Austria ordered to return 5 Klimt paintings
A court in Vienna has ordered Austria to return five paintings by Gustav Klimt to the heirs of a Jewish family who fled Austria under the Nazis.
The paintings by the Art Nouveau master are valued at more than 100 million euros ($140 million).
The paintings include one of the most reproduced pictures of all time, a gold-leaf-clad portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, wife of Jewish Czech sugar magnate Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer.
Lawyers for the Austrian government have fought since 1998 to retain the rights to the four paintings. The other paintings are a lesser-known Bloch-Bauer portrait, as well as Apfelbaum (Apple Tree), Buchenwald/Birkenwald (Beech Forest/Birch Forest) and Haeuser in Unterach am Attersee (Houses in Unterach on Attersee Lake).
Maria Altmann, 89, the California woman claiming the paintings, is the niece of Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer.
She says the family was forced to give up the paintings when Germany annexed Austria in 1938. Adele was already dead, but her husband fled to Switzerland where he died in 1945.
Austria had claimed that when Adele died in 1925, she left a will requesting her husband leave the artwork to the Austrian Gallery upon his death. Bloch-Bauer's family agreed in 1946 that the paintings belonged to the Austrian government, based on his wife's will.
The paintings have been in the Belvedere Gallery in Vienna since the end of the Second World War.
Altmann, who fled to California to escape the Nazis and is Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer's sole surviving heir, claimed the family was extorted into signing away its rights to the paintings and had been lied to by the Austrian government.
After years of legal wrangling, both parties agreed to abide by the arbitration court's ruling.
"The ruling means that [culture] minister Gehrer, or rather the Republic of Austria, have to return the paintings," Altmann's Austrian lawyer Stefan Gulner told Reuters. "This is a final and binding ruling."
The case stems from a 1998 law passed in Austria that required federal museums to review their holdings to see if they included works seized by the Nazis and to find out whether the works were obtained by the museums without remuneration.
Klimt, who lived 1862-1918, is an Austrian icon. He was founder of the Vienna Secession art movement that created a central European version of Art Nouveau. Klimt work of the calibre of the Bloch-Bauer paintings is considered a national treasure in Austria.