Whatever Happened to Klimt’s Golden Lady? with E. Randol Schoenberg -- UC San Diego Library Channel

welcome everybody it's terrific to be down in I say down in San Diego because I'm from Los Angeles but it's always wonderful to come down here it's a beautiful Drive and I get to see my cousin's like first cousin Arnie Schoenberg here and and my mom second cousin Ruth Crow meet us and so many other friends and and possibly family members in the audience it's really a real honor and a pleasure to be here to speak to you tonight so I've been on this incredible journey because of the film woman in gold and we didn't know it's true when we set up this this talk that it would come right as the film has just opened and it's been really overwhelming for me to be able to to see people learning now about the story of Maria Altmann and her family and the work that I was lucky enough to do for her so I want to walk you through that story from perhaps a little bit different perspective than you might have seen in the film or read in the book you can put the three of them together and hopefully come up with a good idea of of what the truth really is okay so here is my client Maria Altmann that is that's Maria if you saw the film Helen Mirren is short and Ryan Reynolds is tall it was the opposite Maria was very tall and stately and I'm of course not and she Maria was my grandmother's closest friend my mother's mother Gertrude's ISIL and those isel's and the Altman's were very close friends especially after they came from Vienna to Los Angeles and my mother really grew up with the Altman children their four children that Maria and Fritz had as her surrogate siblings because my mother was an only child and so the families were extremely close and that's really how I got involved in the story but we'll go back now over a hundred years to Vienna at the turn of the 20th century so 1900 Vienna 1900 a little bit of background Vienna was the capital of austria-hungary this enormous empire which is now I think 12 or 13 different countries so it was really a vast empire and one of the great world powers and Vienna was the capital and after eighteen six seven when Jews were fully emancipated in austria-hungary which is shortly after the u.s. Civil War here just to put in perspective Jews were able to move into Vienna they were able to own property they were able to work in businesses for the first time and so a number of them came from the outlying areas of the empire to Vienna where they were now allowed to live and this coincided with the the Industrial Revolution and great opportunities for business and wealth generation and so a number of Jewish families not all of them became wealthy but a number of them became extremely wealthy during this timeframe as did many non-jews and one of those wealthy families actually two of them were the blocks and the bowers so the Bowers were were banking they were involved in banking and railroads and real estate the blocks were sugar magnates they had a sugar company that started it up in Czechoslovakia and they came to Vienna and ended up owning pretty much a monopoly on sugar production in Central Europe and if you've ever been to Central Europe and eat in the pastries you know how important sugar was to their lifestyle it when I first came across this case I didn't understand I said how could you grow cane sugar in in Austria Hungary it wasn't cane sugar it was beets they made sugar beets and they changed turned that into sugar anyway they became fabulously wealthy and the families combined when first the older brother Gustav married the older sister Teresa so and then there was the younger brother Ferdinand Bloch married a de Labarre so two brothers married two sisters the older ones this is Gustav and Teresa they all combined their name right because block is really ordinary and Bauer is really ordinary but bloch-bauer sounds a little bit fancy the the Bauer's brother died and so they combined the name to preserve the name made it a little fancy Gustav and Teresa had five children the youngest of which was Maria she was a what we might call an accident or afterthought baby she was eight years younger than the next youngest her sister Louisa and she had three older brothers after that so she was really the baby of the family the younger siblings Ferdinand and adayla could not have children a daily I think had several failed pregnancies stillborn children very tragic and perhaps to compensate for that Ferdinand and adayla amassed an enormous art collection and adayla herself was was a very socially engaged person she liked to entertain and have a salon with artists and intellectuals and politicians of her day she was also very left-leaning her niece Maria called her a socialist socialite in a way but she was very very civic-minded and you'll see when we get to her will some of the requests that she made reflected that but before we do let's turn to the to the palais where they lived pretty nice this is if you know the ring in vienna this is one block outside of the ring just a block away from the opera so a very very nice part of town and this was their home and here are some of the paintings that they had now Ferdinand was a little bit older a little bit more conservative his taste was for this style which they call biedermeyer paintings painters you may have never heard of but were very famous at the time for for an adult Miller rule of fun alt people like that Don Hauser wrongful anyway they had had dozens of these type of paintings they had the largest collection of antique porcelain in the world over 300 settings each setting is a cup and saucer and these are some examples of them not bad this was their summer home outside of Prague where the blocks were from just one aside so I don't forget about the summer home when the Nazis came into Czechoslovakia in 1939 they confiscated this home and used it as the residence of what they called the rice protector of bohemia and moravia like the Nazi governor of that whole area and so this was the home of Reinhard Heydrich who many of you may know was the architect of the final solution he is the one that held the infamous Vons a conference where they plotted out the extermination of the Jews he living in Ferdinand's home with his family at that time and then was assassinated leaving the castle and driving into Prague which led to a famous massacre of Czech Czech men and boys in a town called latisha which there a number of films were made about even during the war so this is sort of a storied location in and of itself but beyond that adayla as we said and Ferdinand