The Lady in Gold (47 page)

“Klimt realized this was a very, very special woman and you can see how beautiful she looks, surrounded by gold,” said Lauder. “This is a painting of an obviously very emotional feeling toward Adele Bloch-Bauer.”

Lauder recalled his awe when he first saw the painting as a teenager. “It's not just a portrait,” he said. “It captures all the emotions, all of the spirit that was embodied in turn-of-the-century Vienna. It represents everything that was Vienna at that time. You cannot find a more important piece of Austrian art than this painting.”

Now it had the cachet of history.

Adele Bloch-Bauer
was “one of the last prisoners of
World War II,” Lauder said. “$135 million? You can't put a value on great works of art. This painting is priceless.”

When the press had gone, Nelly studied the gold portrait, hung as
Adele Bloch-Bauer I.

At the Belvedere,
Adele
had been one of many. Here
Adele
dominated the room, the entire museum.

To see all the paintings on public view was Nelly's wish. As the auction loomed, there was no guarantee.

Nelly said she and Maria called Steve Thomas to suggest that they donate the second portrait of Adele to Ron Lauder, and ask Lauder to pay Randol only what he might lose from his 40 percent fee on the proceeds of the sale of the painting. The proposal went nowhere.

Nelly said she sent a message to the rest of the heirs about the possibility of an auction in which only museum directors would bid, keeping the paintings affordable enough for an acquisition and ensuring they would remain in public view. She said she got no reply. (The other heirs declined
to comment, or said they had no recollection of this. Thomas said all decisions on the painting were made unanimously.)

Nelly said her only remaining option was to stridently oppose the other heirs, and she was not prepared for an unpleasant family fracas.

Nelly mulled this over in Canada, at a house perched above Vancouver Bay, with a sweeping view of mountains, tidal pools, and seabirds.

A tiny woman, Nelly was as watchful and wary as a deer—yet also direct. “I don't like the inference that my mother was raped,” she said bluntly, five minutes after we met. “We were saved from Auschwitz by a Croatian friend of hers. I still have the egg warmers she knitted.”

Her husband, Prince Johannes (John) Weikhart Auersperg, had the elegant, dark good looks of a much younger man. He was describing the Auersperg family dynasty, which traced its roots to the eleventh-century Knights of Auersperg, of the Turjak castle of Slovenia. His maternal great-grandfather,
General Eduard Clam-Gallas, served with the legendary
Field Marshal Josef Radetzky, immortalized in the elder Johann Strauss's
Radetzky March.
His maternal grandfather,
Franz Clam-Gallas, was a member of the entourage of Empress Elisabeth in England. The prince was describing the Czech family castle he visited as a child, a turreted twelfth-century marvel called Friedland—a magical castle where Goethe wrote legends and Schiller wrote poetry, and where Beethoven carried on with a Clam-Gallas belle.

The prince was dwelling on the past, the romantic distant past his generation loved to live in. Not the recent past they hated to even visit.

The
Friedland Castle was in Germanic Czech Sudetenland, where Hitler had enjoyed his greatest support in all of the Reich—especially among some Germanic nobles whose Czech estates diminished by the land reform of Ferdinand's friend, President Masaryk. The Auersperg name also appears among the nobles who joined the Nazi Party in the wartime membership files in Berlin.

John came of age nearby in tiny Haindorf on the Polish border, a
thirteenth-century pilgrimage site with an onion-domed basilica, where some members of his generation recalled Hitler Youth as a kind of summer camp, hiking in the mountains and learning to sing harmony. He was fifteen when his family was expelled from Czechoslovakia at the end of the war with the rest of the Sudeten Germans. The family was reportedly declared “
enemies of the people” by the new Communist local authorities.

He left on foot.

John didn't mention this era at all.

Here in this idyllic setting, relatives joked, Nelly and Prince Auersperg had created a studiously serene, picture-perfect life “
inside the golden frame,” a peaceful vision that shut out disturbing memories of the past.

Nelly was soft-spoken and articulate, with the intellectual range of a well-read woman with a classical education. She was discussing the evolution of gender roles and suggesting that the sexualized Klimt portrayals of women could be viewed as disrespectfully one-dimensional.

“
I have a feeling Klimt was interested in Adele because she was a very fascinating person,” Nelly was saying, as she opened a collection of family letters and photographs. “I see Adele as a very serious woman, trapped in wealth.”

“
She was a drawing-room socialist, and bothered by her wealth,” John remarked impassively.

“
I would prefer Adele's portrait to be somewhere in the Belvedere,” Nelly said vehemently. “To this day I don't know if we should have gotten the paintings. I couldn't make up my mind who is right. I didn't like Randy's way of going after it. He didn't seem to care about my opinion.”

“
He's going to make ninety-six million dollars,” John interjected blandly. “If Randol gets ninety-six million dollars, over eight years he was paid one million dollars a month.” He raised his eyebrows. “He took a huge chance. Still—a forty percent fee.”

John believed the Klimt paintings belonged in Austria. He held up the letter from
Gustav Rinesch, written just after the war to Maria's brother Robert. “ ‘
My ski holiday was wonderful,' ” John read from Rinesch's jaunty introduction. “ ‘According to Adele's
will of 1923, she left the paintings to the Austrian Galerie,' ” he read. “ ‘I have given them a declaration that the heirs of Bloch-Bauer will fulfill her wish—' ”

“
Luise loved Klimt paintings,” Nelly said. “If you ask, ‘Did she agree?' I don't know. Luise always said, ‘I wish Adele had deeded the other paintings, and not the Klimts. My mother hated the Biedermeiers, and sold them all.”

