Heirs Still Seeking the Sixth Bloch-Bauer Klimt

Gustav Klimt, "Portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl," 1918 (unfinished)

In 2006, the Bloch-Bauer heirs famously received five Klimts (including the celebrated "Adele Bloch-Bauer I") that were restituted by Austria in response to their claim that they paintings were wrongfully expropriated during the Nazi era.

But the heirs were actually seeking six.

The same lawyer who improbably succeeded in winning back the other five, E. Randol Schoenberg, is still working doggedly on behalf of the heirs to reclaim "Portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl" (above). He told CultureGrrl that he is expecting within days a decision by the Austrian Supreme Court on whether it will hear an appeal to set aside the unfavorable 2006 arbitration decision on returning Amalie, which was rendered by the same panel granting the return of the other five.

Schoenberg recounted:

It ["Amalie"] has a separate legal history, because it is not mentioned in Adele's will and it was not recovered after the war. The decision by the arbitrators in this case was a travesty. I think [?!?] they were upset that Maria [Altmann] and the other heirs decided to take the other paintings out of Austria. Also, the family of the the woman in the painting, Amalie Zuckerkandl, who was murdered by the Nazis, also sought recovery and that muddied the water and allowed the arbitrators to claim confusion. But the painting was owned in 1938 by Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer and must be returned to his heirs.

Nonetheless, Schoenberg is a realist:

I don't expect that we will win.

Randy, did you expect you would win the others?

In other Austrian restitution news: That country's culture minister, Claudia Schmied, announced last week that she intends to push for an independent examination, by two researchers paid by the Austrian government, of the Nazi-era history of the Rudolf Leopold Collection (of "Portrait of Wally" fame).

And the April issue of ARTnews magazine includes a detailed (unlinked) article by William Cohan, questioning whether the Leopold Collection's "Dead City III" by Schiele should have been sent back to Austria from New York. Like that artist's "Wally," which is still stuck in legal limbo here, it had initially been withheld from return to Austria after a 1997 show at the Museum of Modern Art, but was soon sent back, in light of a different set of historical circumstances.