were very involved in the arts and at the time at the beginning of the 20th century the most famous artist in Austria was Gustav Klimt he had started out as a absolutely wonderful academic style painter he received a number of official commissions from the government to paint murals in large buildings but he pointed poked his finger the finger in the eye of maybe too many officials started painting things that were not necessarily approved by the Academy and ultimately broke with the Academy and formed something called the Secession which was a separate group of artists he then didn't like the secessionists and went out on his own and really operated on his own until his death relatively young in 1918 during the flu epidemic at the end of World War one you can see him here in his smock apparently he liked to paint in a long smock with nothing on underneath as a result with his various models he sired as many as 18 illegitimate children who claimed parts of his estate when he died so but he all most of those children were from the nude models maybe working-class girls but then he also had his patrons and his patrons consisted because he was modern right and and avant-garde in a way most of his patrons were the sort of nouveau riche Jewish elite in Vienna including the bloch-bauers but it wasn't just the bloch-bauers the the later or family that circle candle family those three families bought about 30% of the paintings that Klimt did so they were really his his support and Ferdinand then commissioned klimt to draw a portrait or to paint a portrait I'm sorry of Dayla these are sketches he did hundreds of sketches over a period of years before finally finishing the portrait in 1907 and this is the famous woman in gold or lady in gold or gold portrait of a daily bloch-bauer it's one of four gold layered paintings the Klimt made it's probably the best preserved these days the slightly more famous one that you might see in in all the dorm rooms here at UCSD would be the kiss which you probably know and this this is maybe the next most famous painting by Gustav Klimt his portrait of a daily blog our number one five years later he painted a much different portrait of her now some people suggest that perhaps a dealer might have had an affair with Klimt after all he was that type of person who liked to fool around with his models but those who think that say that whatever heat was in the relationship here had vanished by 1912 whether that's true or not I don't know you could notice there's some Japanese influence on this one it's an interesting painting so besides the two portraits the bloch-bauers also purchased a number of landscapes by Klimt this is his beechwood or birch trees depending on whether you look at the thick trees or the thin ones it has a different title the apple trees this may have been painted at the bloch-bauer estate outside of Prague that that some work Castle Klimt was a visitor there several times and this could have been painted there they had this slightly unfinished paintings you see can see in the right in the right corner here it's a little bit unfinished this was probably purchased from Clemson State when he died in 1918 and then this beautiful Schloss camera mocked as a number three one of a series of four paintings that he did on this Lake in Austria just to give you an idea so they had these six paintings in their beautiful home in Vienna and then unfortunately a daily bloch-bauer died very young she was 42 years old in 1925 she developed meningitis and in those days before penicillin was available that was a deadly and fatal disease and she died in a matter of days she had written a will several years earlier probably instigated by the death of her mother in in 1922 and it's a four-page will and these are two two of the handwritten pages and it's written in her hand but in what we might call legalese it has a lot of sort of legal construction and so it's possible that she was advised in this by Maria's father her brother-in-law Gustav bloch-bauer who was a lawyer for the family and in this will she makes a number of bequests and remember I said she was very civic-minded and and social minded she makes requests to the to the orphan society and the Worker society she wants her her library to go to the worker the people in workers library for example and they're very various other requests here but the important one for our purposes is this section here where she says my two portraits and the four landscapes by Gustav Klimt see this word bit to each mine and a gotten that means I ask please my husband after his death to leave them here's the verb at the end to the Austrian state gallery in Vienna so among her civic-minded bequests was the idea that her husband after his death should give these Klimt paintings the two portraits and four landscapes to the Austrian gallery which was a newly formed gallery Museum in Vienna for Austrian art that was formed from one of the Habsburg palaces after World War one here here it is the beautiful Belvedere gallery so she made these requests in her will and interestingly enough in the what we would call probate proceedings in 1926 Maria's father Gustav again who's the lawyer and and executor for adayla filed a document where he says adayla or the deceased makes certain requests in her will which do not have the binding character of a testament and I'll explain that then he says but her husband dutifully promises to fulfill her wishes it should be noted that the Klimt paintings were not her property but his property so this is 1926 so what does that mean so the last one first the paintings were his property not her property it wasn't as if she didn't have property she owned half of the Palais she had inherited from her father the banker quite a quite a fortune but the Klimt paintings were considered for whatever reason not her property but his in 1926 and the rule at that time of course was even if there was a dispute it was not a community property state not very feminist at that time even even if there was a dispute all property was presumed to be owned by the husband so however whatever you think the facts might have been the law at that time pretty clear that her husband would have been considered the owner of the paintings so she makes these requests which are considered not binding what does that mean we have a term in the law here in the United States also that refers to certain requests in a will as precatory language now what is precatory language the way I like to describe it is let's say we had a dog which we don't but let's say we have my wife and I had a dog and