maria, the family rift with Nelly over the paintings was another of the unwelcome novelties she had taken to calling “the curse of the Klimts.” Things like her inability to get around her house without a cane. Or people who wanted her to give them money. Maria was ninety-one. She no longer embraced change. She waved away suggestions she give her house a makeover, and still left the front door unlocked, even when she napped.

  “Nelly and I used to be so close,” Maria said sadly. “I remember when she was born, I cried. We were like this,” she said, holding up two intertwined fingers. “Now that’s all gone.”

  Nelly wanted to donate the second Adele portrait to the Neue Galerie to hang alongside the gold portrait. But Maria’s son Chuck said it couldn’t be done. There were five heirs: George Bentley—the newborn carried by Robert and Thea when they escaped Vienna—shared Robert’s stake with Trevor Mantle, a nephew of Robert’s second wife. The heir who wanted a donation would have to come up with enough money to cover Randol’s 40 percent contingency fee for the value of the second portrait of Adele.

  The Altmanns were not sophisticated Rockefellers. They were a middle-class émigré family with bitter memories. None of them were ever certain they would get the paintings back. But they did. And this was the math. A life-changing sum was on the table. If it wasn’t about the money before, now the money was an unavoidable reality. It seemed ever more unlikely that they would make the grand gesture of a donation.

  In fact, few heirs of Vienna restitutions did make donations. They usually sold the paintings.

  Some insiders were disappointed. “How sad—if unsurprising—to hear that the heirs of Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer are indeed cashing in, as planned, and selling four Klimts at Christie’s in November,” wrote the New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman. “A story about art and redemption after the Holocaust has devolved into yet another tale of the crazy, intoxicating art market.” Had the family left a painting in public hands, Kimmelman wrote, “they would have underscored the righteousness of their battle for restitution and in the process made clear that art, even in these money-mad days, isn’t only about the money.”

  ——

  In Vienna, even the most diplomatic Austrian officials were openly dismayed.

  “This was our Austrian Mona Lisa,” lamented Werner Fürnsinn, the director of the Culture Ministry’s Commission for Provenance Research. Fürnsinn was a genteel, old-fashioned man. His office was at the Imperial Hofburg, with a window overlooking a cobblestone courtyard where an enormous stone Hercules was clubbing what seemed to be a lion. Fürnsinn had impeccable manners, but the auction of the Bloch-Bauer Klimts had clearly punctured his Old World reserve.

  “The auction houses are waiting for important pieces of art to come on the market. There is a market being made by the claims of the victims of the Nazi regime. It’s not only in Austria. It’s Germany. It’s the Netherlands. It’s Poland. It’s everywhere,” he said. “There are too many people making money from it!”

  “As soon as a work of art is restituted, the new heirs can do as they like. It’s money. They do not have the same sentimental approach as their grandparents,” Fürnsinn said. “These paintings were loved here. The public should see these paintings. Not put one in some basement in Tokyo. It’s crazy.”

  Maria said she didn’t care if the Austrians were upset. “We lent them those paintings for sixty-eight years!” she said hotly. “They had a chance to buy them.”

  The deepening rift with Nelly was another story. It saddened Maria, and sometimes made her angry. “How dare you accuse me of only caring about money,” Maria wrote Nelly one day. “I told you I offered to donate the portraits of Adele, but the Austrians did not respond. Nelly, you’ve lost perspective on what happened. Austria was not a victim.” When Maria told the Austrians that the Nazis had stolen the paintings, “Austria insisted it was a gift,” Maria wrote. If it wasn’t for Randol, the paintings would still be in the Belvedere, with no proper explanation.

  Nelly was furious. She found it insulting to be told she was on the wrong side of history. She was uncomfortable even visiting Vienna because of her World War II ordeal. She felt her Los Angeles family disregarded her feelings. She refused to take a share in the restitution of the Elisabethstrasse house of Adele. “My mother never wanted to dig up all of this, but having dug it up she wants to do right by Adele,” Nelly’s daughter Maria Harris said. “She would never have chosen to dig it up because she lived it most deeply.”

  “It” was the past that robbed Nelly of her childhood. As with Maria, “it” swept away her world, took her father, nearly cost her life.

  For Nelly, this past was a dark well of psychic pain. For Maria, it was an unaddressed injustice. Nelly wanted peace, and posterity for Adele. Maria wanted atonement—recognition of a world swept away, an act of contritio
n.

  How was Adele best honored? If Maria and Randol had not fought for the paintings, no one would ever know Adele’s story.

  But the paintings were slipping away.

