"Stealing Klimt"—the Austrians did it
"STEALING Klimt", a documentary film by a British director, Jane Chablani, has been winning admiring notices since it opened in Germany last week (British audiences had a chance to see it on BBC One in May). Paced like a thriller, it tells the story of Maria Altmann, born Maria Bloch to a rich Jewish family in Vienna in 1916, and her struggle in old age to recover five Gustav Klimt pictures stolen from her family by the Nazis in 1938. The pictures were claimed after the war by the Austrian government.
Ms Altmann had fled Austria before the Holocaust, and became an American citizen in 1945. She was alerted to the expropriation of her family’s paintings in 1998, and the fact that Austria had held them since the war, by the work of a journalist called Hubertus Czernin, who had also broken the story of Kurt Waldheim’s Nazi past. Randol Schoenberg, grandson of Arnold, agreed to act as Ms Altmann's lawyer, for no fee.
She was 90 when she finally got her paintings back, after a long legal battle, in 2006. Six months later she sold one of them, "Adele Bloch-Bauer I", a spectacular portrait of her aunt, to Ronald Lauder, an American businessman, for $135m, a new record price for a painting. (It can be seen now in the Neue Galerie in New York.)
Ms Altmann comes across as very much the hero of the film—your favourite great aunt with a razor-sharp memory and an iron will. Austria is the villain, trying to profit from Nazi loot while denying and effacing its complicity in Nazi crimes.
Austrian audiences will see the film at the Vienna film festival in mid-October. Perhaps wisely, nobody from the Austrian government was willing to put the country's side of the story on-camera to Ms Chablani.
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