I said in my will please my dear wife after my death continue to take care of the dog and I drop dead and she says oh thank god that dog is out of here okay that's fine because it's just predatory language it's please take care of the dog if on the other hand I said as a condition of receiving a penny of my estate you must agree to take care of the dog until its dying day in the manner to which it's become accustomed right that would be clearly binding now it's it's often unclear the line between precatory language and binding language but it's interesting that even in 1926 inside a dailies family these were considered non-binding requests but at the time Fernand absolutely intended to fulfill her wishes and donate these paintings to the Austrian gallery when he died Ferdinand actually purchased then after a Daley's death another portrait this one you'll see in the movie actually it's of their friend Amalia at circa kondal who was killed bell zetz in the Holocaust this painting hung in Ferdinand's bedroom and still has not been returned by the Austrians in 1936 Ferdinand who was the president of the Friends of the Austrian gallery decided to give this painting so one of the six paintings mentioned in a Dale is will he actually gave to the Austrian gallery in 1936 before the Nazis came in leaving him with five plus the Circa kondal painting that I just showed you so he had six again makes it a little confusing in 1937 at the end of 37 Maria Maria Altmann or Maria bloch-bauer then married Fritz Altman Maria is Ferdinand's niece if you saw the film she receives a necklace of a Dale a diamond necklace for her wedding Fritz and Maria then go on a honeymoon into the Alps and they return in a few weeks later March of 1938 is the uncial Oost the famous Nazi annexation of Austria this is the day when world was turned upside down for Austrian Jews Jews in Germany had had since 1933 five years to adjust slowly to the increasing difficulties and regulations and discriminatory laws related to Jews but for Austrian Jews it went from freedom to pariah status in one day and this is what Maria and her family faced let's see the next slide is is already 1939 but let me tell you what what happened to Maria's family so Ferdinand bloch-bauer fled immediately on the eve of the onsh loose first to his castle in Prague and then as the Nazis annexed Czechoslovakia over the next 6 to 12 months he went to Zurich Switzerland and he actually lived in a hotel in Zurich Switzerland until the end of the war in 1945 when when he died in November 1945 never having returned back to Austria never having seen any of his family again never having recovered any of his property his property was confiscated by the Nazis who impo most taxes on Jews in various different ways with Ferdinand because he had owned this large sugar company what they did was they said the sugar company had made illegal donations to the previous government advertising and things like that and so they said there were deficiencies on the corporation's taxes the company didn't pay the right amount of taxes rather than have his company pay the taxes they charged the directors of the company Ferdinand and others other Jewish directors of the company to pay the taxes that the company had owed and so Ferdinand in exile was faced with this huge tax judgment that then allowed the Austrians to confiscate all of his property and in January 1939 this is less than 12 months after the Anschluss there is a meeting in Ferdinand's home with members says who was there all the members of the various official agencies including the Gestapo including a representative of Adolf Hitler including members of the Austrian museum world and they went through and listed all of the artworks in his home and made little check marks and notations of which who was going to get what where each one was going to go you can see the Klimt paintings actually listed first here but this is this is all of the artworks because what the Nazis did when they invaded countries in Austria was the first country they invaded was they targeted Jewish families to take away their wealth and take away their art as part of that wealth and one of the reasons they were so interested in art is that Hitler himself had been a failed artist he had actually tried to study in Vienna and applied to the Academy was not let in unfortunately as Maria liked to say and it's in the film too bad they didn't let him in because all the whole world would have been much better if he could have just painted little pictures but he he decided he wanted to be a great art collector and what that meant was going and taking whatever he wanted from Jewish families who had fled or were imprisoned or deported as a result of Nazi persecution and he had a competitor his henchmen Hermann Goering also thought of self as a great art connoisseur and so the two of them would would go around and try to compete and and snap up all of the artworks and so some of the bloch-bauer paintings went to Hitler some went to Goering most of mostly the old old-fashioned Austrian Biedermeier paintings the Klimt however were too modern for the for the big Nazis but they did attract the eye of the Austrian museum officials who were themselves Nazis but not not the same and they liked the clamps and so the Klimt paintings were were sold off by a lawyer who was appointed to liquidate Ferdinand's estate his name was Eric Fuhrer which is sort of an unfortunate name but he was a big Nazi and he came in and liquidated all of her Nan's property to pay off this judgment and so he he sold a number of the paintings to various Austrian museums or traded them so let's let's walk through that I think that's sort before I do that the painting that Hitler took you can see it in the movie is this vault Miller on portrait of account Esterhazy okay let's go back to the paintings let me show you where they all went so dr. Fuhrer in 1941 went to the Austrian gallery and said uh you know we have these these paintings the Austrian galleries interested and so they made a trade and he actually traded the gold portrait and the Appletree picture and in return got back this elos camara Moktar say so it was a two-for-one deal he took this one back and then flipped it and sold it this is all to pay off the taxes that have been imposed on Ferdinand who did he sell it to he sold it to a man named Gustavo shitski who is Gustavo shitski he's a very famous Nazi film director who whose most successful Nazi film was called Haim care or returning home about the invasion of Poland but his other claim to fame was that he was one of those