Five Klimts and a Decade of Argument

The Background

Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer was a Bohemian sugar industrialist and an early patron of Gustav Klimt. Between 1903 and 1912, Klimt painted Ferdinand's wife Adele twice — the first portrait becoming the gilded icon now known to millions. The family also owned three Klimt landscapes. After the Anschluss in March 1938, Ferdinand fled Vienna; Adele had died in 1925. The paintings were seized by the Nazi state, and Ferdinand's property — including the Klimts — was effectively transferred through a combination of forced sale, tax expropriation and outright confiscation. Ferdinand died in exile in 1945, leaving his estate to his niece, Maria Altmann, who had escaped to the United States.

The five paintings ended up in Austrian state hands. The two Adele portraits and the landscapes entered the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, where the gold portrait of Adele became, in the absence of any other obvious candidate, an unofficial national symbol. Austrian authorities for decades interpreted a clause in Adele's will — she had expressed a wish that the paintings go to the Belvedere — as constituting a legal bequest. Altmann and her lawyers argued that Adele could not bequeath what her husband owned, and that the will carried no legal force in any case once the property had been stolen.

The Legal Journey

Altmann began seeking restitution in the late 1990s, after Austria's 1998 Art Restitution Law opened federal collections to formal claims. The Austrian arbitration process moved slowly, and Altmann pursued the case simultaneously in US courts. In 2004, the United States Supreme Court ruled — in Republic of Austria v. Altmann — that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act did not bar her suit, allowing it to proceed in American federal court. Austria and Altmann subsequently agreed to submit the case to an Austrian arbitration panel rather than continue US litigation.

In January 2006, the three-member panel found in Altmann's favour on all five paintings. The arbitrators concluded that the original transfers had been the product of Nazi persecution and that no valid legal title had passed to the Austrian state. Austria returned the works.

What Was at Stake

The Austrian public debate was fierce. The gold portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I had hung in the Belvedere for decades; it appeared on postcards, calendars and in tourist literature as a stand-in for the city's cultural identity. Some argued that restitution would impoverish the national collection and that the public interest in access outweighed private claims. Others — and the arbitrators ultimately agreed — held that cultural prominence cannot legitimise the retention of stolen property.

Altmann sold Adele Bloch-Bauer I privately and the other four paintings at auction. Adele Bloch-Bauer I was acquired by the Neue Galerie in New York for a price reported at the time as the highest paid for a painting at auction or private sale. The landscapes were dispersed through the international art market.

What Remained

The case had consequences well beyond the five works. It accelerated provenance research across Austrian institutions, intensified pressure on museums throughout Europe and North America to examine wartime acquisition records, and gave concrete shape to what the 1998 restitution law had promised in principle. It also demonstrated something uncomfortable: that a painting can be genuinely beloved, genuinely central to a city's self-image, and genuinely stolen — and that none of those things cancels the others.

The Belvedere still holds major Klimts. What it no longer holds is the Adele — and the gap in the collection is, in its own way, part of the historical record.