In 2006 Maria Altmann, who has died aged 94, won possession offive paintings by Gustav Klimt that had been seized by the Nazis in 1938. Soon afterwards, she sold the most famous of them, the portrait of her aunt Adele Bloch-Bauer dressed in gold against agolden background, to the Neue Galerie in Manhattan, New York, for $135m (£73m), a world record for apainting at that time. The four other works were sold at auction at Christie's and disappeared into private collections.
Altmann had begun her fight atthe age of 82, when she learned from the tenacious Austrian investigative journalist Hubertus Czernin that he believed the title to the paintings tobe hers. The Austrian courts proved prohibitively expensive, but she won permission to fight her case through the American courts. In 2004 her action reached the US supreme court, which ruled that she could sue the Austrians. Instead, her counsel settled for arbitration and in 2006 a panel of three Austrian judges ruled in her favour.
The five Klimt paintings were sold for a total of $330.7m (£180m). The works included another later and finer portrait of Adele. At 90 years of age, her victory over the obstinate Austrian government seemed to give Altmann more pleasure than either the paintings, which she had disposed of so quickly, or the fortune their sale had brought her. "It didn't have to come to this," she said, more insorrow than in anger.
Maria Viktoria Bloch-Bauer was born into a wealthy Jewish family inVienna. Her father, Gustav, and his wife, Therese, along with his brother Ferdinand and Ferdinand's wife, Adele, were close to the artists of the Vienna secession of which Klimt was a founder in 1897. The avant garde of the Austrian capital was a relatively tightly-knit group which included the composer Arnold Schoenberg. 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. She grew up visiting her uncle and aunt's grand house on Elisabethstrasse, filled with pictures, tapestries, elegant furniture and a collection of fine porcelain, all of which was appropriated by the Nazis, along with the family's sugar refinery, after they marched into Vienna.
In 1937 she married Fritz Altmann, an opera singer, and the couple lived in Berlin. They escaped to Liverpool via the Netherlands in 1938. In 1940 they moved to Los Angeles, where Fritz worked for the aircraft manufacturer Lockheed. His wife began selling cashmere sweaters from a shop in Beverly Hills, and was so successful that she turned it into a fashion shop and her husband joined her in the business. Fritz died in 1994. 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 aprovenance that ends abruptly between 1933 and 1945. 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.
It turned on the supposed wishes ofFerdinand and Adele. Before Adele died in 1925, she wrote a will requesting that her husband should bequeath their five Klimt paintings to the nation. After the annexation of Austria, Ferdinand rewrote his will, and in any case it is unimaginable that Adele would have held to her wishes in the face of the Holocaust. Yet the paintings hung in the Austrian Gallery at Belvedere palace, inVienna, with a placard inscribed: "Adele Bloch-Bauer 1907, bequeathed byAdele and Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer."
The supreme irony is that when Klimt painted his so-called golden portrait of Adele, his style had hardened into a crass ersatz modernism, so the price it fetched for Altmann makes it the most expensive postcard in the world. 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."
Altmann is survived by her sons, Charles, James and Peter, a daughter, Margie, six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