eighteen illegitimate kids of gustav klimt and he used all the money from his Nazi propaganda films to buy up whatever Klimt paintings were around including this one that the one that Ferdinand had actually donated to the museum okay what happened to the other ones the second portrait of a dealer was then sold two years later by dr. Fuhrer to the Austrian gallery so the Austrian gallery ended up with the two portraits and the apple tree the birch trees was sold to the City Museum of Vienna another Vienna Museum and the houses on Entourage was taken by dr. Fuhrer along with eleven other paintings to pay himself for a job well done liquidating the estate the the portrait of Amalia at circa kondal was somehow went through the hands of her son-in-law into the hands of a dealer who then sold it to her husband and had a much different story and it's one of the reasons it hasn't been returned because her family also claims it should be returned to them okay what happened to the rest of Ferdinand's family maria and fritz some of you may have seen the film their escape was was every bit as dramatic as portrayed in the film what actually happened was probably even worse fritz was actually sent to Dachau for two months in the summer of 1938 why because his older brother Bernard was like Fernand bloch-bauer a very wealthy industrialist he was a sweater manufacturer and he fled as soon as the Nazis came into Vienna and he a very smart guy he immediately wired all of his customers and said don't send any money to Vienna I'll come and pick it up and so we went to Budapest in Rome and Paris and London and picked up the receivables that were due his company picked up all the money and started a new business in Liverpool okay he was the type of person I think you could drop him on a deserted island on Friday and on Monday he'd already be a millionaire so he starts up a new company in Liverpool and the Nazis are upset because they want to take his whole his whole business and he's stolen the money from his own business so they decided to arrest Fritz his younger brother and sent him to Dachau and held him hostage until his older brother agreed finally to return the money and sign away his company to the Nazis which he managed to do more recklessly in in several months so Maria was actually flown to Berlin with the Gestapo and an agent of Fritz's brother went to Berlin and they signed documents and traded the money and and Fritz was ultimately released but even after he was released they were under house arrest and they made three failed attempts to escape before finally going to a dentist office and escaping out the back similar to what you saw maybe in the film and and to safety of course it wasn't immediately to safety they had to get out of Germany they flew to Cologne where the person they were supposed to meet didn't make it and they had to make their way north to the border with Holland and managed to find someone who who was able to smuggle them across the border Maria had to go through barbed wire and scratched herself apparently getting into Holland where they were still not safe because at that point they were illegal aliens in Holland and Holland had the practice that time of returning escaping Jews back to Germany so they had to actually then evade the Dutch police once they were in Holland until finally they met up with Fritz's brother Bernard who flew them to safety in Liverpool they then went to Fall River Massachusetts where Bernard set up yet another factory to make sweaters in the United States and from there they came to Los Angeles to Hollywood in around 1942 and there they connected again with their friends the sisal zmei mother's parents and that's that's how my family gets involved with the with the altman's after after the war Maria's the rest of her family her sister managed to go to Yugoslavia initially with her husband who was a Jewish lumber baron Bern Goodman they hid through the war in Croatia there was a deportation almost all of the the Jews in Yugoslavia were deported first to use innovates and then to Auschwitz and murdered almost none of them survived but they managed to avoid deportation last-minute and hide out the end of the war at the end of the war Tito and the Communists came in and then arrested Louise's husband and executed him for being a capitalist so after surviving as a Jew in hiding in Yugoslavia under the Nazis he then was executed and Maria's sister and their two young children escaped then to Israel and from there to Vancouver where they were reunited with Maria's mother and and the three older brothers who all went to Vancouver okay so what happened then after the war ended as I mentioned Ferdinand died and he left behind a will that gave his estate to his two nieces and one of his nephews there's no mention of any gift of paintings to the Austrian gallery of course because he didn't have them the paintings were stolen only to only his nieces and nephews in there and they're only claimed after he died was the hope for restitution now this is in the end of 1945 when I first became involved I didn't understand why after the war when when the Allies conquered Austria why couldn't you just walk in and get your property back civilians were not allowed into Austria until almost two years after the end of the war and it wasn't until 1948 that Austria enacted restitution laws that allowed Jewish families to try to recover their property so it took three years from the end of the war before it was possible to recover anything and the heirs of Ferdinand bloch-bauer hired a friend in Vienna Gustav Rhenish sorry everybody's named Gustav in the story it's Gustav Klimt and Gustav bloch-bauer Gustav Rhenish Gustav Rhenish is the lawyer for the family and his job is to try to recover as much as he can of the bloch-bauer property so the shares of the sugar company the the home the the artworks principally and he his job was not so easy the Austrian gallery was closed at that time and he wrote letters and ultimately he discovered that some of the Klimt paintings three of them were in the Austrian gallery and he wrote to the museum at the end of 1947 beginning of 1948 and said what is your position with regard to my clients restitution claim which was just coming into effect and the museum said what restitution claim these paintings were donated to us by a daily bloch-bauer in her will and her husband was only allowed to keep them during his lifetime but the paintings belong to us we only have three of them and it's your responsibility to find the other three and bring them to us otherwise we're going to sue the