The avant-garde of the Austrian capital included the composer Arnold Schoenberg. (The lawyer who handled Altmann's case was E Randol Schoenberg, the composer's grandson. Ryan Reynolds portrays him in the film.)
He sent Altmann a cashmere sweater to see if Americans might like the fine, soft wool. Altmann took the sweater to a department store in Beverly Hills, which agreed to sell them. Other stores across the country followed suit, and Altmann eventually opened her own clothing boutique.
Altmann led a charmed childhood. Maria Viktoria Bloch-Bauer was born to Gustav Bloch-Bauer and Therese Bauer on February 18, 1916, in Vienna, Austria. Her wealthy Jewish family, including her uncle Ferdinand and aunt Adele, were close to the artists of the Vienna Secession movement, which Klimt helped establish in 1897.
The Altmanns then fled to America and ultimately settled in California.
The titular character in Woman in Gold is Adele Bloch-Bauer, whose husband, ...
She had just married opera singer Fritz Altmann and her uncle had given her Adele's diamond earrings and a necklace as a wedding present. But the Nazis stole them from her — the stunning necklace she wore on her wedding day was sent to Nazi leader Hermann Göring as a present for his wife.
For many years, Altmann had assumed that the Austrian National Gallery had taken possession of the Klimt paintings. But when she was 82, she learned from the tenacious Austrian investigative journalist Hubertus Czernin that the title to the paintings was hers, and she vowed to get them back. In 1999 she and her lawyer tried to sue the Austrian government. It had kept the paintings based on Adele’s will in which she made a “kind request,” that Ferdinand donate the paintings to the state museum after his death, which took place in 1945.
In 2006 Maria Altmann, who has died aged 94, won possession of five paintings by Gustav Klimt that had been seized by the Nazis in 1938.
As Klimt's lover, Gustav Mahler's wife , Alma, put it at least as impoliticly: "Klimt's pictures, which had started off in a grand manner, he covered with tinsel rubbish, and his artistic vision sank in gold mosaics and ornaments.".
The four other works were sold at auction at Christie's and disappeared into private collections. Altmann had begun her fight at the age of 82, when she learned from the tenacious Austrian investigative journalist Hubertus Czernin that he believed the title to the paintings to be hers.
It reaches everywhere: the National Gallery in London has a long list of questionable provenances, including the famous panel by Lucas Cranach, Cupid Complaining to Venus, which during the second world war was in Hitler's personal collection. But nothing had been as spectacular as the Altmann case.
Altmann's quiet life ended abruptly in 1998, when Czernin announced his discovery. The case was fought against the background of the ongoing international movement to seek reparations for the Nazi plunder of art, which consists initially of listing all works with a provenance that ends abruptly between 1933 and 1945.
All those years later, the lawyer who handled Altmann's case was E Randol Schoenberg, the composer's grandson. Altmann was not old enough at the time to remember Klimt's visits.
Maria Altmann in 2005 with the recovered Klimt painting of her aunt Adele. It fetched £73m in 2006, a world record at the time. Photograph: Ann Johansson/Corbis. In 2006 Maria Altmann, who has died aged 94, won possession of five paintings by Gustav Klimt that had been seized by the Nazis in 1938. Soon afterwards, she sold the most famous ...
The painting went on public view for the first time since the auction when Winfrey loaned it to New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in September 2014.
The work was sold by the subject’s heirs, after they won a drawn-out legal battle with the Austrian state museum over five Klimt canvases seized by the Nazis from Bloch-Bauer’s husband during World War II. Recommended Reading.
Oprah Winfrey made a pretty penny selling Gustav Klimt ‘s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II (1912) for $150 million in 2016, reports Katya Kazakina for Bloomberg. The buyer is allegedly an unidentified Chinese collector, who pulled the trigger on the purchase over the summer.
The canvas, priced at $170 million, also went to an Asian buyer. Recommended Reading.