  For Maria, her long-awaited reckoning would end at the Christie’s auction in New York. In a way, the auction was Maria’s divorce—the final splashy denouement of her betrayed love for Austria.

  Maria was a celebrity in the art world. When her long limousine pulled up to Christie’s in Manhattan on the afternoon of the auction, photographers lined up like paparazzi, speaking in French, German, British accents. A doorman held red roses. Blowing kisses and sporting a movie-star smile, Maria swept past a king’s ransom of art. A corpulent nude woman gazed down from a Botero, a Mexican peasant labored in a Diego Rivera, and translucent fish and crabs swam on iridescent purple and green Lalique vases.

  The Bloch-Bauer Klimts hung in a room decorated like Josef Hoffmann’s Secession chamber. “Mrs. Altmann, congratulations on the final chapter of this story,” a young reporter said. But why, he asked, are you not making a single donation to a museum? “That’s a difficult question,” Maria began carefully, as Randol stood behind her, thumbing his BlackBerry. “I’m one of several heirs. We decided to go ahead with the sale.”

  Ronald Lauder showed Maria to his private auction box. He was going to try to get the second portrait of Adele tonight, Maria’s family was told.

  Below her were wealthy buyers: A man with spiky bleached hair and a Warhol Campbell’s Soup T-shirt. A handsome brunet with black leather pants and a white T-shirt had his hair piled up Amadeus-style above theatrically haunted eyes, looking as rumpled as if he just rolled out of someone’s bed. A fragile-looking elderly gentleman in cowboy getup walked by a woman garbed in what appeared to be Tibetan robes. A lady at least sixty years old wore black leather pants and a fuchsia T-shirt. A man wandered by in an antique monocle, and a woman hid behind enormous dark sunglasses, like Jean-Luc Godard. A gamine barely out of her teens settled into a prime bidding spot in jeans, Keds, and a sweater tied around her waist. This was a spectator sport for rich people. There were waves, air kisses, hellos mouthed across the room. “Absolutely! They’re going to take no prisoners!” a florid white-haired man in navy pinstripes shouted into a cell phone.

  Into this rather unseemly orgy of art and commerce stepped the auction world’s equivalent of heavy artillery: Christopher Burge, an honorary chairman of Christie’s, sipping three fingers of scotch. Behind him, as in a stock market, was a monitor to translate prices into euros, Swiss francs, Japanese yen, and British and Hong Kong pounds.

  The jaunty Burge and his crisp British accent went a long way toward dignifying this Costco-like jumbo sale. One of the first items up was a Picasso “tomahto plahnt.” The eager bidders quickly eclipsed the presale estimate of up to $7 million. “Do I hear $12 million?” Burge chirped brightly, just before the painting sold for $13.4 million. This seemed to set the high-flying tone. A tiny sliver of hammered green metal on a wooden base was presented as La Jambe, or “The Leg,” by Alberto Giacometti. It had a presale estimate of up to $2.5 million. But in a few giddy seconds, the tiny leg went for $7.9 million.

  Finally, the Klimts. Maria leaned forward as they offered Birch Forest, which she said was coveted by Microsoft founder Paul Allen. In less than a minute bidding climbed to $28 million, $30 million; “all yours at $36 million!” Murmurs rippled through the crowd. Klimt’s painting of the Attersee shot up to $28 million. His Apple Tree, “like a cupcake of delight!” Burge trilled, “selling to you, Thomas, at $29.5 million!” Now the second portrait of the mortal Adele with smoke-stained teeth. Feverish bidding pushed up the price in seconds. “Yusi, $60 million,” Burge baited “Yusi,” a handsome blond with sculpted cheekbones who looked like a sane, well-groomed Klaus Kinski. “$69 million Yusi! Pedro $70 million! Yusi $70.5 million . . .”

  Lauder stopped bidding.

  A dark horse pulled ahead of the pack. “It goes to the bidder at $78.5 million!” Burge said with surprise, as the buyers, an older man and woman, hurried out.

  In six minutes, Ferdinand and Adele’s Klimts were gone.

  Everyone jumped to their feet for a standing ovation. The auction total “is a record $491 million,” Burge told reporters, “the most extraordinary auction I’ve been involved with in my career.” It was “a return to the extraordinary period of the 1980s. It’s $200 million more than the highest sale ever held!” A Christie’s press agent read Maria’s statement: “My aunt Adele and uncle Ferdinand enjoyed living with these paintings and sharing them and we trust the new owners will continue this tradition.”

  The fairy tale had ended.