estate so they took a very aggressive approach and dr. eNOS didn't have the will of de Labarre he actually looked for it but the file was with the state attorney and in the meantime he had managed to recover some other paintings so remember I said twelve paintings were taken by dr. Fuhrer the Nazi lawyer liquidating the state including one of the Klimt and so he found these twelve there were other paintings that also he was recovering at that time if you saw the monuments men last year with George Clooney right so George Clooney and his merry band band of men find these giant caves full of artworks that were taken by Hitler and Goering and for the planned Fuhrer Museum and Lintz and they find these in in salt lines in Salzburg and they bring them back to Munich and from Munich rather than set up a procedure where people could claim their stolen property they said no we're not going to deal with that we're going to just return the artworks to their country of origin so in this case Gustav Rhenish had to ask the Austrians to ask the Americans in Munich to send the paintings to Austria and then he had to apply to the Austrian government to get them back and once he got them back in Vienna he wanted to send them off to his clients in Canada and the United States so then he had to go back to the Austrians and ask for an export permit Austria like many countries had laws in place that limited the export of cultural artifacts including paintings and so you were not allowed to export artworks even to families who had survived and escaped the Nazis without permission and what the Austrians then did is they took advantage of this situation and they denied export permits for Jewish families not just the bloch-bauers but the Rothschild family the later family and circle condo family all of these families that had large collections who ever survived wanted to take what was covered out and they had to face this export restriction and what the Austrian authorities would do is they say no nothing can can leave and if you appealed they would say well you've got 20 paintings if you would donate five of them to our museum we'll let the other 15 go and so they used this law to extort donations from Jewish families who for very good reason did not want to come back and live in Austria after World War two and dr. Rina SH was faced with this dilemma what to do with the paintings that he recovered what to do about the Klimt paintings given the the museum's position and so he had a meeting in April 1948 with the authorities and he said the heirs will acknowledge the will of a daily bloch-bauer and leave the Klimt paintings in the museum we'll try to help you recover the other ones one of them he had already he said and I hope by that to get your agreement to let the other paintings out several dozen other paintings porcelain drawings etc they still had to donate some porcelain some of the drawings that were recovered but he was successful and he managed to export to his clients several dozen artworks I Maria had a couple of them in her home in Los Angeles but the Klimt painting stayed in Vienna and if you had asked Maria the baby of the family what had happened to the Klimt paintings before 1998 she would have said well it's too bad my aunt adayla gave them to the museum so we never gotten we never saw them again they went from from her uncle's home where they were in a memorial room to her aunt and and they were then lost after the after the war but then in 1998 everything changed there was a an exhibit in New York at the Museum of Modern Art of artworks by another Austrian painter contemporary of Klimt named Aegon Sheila and two of those paintings were alleged to be stolen from from Jewish families and the district attorney in New York mr. Morgenthau decided to seize the paintings as stolen property and this was right at the end of 1997 caused a big outcry especially in Austria and the Austrian Minister said this is ridiculous we don't have stolen paintings in Austria everything was given back after the war we can't be accused of this whereupon this amazing journalist who Burgess chair Neen decided to do some research and he went into the archives in the Austrian gallery and in the federal monument agency and discovered this extortionate procedure that had happened after the war and he discovered that many of the provenance stories around Austrian paintings were false so for example in the guidebook to the Austrian gallery the gold portrait of a daily bloch-bauer said donated in 1936 and he found the letter signed Heil Hitler Eric Fuhrer with trading it in 1941 so he wrote this big series of articles in expose about the fishy way that Austria obtained a lot of these paintings and to Austria's credit the minister minister gehrer proposed a new law and the new law said that if our federal museums if our public museums have artworks that either were never returned or were returned and then traded to our museum in exchange for export permits we're going to give them back and this was around September 1998 so Maria Altmann got a call from a former Austrian general consul in Los Angeles Peter Moser who later became the Ambassador from Austria and he told her about this new law and she hung up the phone and then decided to try to call my mother my grandmother her best friend had died about 10 years earlier but she kept up with my mother and knew that I was a lawyer my parents actually were not in town and so she looked me up and called me directly in my office and at that time I was I was working in a small office of a large New York firm downtown Los Angeles named Fred Frank Harris Shriver and Jacobson and the Schreiber Sargent Shriver for example so it's a big New York firm and I got this call from Maria Altmann who I knew as my grandmother's good friend I'd probably last seen her when my sister got married and she said Randy I just got this call from Vienna about this new law in Austria and I'd like to speak to you about possibly recovering my family's paintings and and I said I sort of know what you're talking about because I had gone online to see what was going on in Vienna because my parents were in Vienna at that time and and had seen an article about this and so just by coincidence I had read that and she called and so I was very excited about it I didn't know at the time what the story of the paintings was I had seen the portrait of a daily bloch-bauer when I was a teenager and went to Vienna for the first time and I remember my mom pointing the painting out and saying you know your grandmother's friend Maria Altmann that's her aunt a daily bloch-bauer