The Lady in Gold (46 page)

Now the paintings would be lost by Austria. When the Bloch-Bauers recovered the “donated” Klimt drawings from Austria and sold some, “it broke my heart,” Strobl said. “It was only a matter of money for the family.”

Austrian state art administrators insisted Adele would not be happy.

“It was so clear what she wanted,” the intense young
Stephan Koja, the
Austrian Gallery Klimt expert, would lament later, at the museum café. “She did not want those paintings to go to her niece. She wanted them to go to the Belvedere Museum.”

But to keep them, Austria would have to pay. When the case began, the paintings had been valued at $150 million. But that was before the panel ruled they did not belong to Austria.

Now
Wolfgang Schüssel, the Austrian chancellor, was saying the government “will not continue to negotiate, because we don't think it will be possible to pay $300 million out of the government budget.”

A well-connected group had taken out a full-page ad in
Die Presse
that week for a proposal to raise money to acquire the two portraits of Adele. Backers included architect
Hans Hollein,
Christian Mayer, the head of the Schoenberg Center, and the Belvedere's
Gerbert Frodl.

“
Basically, the government has been spoiling the whole thing,”
John Sailer, a leader of the movement, would say months later, when it was clear the effort would fail. Sailer, the owner of the Ulysses Gallery, loved his country. He lived high above the Ringstrasse in a light-filled atelier where his modern art collection competed with rooftop views of St. Stephen's Cathedral.

Sailer had lived his country's bittersweet history. He was four months old when Hitler marched into Vienna. His Jewish mother and Social
Democratic father were on a train at the time, and they fled without him. A woman smuggled him out eight months later by pretending he was her own son. Another mother in their circle stayed behind to pack the apartment, and her family never saw her again. Another large family was led away by the
Gestapo, but as they walked down the spiral staircase, a non-Jewish neighbor pulled their littlest boy into their apartment; he was the only one to survive. Sailer's father testified against Nazi war criminals.

Sailer never tried to recover his family's confiscated home. He got on with his life. He was hired to help redesign the Belvedere in the 1960s. There, a guard whispered the way to the mysterious hidden concrete bunker. People told him it had been designed to be the last SS command station in Vienna. Sailer helped transform it into an art storage depot.

“
My gut feeling is that there is some vague sentiment that ‘If the rich Jews want to take away the paintings, let them. We're not going to give them any money,' ” Sailer would say, when the effort failed. “It was, ‘There are the rich Jews in America, taking over our paintings.' Or ‘Adele was a Jew, so why do we want to keep her? Why don't we send her off?' ”

Yet as long as the Klimts were in Austria, there was hope.

“
Maybe you can change [Randol's] mind,” said
Elisabeth Sturm-Bednarczyk, a fashionably thin, well-groomed businesswoman, as she sipped pungent black coffee at her art and antiques store on the Dorotheegasse. Elisabeth, an old friend of Maria's sister Luise, was the dealer for Ferdinand's porcelain, and she had informally advised Austria in the negotiations.

Change his mind? Once Randol made a decision, you couldn't change his mind if you put a gun to his head.

“He's demanding such a high price that the government felt they were being mocked,” she said. “Randol said, ‘Oh, you have to offer a price.' But we can't offer a price, really.

“Perhaps you can also help. The situation is horrible,” Elisabeth continued. “Austria didn't give them back, all those years, not for anti-Semitic reasons. The impression that Austria is anti-Semitic is mistaken. It was really a misunderstanding. People say, ‘Oh, they were stealing them.'
Gerbert Frodl, the director of the Belvedere, felt they really belonged to Austria. Frodl is a very good friend of mine, of many years.”

Elisabeth sighed. “It is said an Arab wants to buy them. They will not know how they can be preserved. If they don't take care the paintings will be ruined in thirty years' time,” she said, with a pained expression.

“It's extremely important that the paintings stay in the Belvedere,” Elisabeth said. “Otherwise the Bloch-Bauer name will be forgotten in Austria, and all that it meant. It was a time when Vienna had not just cultural influence, but with Freud, the subconscious itself was being analyzed, and the origin of all of this was Vienna.”

