FIFA Dispatch. 2.

There's something seductive about a movie that tells a story about stolen art - deliberately seductive, of course. The film that I saw at the International Festival of Films on Art in Montreal even had a happy ending.

The documentary is Klimt, or the Will of Adele (Klimt ou le Testament d'Adèle) by Michel Vuillermet (made for TV5 of France). It is less about Gustav Klimt than it is about the fight of a Jewish family to recover paintings by Klimt that the Nazis seized in the late 1930s and that Austrians kept in one of its most distinguished museums, the Belvedere Castle, until last year. After years in court, the paintings were returned to the family last year and sold for record prices at an auction at Christie's in New York. One of them, Portrait of Adele 1, brought $135 million privately, at that point the highest price known to have been paid for a single painting.

It's a complicated story. Adele Bloch-Bauer, a wealthy Jewish socialite in Vienna, was a patron of Gustav Klimt, who painted her portrait twice. He also sketched her many times in preparation for those paintings. Adele presided over a salon at her Vienna home where Klimt was a frequent visitor, and there are rumors that she was Klimt's lover. Before she died of meningitis in 1925, Adele, who was married to Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, wrote a letter stating that she wanted her paintings to go the Austrian Gallery, the country's national museum. It wasn't a will, just a wish. More than a decade later, things had changed for much worse.

The Nazis came to power in 1938, and most Viennese applauded when Jews were beaten in the streets and forced to pay extortionate taxes. The Jews' property was also Aryanized, or transferred to Aryans (gentiles). This happened to the Bloch-Bauer family, who were specially targeted by the Nazis for their wealth. Adele's husband Ferdinand fled to Prague, and then to Switzerland. Her niece, Maria Altmann, went to Holland, then to England, then to Los Angeles, where she lives today.

The paintings were seized, and turned up in the Belvedere Castle, a branch of the Austrian Gallery. When family members tried to recover them after the war, just as Austrians were creating a new identity as "victims" of the Nazis, the Bloch-Bauers were forced to donate works to the museum to get a few pictures back. Then they gave up trying. In the 1990s, when news emerged that Austria still held many paintings looted from Jews that were never returned, Maria Altmann considered trying again to recover her family's art treasures. She was encouraged after paintings on loan from Austria were seized while on loan to the Museum of Modern Art in 1997, and the MoMA scandal resulted in passage of an Austrian law intended to expedite the return of such looted work. (One of those paintings, Portrait of Wally by Egon Schiele, is the subject of a ten-year court battle in which MoMA has opposed efforts of a Jewish family to reclaim the work.) Through her lawyer, Randol Schoenberg, Altmann requested that her paintings at the Belvedere Castle be returned. She was rebuffed, and told that she could file a lawsuit. When she sued, the Austrian court required her to leave a certain percentage of the paintings' value in escrow, which amounted to millions of dollars.

Instead, Altmann and her lawyer decided to file suit in the United States, arguing that Austria did business there and had legal standing, even though the Nazi-looted paintings were in Vienna. The Austrian government and the US government opposed her, but the case went to the US Supreme Court, which ruled that the case could be heard in California. Austria insisted that the 1923 letter in which Adele had wished that the paintings would go the Austrian Gallery had the status of a will. Maria Altmann's lawyers argued that the letter did not constitute a will. After that, rather than go to court again in the US, Austria agreed to mediation in Austria, and an Austrian mediation board awarded the art to Mrs Altmann. No one expected such an outcome.

The family represented by Maria Altmann had more heirs than paintings. Naturally, the proposal arose that their needs might be met by selling the paintings. Last summer, the family sold Adele 1 to the collector and cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder for $135 million. A sale of the other Klimts brought $190 million. Critics sniped that the paintings should have been donated to museums, but it seemed that justice had been done - or had it?

For Maria Altmann and the other heirs of the Bloch-Bauer family, there was some justice and lots of money after almost 70 years. Yet valuable films like Klimt, or Adele's Will and others on the same topic tend to celebrate the victory of Mrs Altmann, without pointing to the other cases that remain unresolved. A longer documentary, Stealing Klimt, by Jane Chablani of the UK, which showed at the European Film Market of the Berlin International Film Festival, is more comprehensive than Klimt, or Adele's Will, yet it makes the same point - that the Nazis were responsible for the greatest thefts in history, as well as the bloodiest campaign of mass murder.

Another film making the rounds of festivals and film clubs, The Rape of Europa, by Richard Berge, Bonnie Cohen and Nicole Newnham, focuses on the work of American soldiers who rounded up looted art throughout the zone where Americans operated and saved much of what the Nazis pillaged. (The film is based on the important book of the same title, published in 1995, by Lynn Nicholas.)

But there's another case that's ripe for another film, either a documentary or a thriller by Oliver Stone. Back in 1997, a Jewish family whose art was looted by the Nazis spotted one of those paintings, Egon Schiele's Portrait of Wally, at the Museum of Modern Art, on loan from an Austrian government-funded foundation. For ten years, the family has tried to recover the picture, and the museum has dug in its heels, a surprising position in a city where the Holocaust is deplored every day. On one side of the dispute, there's the US Justice Department and the heirs of the Viennese Jewish family that owned the painting before World War II. On the other side are an Austrian government foundation and the Museum of Modern Art.

The case is in federal court and could come to trial this year. (In the interest of full disclosure, my contract with National Public Radio was terminated after I covered the case in late 2004, following complaints to NPR by MoMA that misrepresented the facts of the case. You can Google all about it. The story that brought down the wrath of MoMA, complete with a false "correction" posted by NPR, can be accessed here.)

The revelation that Portrait of Wally was stolen embarrassed Austria and led to an investigation which showed that many more works of art looted from Jews were on view in Austrian museums. MoMA has never seemed terribly embarrassed about borrowing the picture, and even less embarrassed about insisting that it go back to Austria, where the Jewish family will have a difficult time claiming it. The Schiele case raises troubling questions, since the Portrait of Wally is no less stolen than the paintings recovered by the heirs of Adele Bloch-Bauer. When the public reads about the case, which is rare, it tends to see the dispute in terms of right and wrong, and not as a threat to future art loans, which is the way it has been portrayed by MoMA and its allies among American museums. Why is MoMA digging in its heels in the face of so much evidence? Why has the same public which applauded the return of the Klimts to Maria Altmann ignored the Schiele case? Why has MoMA chosen to fight a war of attrition over the painting, rather than help resolve a Holocaust property crime? These are questions that the museum's director, Glenn Lowry, has tried to avoid for the past decade. (Check out Jed Perl's account of Lowry's reign there in the New Republic.)

Where is the documentary film on this subject?

Posted by dwhudson at March 26, 2007 1:22 AM