and I remember it just because a daily block Bauer is such a weird name that for an American kid to hear and so I remember seeing the painting and knowing about the painting but I didn't have any idea about what had happened to it that even that her family had owned it but Maria then met with me and told me her story and she told me about her escape with Fritz and she told me about these paintings and her sister had just died and she had obtained from her niece some of the documents her sister had left behind including a letter from this lawyer Gustav Rhenish talking about this meeting he had in 1948 with the officials trying to get export permits etc and it really looked like this new law would apply to the recovery of these paintings but what to do we waited for the law to go into effect and what Austria did actually was not allow anybody to file a claim or file a lawsuit they set up an internal procedure with an advisory board that was going to decide what painting should be returned so I helped Maria approach this board and say we had documents and sent them the documents and we waited really for a decision which came then in June of 1999 the bloch-bauer was the the third case that they handled they returned hundreds of artworks to the rothschild family some artworks to the later family and then turned to the bloch-bauer and for the bloch-bauers they agreed to give them back some drawings and some porcelain but they said the Klimt paintings must stay because they were donated by a daily bloch-bauer in her will so at that point Marie and I had to decide what to do and I actually asked the Austrians at that time if they would arbitrate the issue of the will because remember I had already seen that Maria's father had said these requests were not binding in 1926 also dr. rena had said it doesn't look like they're binding and so i thought this should be a legal issue decided by austrian arbitrators but i was told by a minister gehrer in a letter if you don't like it go to court so I'm a lawyer right you'd never say go to court to a litigator that's really not a very smart thing so I decided okay Maria we should try to sue and and recover this so I found an Austrian lawyer because of course the paintings were in Austria it seemed like that would be the place you would want to file a lawsuit and I found an Austrian lawyer who said well there's no real right to file a lawsuit under this new law but maybe we could do some sort of declaratory relief action over this issue of the will and I said well that sounds great why don't you prepare it and he prepared it and then he said you know to file a lawsuit in Austria you have to pay court costs is it okay that's the same here what are the costs he said no you don't understand it's a percentage of the value at stake in the litigation so in this case to file the lawsuit you have to have about two million dollars so Maria who at that point was was in her mid 80s still selling dresses out of her home obviously did not have two million dollars to throw away on a lawsuit in Austria which already had you know a lot of hurdles that we would have to get over and so we sort of thought of giving up but I I wouldn't give up and I I looked very naively at the idea of suing in the United States I thought Maria Altmann came to the United States in the early 1940s she was already a citizen when this trade happened she's been here for 60 years why shouldn't she be allowed to sue in the United States and so I looked in the law books in our Federal Rules and there is a there's a statute called the foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 you can tell by the title of the act that the ordinary rule is that foreign states are immune from lawsuits you cannot sue a foreign state in US courts but there are exceptions and they're small exceptions and one of the exceptions said that you can sue a foreign state if the case concerned property taken in violation of international law okay where the property is owned or operated by an agency or an instrumentality of a foreign state which is engaged in a commercial activity in the United States so I read that and thought okay the Nazis took it that should be violation of international law they're owned are operated by the museum which is an agency or instrumentality of Austria a foreign state and the museum is engaged in commercial activities in the United States they sell books they I found a book that they published with Yale University Press they advertise they accept US credit cards they have connections with the United States so I think we can sue and I tried to convince my big law firm to do this but they were not really in the business of tilting at windmills and suing foreign countries and and so I ultimately decided to leave the big firm that I was in and I opened up my own small office I rented out a tiny office from from a friend of mine who had a real estate company and I drafted a complaint against Austria and I went down to court and I filed this complaint and it didn't cost two million dollars it cost about one hundred sixty five dollars and there's an email I wrote to Maria at the time saying I just hope that we can keep the case alive because my hope always was that if if we haven't lost completely there's something could happen and we could win and and so we filed this lawsuit and Austria of course hired a big firm to represent it and they did what any lawyer would do they filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit at the outset and they had a number of different grounds and one of them was that we should not be able to rely on this foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 because the case concerns events that took place in the 30s and 40s it would be impermissible retroactively to apply a law from 1976 to events that took place earlier fortunately we had a terrific District Court Judge the late Florence Murray Cooper and much to everybody's surprise she ruled in our favor and denied the motion to dismiss so Austria had an immediate right to appeal normally you don't but if it's a foreign sovereign immunity issue it goes immediately on appeal and they went to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal in Pasadena and I argue then for the first time in front of three judges in the Ninth Circuit and again with a miracle we won a 3/0 opinion so we were feeling really good right everything's going our way Austria then filed a motion for reconsideration or rehearing and they were joined by the US government apparently the US government started getting calls after the Ninth Circuit decision saying