VIENNA: They are some of the most famous paintings in the world - and they have just made legal history. The US Supreme Court has taken the surprise step of allowing a woman to sue the Austrian government for the return of six paintings by Gustav Klimt that were stolen by the Nazis.
One of the paintings is a portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, commissioned by her husband, the Jewish businessman Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, in 1907. The painting - the oval face of a woman with a crown of black hair emerging from a sweep of gold - has become an Austrian icon and would, experts say, be one of the most valuable works of art in the world if it were ever sold.
The Austrian government says it is the rightful owner because in her 1925 will Adele Bloch-Bauer asked her husband to leave their Klimts to the Austrian national gallery upon his death.
"The will of Adele Bloch-Bauer has the force of a legacy," Gottfried Toman, the solicitor general arguing the case for Austria, told The Observer. But Hubertus Czernin, a journalist who has written a book on the case,says Bloch-Bauer's expression of a desire is not legally binding.
"There is no doubt Ferdinand would have carried out the wishes of his wife and given the paintings to the national gallery if it had not been for what happened subsequently," Czernin told The Observer.
"But he changed his mind, and he had every legal right to do." In 1938, Bloch-Bauer fled Vienna following the annexation of the country. The Nazis seized his possessions, including the six Klimts now hanging in the national gallery in Belvedere Palace, Vienna. When he died penniless in Switzerland in 1945, he left the paintings to his niece, Maria Altmann.
Altmann, 88, who fled the Holocaust for California in 1942, has spent six years fighting for the right to file a suit in California's federal court to have the paintings returned.
Her lawyer, Randolf Schoenberg, told The Observer that one of Austria's most respected legal scholars, Professor Rudolf Welser, chairman of the Institute of Civil Law at Vienna University, had also concluded that the request of Adele Bloch-Bauer did not have the force of law. -Dawn/The Observer News Service.
