Austrians in Los Angeles
Oh so close to Palms, in green furrowed Cheviot Hills, lives a woman named Maria Altmann. Recently, she won. And so have you. Gustav Klimpt, an important artist of Vienna's "jugendstil" school, painted a number of portraits of high society ladies of the era, many in his masterpiece "gold style" which incorperated the use of gold with Egyptian and Byzantine motifs. Many of these women were Jewish. Adele Bloch-Bauer was born into just such a priviledged family in Vienna in 1881, and married her husband, Ferdinand, a sugar magnate, there. He commissioned Gustav Klimpt to paint a portrait of his wife, and bought two, as well as three landscapes. Adele succumbed to menengitis in 1925, and from that time, her husband kept her room, with the portraits in it like a shrine -- clean as a whistle, and filled with flowers.
During the build up to World War II, the Bloch-Bauers, and the Altmanns (Maria was about 25 at the time) had all their assets "aryanized" (saw the word iin the process of researching this very article. Maria had a necklace from her aunt, given to her on her wedding day, taken from her. It ended up as a gift to Goebbels wife. Her husband was sent to Dachau, but returned when his brother signed over his company. Maria and her husband managed to escape to the US. Ferdinand escaped to Switzerland where he watched his company, his home, his paintings, disceminated among the Nazis. He often said that of all his possessions, he wished he had the portraits of his dear wife back again.
Skip forward several decades, to the legal battle between Maria Altmann and the Austrian Government was resolved in January. As it happens, Austria's contention that Adele had left them her paintings in her will was, at worst, false, and at best, misconstrued. However, Austria's loss is your gain, as the five paintings (which constitutes the largest Nazi looted art return in Austria's history) are now on display at LACMA through June 30th. They're the only ones on the west coast. Though the exhibit seems tucked into the corner of the museum, and the main gold painting is poorly lit (so that you can't see the changing gold without squatting) but they're Klimpts and they're here. Thank you, Maria Altmann, for sharing your bounty with us! And being broke is no excuse -- it's free after five every day!
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Boulevard.
posted by kuaptic. @ 8:05 AM
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