what's going on in crazy California are we going to be sued right Mexico and Japan and Poland and France everybody was worried that all historic wrongs would now be litigated in California and in the US government the State Department their job is to is to pacify foreign States so that we can fly our planes over them or do whatever we want and so they took actually Austria aside and asked the Ninth Circuit to reconsider its decision fortunately the Ninth Circuit did not the judges did not reconsider and but then Austria petitioned the US Supreme Court and the US Supreme Court doesn't grant a lot of petitions for cases they hear only about 75 or 80 cases a year but when you have a foreign country complaining and the US government is on the foreign country side it's a little unusual and so they took the case and then of course all bets were off I think if you would talk to any lawyer in the country about this they would have said that I had had less than a zero chance of winning but I prepared to go to the US Supreme Court to argue this case for Maria Altmann and I did several moot court practice sessions these are law schools set them up for lawyers going to the Supreme Court to practice judges people professors and other lawyers will pretend to be the justices and asks you lots of questions I did three of these and I really thought I was ready and I went to Washington in in February of 2004 and I had sort of a gallows humor because no one thought I was had any chance of winning and my goal was really just to get one justice on our side to tell our side of the story but I really didn't have any expectations beyond that but by the time I got up to speak I was the last speaker first austria's lawyer and then the US government lawyer spoke I felt the justices were at least entertaining our side of the issue and so I got up to speak and I said there are four grounds for affirming the Ninth Circuit ground one is and as soon as I finished the first sentence I got interrupted by justice Souter in the film it's justice Rehnquist but it was really just a suitor who very smart very smart justice he's since retired but he had this heavy New England drawl it was a little hard to understand and and to me the question sounded like da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da like that and and I had I I had no idea what he had just asked me and and unfortunately there's a tape of this you can go online and hear it but I I said um I'm sorry Your Honor I didn't understand the question and you can hear the gasps in the audience behind me but all the other justices smiled as if to say oh he does that all the time we didn't understand it either it was it was this incredible ice breaking moment because they realized I was who was I I was just a kid from Los Angeles representing my grandmother's friend trying to convince the US Supreme Court that we should be able to sue Austria to recover paintings that had never left Vienna right so I it was a crazy situation and and so he rephrased he was very nice he replaced the question I answered as best I could and moved on and the rest of the argument went like a dream really I just I floated out of the courtroom I was so happy and my father who was a retired judge for the first time he said you know I think you might have a chance and and we were just so ecstatic and I returned home and I opened up the daily journal which is our legal legal newspaper for for Southern California for Los Angeles and the headline was court likely to reverse Altman suit it was all about how we were going to lose a full page about all the arguments and and so I called up the reporter this guy Dave Pike and and I said you know you could have at least said Randy does a good job but court likely to reverse right because no one saw what had happened it was so terrific and he's not trust me I've been reporting for 34 years of the Supreme Court I can tell by the body language you don't stand a chance so it's okay everybody thinks that anyway I said do me a favor when the court announces the decision they don't tell the lawyers in advance they just announced one day later in the term and I said you'll be there first can you give me a call here's my home number you can call me so sure enough three months later I'm making breakfast for the kids right and and there's this call and it's this journalist Dave Pike and I said okay give me the bad news and he said no not bad news you won right and I just I dropped the phone I can't even remember what what else happened I was so excited I got dressed and and raced over to Maria's house and her kids came over we hugged and celebrated and then we realized what did we win right nothing we won the right to start a lawsuit in Los Angeles and it was 2004 six years into this so we entered in what I lovingly call Discovery Hell which is where litigators like me we torture each other back and forth writing letters and interrogatories and making our lives miserable and we did that for about a year and a half and then we had to do a court-ordered mediation now up to this point Austria had refused every request I made to sit down and discuss a resolution of the case they wouldn't even talk to us and so when we had to do a mediation I said I'm not going to waste my time you bring a mediator you tell us where it will show up we'll get it over with and be done with it because tired of this so we brought Maria to the the other attorney's office in Austria a mediator from from Austria professor from Austria and very quickly he sat us down and he said I sense from both sides you want this over with so of course we did I think each side had a different idea of what over with meant and and he said well I have an idea why don't we have an arbitration in Austria you pick one arbitrator they pick the other those two pick a third and have it decided in Austria and I thought wow they finally came around it's only been seven years since I proposed that and I was I was very excited and I pulled Maria aside I say isn't this great we can have this arbitration and she said are you crazy why would I want my case to go back to Austria the district court judges love us the Ninth Circuit loves us even six out of nine Supreme Court justices love us why would I want to do this and I said Maria you're 89 years old this case has a lot of procedural hurdles still to get over they could drag it out for another four or five years it could go back up to the US Supreme Court even if we win in the United States Austria would not have to comply with the US judgement we don't actually have a treaty with Austria on enforcement