The gold portrait of Adele, she said, “stands here like a symbol of time, painted by the most well-known painter of Austria. Everything becomes one in this painting. The time, the social standing of the Bloch-Bauer family, all that was made possible by the Jewish haute bourgeoisie. This was a very special time, and Adele played a great role here. If you don't have a symbol to remind you, everyone forgets.

“Everyone says, what is the most famous work of Klimt?
The Kiss
and the
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer.
The portrait is a symbol of the history of the nation. This is the prestige of Vienna.”

Elisabeth sipped her thick black coffee. “The family is very divided, and now Maria has the say in everything,” she said. “I think Randol put her up to this. The Canadian family isn't happy about this. They've gotten a lawyer. Nelly wanted these paintings to stay in Austria.

“There is very important family history behind these paintings,” Elisabeth continued. “As Luise always said, it must have been a big love affair. A grand passion. But it was taboo to speak about it. Those were her words. And I'm sure that's why Adele wanted the museum to have it, so they are connected. So what they didn't have in their lifetime was always in the viewers' minds. So they always saw her and Klimt together, forever.”

Elisabeth walked me to the door. “There's still a chance,” she said. “Perhaps these paintings can still be saved.”

Elisabeth opened the door. It was bitter cold outside. “Where will all this restitution end?” she said exasperatedly. “Are we going to go back to Napoleon?”

I stepped out of her shop, which was just down the block from the Dorotheum, the five-hundred-year-old auction house where the possessions of Jews had been auctioned off. The Dorotheegasse was the marketplace of the treasures that make museums of Vienna apartments: antique guns, jeweled golden swords, portraits of long-dead ancestors, and tiny porcelain statues of demure ladies with parasols. It was difficult to imagine how all this bric-a-brac survived
World War II, much less Napoleon.

I walked across the cobblestones to the Jewish museum to see an exhibit on
Erich Zeisl, Randol's grandfather. Randol was off in a concert hall, listening to a symphony record a recital of Zeisl's
Requiem Hebraico,
the composer's homage to his murdered father and the many who shared his fate.

The Klimts did leave Austria. A few days later, they were carefully crated. False itineraries were circulated by e-mail, to throw off would-be thieves. The gold portrait of Adele left the Belvedere on a chilly morning before dawn, to avoid protesters. It was loaded on an unmarked truck. Adele would fly along the wintry Danube and over the Salzkammergut, with its snowy mountain peaks. The painting would climb higher, over the Alps, to the grand Duchy of Luxembourg and, finally, Los Angeles.

Ciao Adele!

As the five Klimt paintings drew record-breaking crowds at a hastily arranged special exhibit at the
Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), potential buyers intensified their courtship, hoping to close a deal.

Developer turned billionaire philanthropist
Eli Broad was leading a bid by LACMA donors to acquire all five paintings for $150 million, the art writer Tyler Green reported in
Fortune
magazine. “
It was a very significant offer,” a LACMA curator said. “Our goal was to keep them all together.”

But valuations seemed to rise by the day, as the LACMA show told the world the saga of loss and redemption. One afternoon Maria sat on her burnt-orange sofa, looking over monographs on the paintings sent by Christie's and Sotheby's. “
The most significant event in the art world since the World War itself,” Maria read aloud. “Shameless,” she said, shaking her head, with an amused smile.

There was truth to the flattery. Restitution was putting on sale artistic masterpieces that otherwise would have been locked up as tight as
Mona Lisa
in the Louvre. The belated correction of Nazi dirty deals was spilling into a voracious art market willing to pay $100 million for a silly diamond-encrusted skull by
Damien Hirst.

These paintings were legends. They had a history. Hungry auction houses saw it coming.

Ron Lauder had coveted the gold portrait of Adele for years. Now he needed it. He needed a destination painting, a reason for people to go to the Neue Galerie.

One morning, as I sat in her kitchen, Maria looked at her watch. “
Oh my darling, I have to go to the hairdresser,” she said. “I'm seeing Ron Lauder. We're going to the Peninsula.” Lauder was also meeting with
Steve Thomas, the art law specialist representing the heirs of the Klimts.