  “We were lucky to have the works of art because of restitution, so we have to be sensitive to the issue,” Christie’s Stephen Lash was saying to an older woman he introduced to Maria’s grandson, Philip Altmann, and his wife, Tanya.

  “Your paintings are really lovely,” Lash told them.

  “We hope to get to see them again,” Tanya said.

  Lash raised his hands. “Who knows?” he said. “Who knows?”

  Maria said she turned to Lash and was surprised to see his eyes filled with tears.

  The gavel prices for the four Klimts sold at the auction totaled $192.7 million. The proceeds, combined with the $135 million sale of the gold portrait, would be divided among Randol and the five heirs.

  Life had changed for the heirs of Adele and Ferdinand, and for the lawyer who had found jurisdiction in a museum guide.

  Weeks later, back in Los Angeles, the phone rang. It was Maria. “Did Adele’s portrait go to that man who put the hole in the Picasso?” Maria asked. It took a moment to realize Maria meant Steve Wynn, the Vegas hotel baron who accidentally poked his elbow through a $139 million painting of Picasso’s twenty-one-year-old mistress, Le Rêve, while showing it off to celebrities. “I wonder if Paul Allen got Birch Forest,” she mused. Maria had promised Nelly she would find out who bought the paintings and persuade the buyer to loan them for public exhibition. But she said Lash wouldn’t reveal their names.

  The paintings had disappeared, confirming Nelly’s worst fears. No one knew who had bought Adele Bloch-Bauer II, Apple Tree, Birch Forest, or Houses in Unterach on Lake Attersee. If Adele knew “the fate of the Klimt paintings,” Nelly said, “she would be heartbroken.”

  A couple of months later, it was clear that Maria, too, might never find peace on the issue. “I don’t want to ask Nelly for forgiveness,” Maria said, over dinner at her favorite Italian restaurant, near her old Burton Way dress shop. “If she was so against this, then why did she take the money? I did nothing to forgive.”

  Maria was pensive. “What would Adele think?” she asked. “She loved Austria.” But which Austria? The Austria of music, art, and philosophy? Or the murderous, greedy Austria, eager to hang on to palaces, paintings, books—even knives and forks—stolen from families that were exiled and murdered?

  Maria sighed, with a century of weariness.

  “I don’t know,” she said finally.

  Art Nouveau master Koloman Moser created an ex libris of Adele as a nude princess who is courted by a frog—not a particularly flattering image of Ferdinand. (Illustration Credit 79.1)

  In the end, many things led to the restitution of the Bloch-Bauer Klimts. There was the coming-of-age of a younger generation of Austrians, who felt more curiosity than shame. Austria was assuming presidency of the European Union in 2006, casting a spotlight on its perpetually unfinished business. There was “the burden of history.”

  There was the higher moral standard, demanded by the living victims of an unprecedented historic crime. In the days of Napoleon, war meant booty. It was accepted: to the victor went the spoils. Now people were disturbed by art taken by force and kept by deception.

  Restitution cases were now judged in the court of public opinion. The world of today was shocked to discover that even one of the women painted by Klimt was sent at gunpoint to a place where families bu
rned in ovens.

  The rarefied art world seemed an unlikely stage for the reenactment of a drama steeped in love and blood.

  Once again, the Lady in Gold was reborn. The portrait had been created, stolen, renamed, consigned to a shadowy underworld. It had miraculously eluded the inferno of war. A man who had seen Adele and never forgotten her paid $135 million to buy her, legally, for the first time. Adele was now legend.

  Restitution had reintroduced Gustav Klimt to the world. The compulsive reproduction of The Kiss had made him blandly ubiquitous. The artist was now revealed not as a purveyor of easy beauty, but as a deeply flawed man who nevertheless faced the biggest ethnic question of his day and emerged righteous. Long after his death, his art had opened eyes and minds. He had finally changed the world. Maybe this was Klimt’s true “kiss to the whole world.”

  Perhaps no one would ever agree whether the “Austrian Mona Lisa” belonged to Vienna or to the exiled creators of the insulted culture that produced her; whether Adele represented the glittering aspirations of turn-of-the-century Vienna—or the sacking of everything that made Vienna shine. Adele’s life was a triumph of Jewish assimilation, but her portrait was a relic of assimilation’s tragic failure. Adele symbolized one of the most brilliant moments in time, but also one of the world’s greatest thefts: of all that was lost when one woman and an entire people were stripped of their identity, their dignity, and their lives.

  What is the meaning of justice when law is used to legalize thievery and murder? What is the meaning of cultural property when patrimony is an arm of genocide? What is the value of a painting that has come to evoke the theft of six million lives?