The Lady in Gold (38 page)

Then he reported back to Robert, in Vancouver with the other Bloch-Bauer brothers, who had changed their surname to Bentley. Rinesch wrote jauntily:

As for the
Schloss Kammer,
Gustav Ucicky—now a Nazi-stained has-been whose wife had dumped him for an American soldier—“says he bought it in good faith and refuses to return it,” Rinesch wrote.

Many such wartime deals had been declared void, but Austrian officials didn't plan to do that in this case. Instead, they enlisted Rinesch to help get a signed promise from Ucicky to donate his stolen Klimt paintings to the Austrian Gallery upon his death.

The Austrians didn't try to get signed authorization for the Klimt swap from Robert in Vancouver, or from Maria
in Los Angeles, or from Luise, who was then trapped in Communist Yugoslavia. Instead, they cut a deal with Rinesch.

“I'm giving [Garzarolli] the authorization,” Rinesch wrote Robert, “to receive the last Klimt paintings.” With this agreement, the “museum is now very friendly to us,” and promises to hang plaques identifying the Klimts as a “donation” of Adele Bloch-Bauer, Rinesch wrote.

But the museum simply identified the gold portrait as
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I,
with no information on its provenance—just as another museum had hung the portrait of
Amalie Zuckerkandl, declining to mention that Amalie had died with her daughter in a concentration camp.

Other Vienna collectors struggled to get art returned. The Federal Monument
Office was notoriously quick to designate art as patrimony and refuse exit permits for it.

Erich Lederer tried in vain to get an exit visa for Klimt's
Beethoven Frieze.
Austrian officials were now determined to acquire the work that had once been rejected by officialdom.
They told Lederer he would have to pay for its storage, though the
Frieze
was sitting in the dank Altenburg Monastery, a puddle at its feet.
Otto Demus had personally banned the export of the
Frieze
in 1950, and dismissed as “out of the question” Lederer's offer to “donate” the rest of his art collection in Austria in exchange for the
Frieze
's export.
Austrian museums ended up extracting much of what was left of the Lederer collection anyway—a Bellini painting, a chance to buy a
Jacobello del Fiore triptych—including forty-seven drawings and watercolors by
Egon Schiele acquired by the Albertina in exchange for not standing in the way of the export permits of the Klimt portraits of Lederer's mother and sister.
Demus duplicitously assured Lederer that he found this “horse-trading” of art for export permits distasteful and embarrassing. Lederer was beside himself. His mother, Serena, and his sister Elisabeth were dead. His aunt Aranka and her daughter had been murdered. Now he found himself begging, piece by piece, to get his family's art back from the defeated country that stole it.

Judgment was clouded by divided loyalties. Veterans of the Nazi era still controlled the fates of paintings.

In 1960,
Fritz Novotny, who co-curated the 1943 Klimt exhibition for
Baldur von Schirach, became director of the Austrian Gallery, where catalogues cosmetically erased the Nazi-era provenance of both portraits of Adele Bloch-Bauer, saying the gold portrait was acquired in 1936 and the second portrait in 1928, thereby sidestepping any question of acquisition during the Third Reich.

In 1965,
Walter Frodl, a curator for Hitler's museum in Linz, was named president of the Federal Monument Office. He was now well positioned to block the return of art he had helped steal.

These Nazi-era holdovers would now decide whether to grant the exit permits that were the only way for exiles to regain their art.

Austria refused to give Emile Zuckerkandl an exit visa for his family's Klimt poppy field,
Mohnwiese,
which hung in the Zuckerkandls' sanatorium. Emile had tracked down the man who had it. The denial of the exit
permit noted that “
interest in Klimt's paintings is increasing, particularly among the Austrian public, who have a right to see the landscape of their native painter, Gustav Klimt.” The Austrian Gallery did offer to buy it, for 15,000 shillings, or about $576.

Emile was living in Paris. Someday he would be revered as a founder of the field of molecular biology. For now he was an impoverished student. His family was reeling from loss. His great-aunt
Amalie Redlich had been deported to Lodz. His cousin
Nora Stiasny had died at Belzec with her mother, Amalie Zuckerkandl. Her Klimt landscape, now hanging on
Gustav Ucicky's wall, would end up at the Austrian Gallery when Ucicky died.

Emile said he got a call in 1956 from the collector
Rudolf Leopold, who was strangely familiar with his problem.
Leopold wrote Emile a cheery letter, offering him a low 20,000 shillings, or about $770. Emile refused. Leopold wrote again, offering 30,000 shillings, or about $1,150. This time Emile accepted, though he could have gotten far more for the painting—if only he could get it out of the country. But he couldn't, and he needed the money. Within a year, his
Mohnwiese
was at the Belvedere, traded by Leopold for Schiele's
Cardinal and Nun,
and his
Two Crouching Women,
considered somewhat risqué for exhibition at the Belvedere.

Emile was suspicious and angry.

Some of the paperwork for the swap was signed by a familiar hand, the Austrian Gallery's
Fritz Novotny, the host of the 1943 Klimt exhibition that was a virtual showcase of stolen art.

The war was over. But the wartime theft was still enabling the Belvedere to consolidate its best Klimt collection ever.

In 1966, Maria's old friend Anton, now the Palo Alto, California, doctor Dr. Tony Felsovanyi, got a call from someone representing
Ursula Ucicky, the widow of Klimt's Nazi filmmaker son. The emissary offered to sell back to Felsovanyi the stolen Klimt portrait of his mother, for $11,000. He declined. The Austrians would never give him an exit permit, and there was no way he would ever move back to Vienna. The last time he visited, a priest had asked a reunion of Theresianum alumni to bow their heads for two classmates hanged as war criminals.