of judgments as crazy as that is I said Maria I think we need to take this chance and fortunately she trusted me and allowed me to do it and I went back to Austria and argued the case it was mostly in German I had a translator there but I could I could do most of it in German and and of course there are no live witnesses to the will of a daily bloch-bauer from 19 23 or 25 so it was all about the documents and and reading things that were hard to read and some of the legal issues and and we submitted the case it's not like in the in the film for those of you seen it it's sort of immediate gratification but but the filmmakers I think nicely decided not to have everybody wait for five months in the theater for the decision the reality was that that it was about five months later I I was returning home from a from a Sunday night poker game where I'd lost a little money and feeling dejected and I checked my blackberry after midnight and there was the decision of the arbitrator's and of course you can't read anything on a black very so I had to go to my computer open up the decision and it's in German and the verb is like on page 5 and but it took me a while and I realized we won we won all three arbitrators agreed with the position we had taken from the very beginning which was that Maria's aunt died and made these requests to her husband which were not binding the paintings were owned by him he died in exile after the paintings were confiscated and left his estate to his heirs and not the museum and so the only reason that the paintings were in the museum was that dr. Rina SH the the family's attorney gave up these paintings to get export permits for other paintings and get them out of the country which was exactly what this law was designed to reverse so these paintings were essentially donated in exchange for export permits they did not agree with the Austrian position on a day Liz will and so we won and then we really did celebrate because it was a huge event I have some pictures here from the Supreme Court and then following the decision of the arbitrator's we we took the paintings out it's different than in the film Austria actually required that we agree to a whole long procedure that could have taken several months where they could have purchased the paintings but very quickly they abandoned that Austrian said they didn't want to purchase the paintings and so we had to decide what to do with them and so I called up stephanie baron who's a curator at the LA County Museum of Art and I said Stephanie how'd you like to have a Klimt exhibit tomorrow right and she she said yes maybe not tomorrow but in a couple weeks and in about four weeks she put together an exhibit of these five magnificent paintings and for me that was really the greatest moment because we had Maria and these five paintings that were once in her family home in her uncle and aunts home all in one room just like they had been back in Vienna and she was there with her children and her grandchildren and her great grandchild at that time and her nieces and nephews and everybody came to be as a family with these paintings and that for me was was the moment of the whole case that I could have achieved that for Maria my grandmother's good friend so thank you very very much thank you and II very much for all you've done it really did a marvelous job it's just outstanding everybody appreciates it could you just fill us in on where the St Lauder family came into this whole thing and and maybe bring us up to date as to what happened with them there was a lot of money floating around here could you bring that up today - sure they actually fits with this slide that I thought I was putting on while you were speaking the the painting the gold portrait of a daily bloch-bauer was purchased by Ronald Lauder and with that he agreed to put it on permanent display at the NOI gallery in New York which is on 86th and 5th sort of near the the Met and the Jewish Museum up there in that area on the Upper East Side and I love this this juxtaposition here because you see these two statues here so these were listed on that inventory in Ferdinand's house as two statues by Georg Mina Georg Mina is a Belgian symbolist sculptor but they didn't have a photograph of the family didn't have a photograph and they were never recovered and after the gold portrait was returned the Austrians realized that these two statues they had in the Austrian gallery had had arrived at the Austrian gallery in 1942 and that they must be the same as the ones that Fernand bloch-bauer had lost because here they are in the first exhibit of the gold portrait in 1907 in Mannheim so they ended up returning these two sculptures to the family in 2007 and it was my idea I convinced the family to donate them then to the neue gallery so they could be reunited 100 years later with the gold portrait and that's where you'll see them today I was there last month to see them the the other paintings were auctioned off at Christie's it was at the time the largest or the most successful auction of all time was of course you couldn't know that in advance when you put so many paintings by one artist up for auction that Maria was not the only heir there were there were four other heirs the heirs of her brother and sister and and really none of them wanted or could afford to have one of these paintings in their home you can imagine a 90 year old woman living with with a painting like this in her home wouldn't necessarily be a safe thing and so they decided rather than wait for estate taxes to force them to sell that they would they would dispose of the property that way return the gold portrait to a museum setting by selling it to Ronald Lauder and allowing the other four to go back into private hands of people who live like Ferdinand bloch-bauer did with with perhaps too much money and and the and the love of beautiful art and so so four of the paintings are in private collections on the the other portrait of a Dayla the white portrait if we go back to that was just put on loan by whoever owns it who's apparently remodeling at the Museum of Modern Art so now if you go to New York you can see both portraits of a daily bloch-bauer and I I presume that over time the other landscapes will will come back into public view as well so I hope that answers your question thank you very much for coming tonight you

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 379,595

Keywords: Holocaust, looted art, Nazis, World War II, Adele Bloch-Bauer

Id: Kk5YNt6Q4Z8

Length: 58min 41sec (3521 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 03 2015