In Vienna, the catalyst for this drama,
Hubertus Czernin was failing.

“
I've lost so much weight,” he mused. “People say that I already look like Death.” He chuckled, as if in sad wonder at the progressing evidence of his own mortality. His body ached so much he felt he no longer fit in it. He took so much morphine he was useless after 1 p.m. His physical decline felt surreal. “I keep feeling as if someday I'll wake up, and this will all turn out to be a strange dream,” Czernin said. “But now I'm sleeping twenty hours a day. When I wake up, it's still here.”

When his wife, Valerie, came home from her errands, Hubertus called her to his bedside to describe everything he could no longer see: the streetcars, the blooming chestnut trees, the children playing outside by the fountain in the square where Tamino played Mozart's magic flute, his Pamina wrapped around him. Hubertus imagined it all: life.

On the eve of a dinner in his honor, Hubertus closed his eyes and let go. Austria had lost another fragile, eloquent troublemaker.

A week later, Lauder announced that he had bought the gold portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer for a record $135 million. It was a sum greater than that year's funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. Klimt, once branded as a pornographer, then dismissed as too decorative, was now the creator of the world's most expensive painting.

The LACMA effort to buy the rest of the paintings had collapsed. “
It became clear that they were looking to get the greatest number of dollars they could,”
Eli Broad told
Fortune.

“
It's pretty hard to be resolutely philanthropic with a large group of
people when there's that much money on the table,” the LACMA curator said of the five heirs.

Nelly had agreed to the sale of the gold portrait of Adele, but she still had mixed feelings. She told Maria that taking Adele out of Vienna was like taking
David
out of Florence, or the
Mona Lisa
out of Paris. She argued that both portraits of Adele should hang in a museum, together.

Days before the gold portrait was to be delivered to the Neue Galerie in New York, Nelly balked at paying Randol his 40 percent contingency fee.

Randol filed a $40 million lawsuit against Nelly in U.S. Court of the Central District of California in Los Angeles for refusing to compensate him for his investment of eight years in a highly speculative endeavor that had resulted in the “most successful Nazi-looted art recovery litigation in the history of the United States,” according to his court filing.

Randol accused Nelly of unjust enrichment, saying she planned to collect a 25 percent share that could total more than $86 million from the sale of the Klimts—which Randol valued at more than $300 million—without paying his fee.

The other heirs—Maria Altmann and Nelly's brother Francis Gutmann, who would also get 25 percent, and George Bentley and
Trevor Mantle, who would split the remaining 25 percent—were paying his fee, Randol said.

But Nelly, he argued, was refusing to compensate his “hard work and efforts” in “extremely high-risk” litigation that was now going to put money in her pocket.

He said Nelly's attorney, Bill Berardino, had said that since Nelly did not sign the 40 percent contingency fee agreement, she was not bound by it, yet she was prepared to pay a “fair fee.”

Nevertheless, “Auersperg has refused to pay a fair fee, or any fee,” Randol charged.

Nelly caved. She agreed to pay Randol in full.

“
I refused to pay because he was not my lawyer. My lawyer advised me to pay,” Nelly would say later, offering no further explanation.

Steve Thomas, the lawyer for the sale, said that “
the misunderstanding was resolved amicably between them outside any courtroom and put behind them, and they quickly moved on.”

Adele
was on the move again.
The gold portrait was carefully packed in a crate that was bolted to an eighteen-wheel truck. A special high-security
team drove for three days and three nights from Los Angeles, updating its position and stopping only to refuel. East Eighty-sixth Street was sealed off by a special police cordon.
Ron Lauder was anxiously pacing the pavement when the rig pulled in at midnight July 5.

“
In many ways, this is what I believe Adele Bloch-Bauer wanted for herself, had she lived to see this,” Lauder said at the unveiling of the painting at the Neue Galerie a week later.

Nelly sat in the audience. Randol's lawsuit had been formally dismissed just the day before.

Now she silently watched as Lauder introduced Adele, a woman “who believed in the value of art.