Fritz Novotny had moved the
Beethoven Frieze
to the former stables of Prince Eugene at the Belvedere Palace. The “substance of the artwork is jeopardized and in need of extensive restoration soon, in order to save it from further decay,” the Austrian chancellor,
Bruno Kreisky, wrote Erich
Lederer in 1970. Though “
the financial possibilities in our country are limited,” Kreisky wrote, “I would like to appeal to you as a member of a family that fostered the path of Austrian art into modernity.”
He offered Lederer 6 million schillings for the
Beethoven Frieze
. Erich showed little interest. They raised the price. Finally, in 1973, Lederer, then an old man with no more hopes of getting the deteriorating
Frieze
out, reluctantly accepted 15 million schillings, or about $750,000.

The Bloch-Bauer Klimts made their way into the Belvedere. Führer sold
Birch Forest
to the Vienna city museum in 1941, but Belvedere officials wrestled it away in 1948, invoking Adele's will.
Houses in Unterach on Lake Attersee
was taken by the Belvedere in the 1948 negotiation with Rinesch.
Schloss Kammer am Attersee,
donated by Ferdinand in 1936, returned to the Belvedere when Vicky died in 1961. The portrait of
Amalie Zuckerkandl, which once hung on Ferdinand's bedroom wall, would get to the Belvedere after the death of the art dealer who got it during the war.

Most elderly Jewish exiles who came to claim their art were dismissed by Austrian officials, who demanded that the exiles prove they owned the paintings. Many survivors had lost the proof when their homes were sacked, or had been assured that their families had “donated” the works. The officials had the truth locked away in secret files in closed archives. There was no point in advertising that the Austrian Gallery's Klimt collection had been raised to world-class stature by the “acquisition” of paintings stolen from its Jewish citizens during the war. Publicly, administrators who knew cynically papered over the histories of the paintings.

The paintings raised many questions. Austrians who knew the answers kept silent.

Then a new generation emerged, of Austrians who did not drink from the communal well of self-pity, denial, and deceit. Their questions provoked startled glances. Or glares.

An Austrian psychiatrist,
Rudiger Opelt, would call his generation the “Children of Tantalus,” after the son of Zeus who appalled the gods by inviting them to a banquet and serving the dismembered body of his son. Opelt lived in the village that gave the world the famous Christmas carol “Silent Night,” a picturesque hamlet where his neighbor was a grandson of
Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the former Nazi commissar of the Netherlands hanged at Nuremberg. Opelt believed secrecy and denial over the Nazi era was eating away at Austrian families and his entire society.

Opelt developed his observations firsthand.
When he was a student in the 1970s, his neurology professor was
Heinrich Gross, said to have directed the euthanasia of children and babies who had been the subject of experiments at a notorious clinic at Steinhof hospital. Some eight hundred deemed “unfit” by the Nazis—bed wetters, slow learners, children with harelips—died or were deported. Here children had brain surgery while still conscious, or were monitored while they froze to death. Attempts to prosecute Gross had been quashed since the 1950s.
Gross continued to use the brains of the euthanized children, sealed in jars of formaldehyde—a collection he called “unique in the world”—for research that won him the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art in 1975. The next year he attempted a follow-up exam on a survivor, who alerted the press. Opelt was appalled by the grisly revelations. It disturbed him that so many people kept Professor Gross's secrets. Some of these secret-keepers had been involved in the crimes. Others simply knew but were afraid of the greater questions they raised, of their own guilt as passive witnesses.

One of the heirs to this treacherous legacy was
Hubertus Czernin, a young Vienna aristocrat turned crusading journalist.

Hubertus was a romantic. Tall and thin, he had large brown eyes, the elegant fingers of an artist, and a dry Viennese wit. He was also a class traitor.

Hubertus Alexander Felix Franz Maria Czernin von und zu Chudenitz was a count of a thousand-year Bohemian lineage. History flowed through his family like the Danube. The old Czernin Palace housed the Prague Foreign Ministry. His great-uncle Ottokar was the Austrian foreign minister during
World War I. His uncle Jaromir sold Hitler a Vermeer,
The Art of Painting,
with a letter saying he hoped it “pleased the Führer”—which the family now claimed was done under duress.

Hubertus lived on the top floor of his grandfather's
palais
on the Mozartgasse.
The immense town house was a few minutes' walk from the Belvedere and the
Secession. The
palais
too had a star-crossed history.
Ludwig Wittgenstein's brother Konrad had lived there until his suicide in 1918, and
Richard Strauss moved in when he co-directed the
Vienna State Opera in 1919. Johann Strauss, Schubert, and Brahms once resided nearby.

The heavy wooden palace door opened onto the cobblestone Mozartplatz, with its bronze verdigris fountain of young Prince Tamino playing the “magic flute,” entwined with his beloved Pamina.

Mozart had opened
The Magic Flute
after his fall from grace, at a hall at the Freihaus, or free workers' housing, which once stood near Czernin's
palais
. Mozart died not long after. He was buried in a pauper's grave with strangers. It was an ignominious end for Amadeus, once so “beloved by God.”

Count
Hubertus Czernin, the intellectual and investigative journalist, who shocked Austria with the Nazi-era secrets of Austrian presidential candidate
Kurt Waldheim, 1999. (
Illustration Credit 60.1
)