The Biedermeiers were campy pastorals of bosomy maidens and men in lederhosen. Hitler viewed them as exemplary “Germanic” culture.

“The fact that Luise said ‘Adele gave the Klimts' shows she agreed,” the prince said.

“ ‘I'm giving [Garzarolli] the authorization,' ” John read, “ ‘to receive the last Klimt paintings, and instructions to please go and retrieve them . . .' ”

John looked up. “With this, one cannot say it is looted!” he said adamantly.

“ ‘There will be plaques—' ” he read from the letter.

“No! There were no plaques!” Nelly broke in hotly. “People were very upset!”

Nelly sighed and shook her head. “I never knew what was in Rinesch's mind when he wrote this letter,” she said. “The story was, he was trying to soften up the authorities. But I didn't feel, with all this, I could sue.”

“
It was tit for tat,” her husband said.

But wasn't this “tit for tat”—the quid pro quo deal of granting export permits for minor paintings, to extract permission to hang on to the good ones—proof of Randol's contention that the deal violated the laws against using the lure of export permits to extort paintings? That was what the Austrian panel had concluded when they said Austria should give the paintings back.

Nelly changed the subject. She opened her photo album to a picture of Ferdinand. “I was the last one to see Ferdinand,” she said. “In January 1941, at the most expensive hotel in Zurich, the Bellerive au Lac. I went down to look at the swans swimming in the lake . . .”

Her husband broke her reverie with a direct stare.

“The mistake was not that Luise stayed,” he said carefully. “The mistake was that she didn't leave in 1941.”

Nelly turned back to her album.

Here was a sepia photo of handsome Viktor in a
World War I uniform, the heir to a Jewish dynasty of barons who threw New Year's Eve parties with Gypsy musicians and sleigh rides in the snow. Viktor and Luise were children of privilege. Nelly was a child of war. Nelly wanted to clear her father's name of the long-ago charge of collaboration.

She pulled out a lock of her father's hair. “
We thought the Nazis were gone and life would be great,” Nelly said, shaking her head. “He was charged on a Thursday. The trial was Tuesday. The trial was ridiculous. We thought, ‘This is a sham.' They wanted to steal the lumber business, again.”

In the courtroom “they said, ‘Since the French revolution, types like you have exploited the working classes. You are a parasite to society.'

“The main ‘sin' for which he was sentenced to death was he had caused the death of several hundred partisans,” she said. “He explained that since he was a Jew under Nazi government, he was unlikely to be able to arrange Nazi maneuvers. He was in jail in Zagreb with us at this time.

“The charges were irrelevant,” Nelly said disdainfully. “He was the kind of person you get rid of in a Communist country. So Baron Gutmann, who barely escaped the Nazis, was shot by Tito's henchmen.

“People are weak!” Nelly said angrily. “There are few heroes around!”

Her husband looked concerned. But soon the conversation returned to the paintings. She had proposed donating the second portrait of Adele to Lauder, or making it easy for him to buy it. The landscapes could be donated to museums. But all five heirs would have to agree.

John started to say something else about Randol's fee. Nelly shot him a look.

Nelly had other reasons for not wishing to dredge up the past, and they had nothing to do with paintings or porcelain. After a dinner, she led me to a tiny alcove off the stairs. One wall was covered by a portrait of Maria's mother, Therese, in lush greens and blues. Who was the artist? Nelly shrugged. “No one remembers.”

What Nelly wanted to show me were framed pencil sketches of men in a big room, some playing checkers or reading. Others slept on the floor. The men were condemned to death. Nelly's father made these drawings in the prison cell where Nelly spent her last night with him in 1946. “
They weren't supposed to shoot him yet. The appeals were not exhausted,” she said.

Nelly paused, studying the drawings. “It was a very weird evening. I can't put it any other way,” she said. “That's the only way to describe it. Weird. It wasn't sad. It was very confusing. Something you couldn't grasp. We talked about life and death. My father said, ‘So many people have been shot in the last few years. What's one more? It's not that important.' They came and woke me up. My father said goodbye to me. He was very peaceful.

“I walked out into the street, but it was like in a dream. I thought, ‘Oh my God, the world is carrying on as if nothing was happening. I wanted to stop people in the street and say, ‘Don't you know they are shooting my father?'

“I don't think I will ever get over it,” she said, her eyes shining with tears. “It's just part of me.”

On the way downstairs, Nelly paused before Klimt's languid drawings of Adele, and a backlit cabinet of Ferdinand's eighteenth-century teacups, with cobalt-and-gold geometric designs that looked as contemporary as porcelain by Gianni Versace.

“I'm the only one who didn't sell them,” Nelly said.

In Vienna, the impact of the Bloch-Bauer restitution rippled out of ministries and courtrooms and into cafés and dinner parties. Austrian officials were forced to confront the fact that the world saw the restitution cases differently, and they had paid a price for this.

They might pay even more. Long-lost heirs with illustrious family names were submitting new claims for paintings stolen during the war.

One of the clouds on Austria's horizon was Baroness Marianne Kirstein-Jacobs, an elegant, willowy older woman who was an heir to the
Lederer collection. The baroness was trying to recover Klimt's portrait of
Ria Munk, which had been commissioned by Ria's mother,
Aranka Munk, the baroness's great-aunt. The portrait had disappeared from Aranka's sacked villa at Bad Aussee. At that moment, the painting was at the Landesmuseum in Linz. When the Nazis came, “
the museums helped themselves, like self-service at Wal-Mart,” the baroness said angrily.

The baroness took a seat on a buttery yellow leather sofa in front of a Lederer collection of cast bronze statues of Bacchus, the lusty god of wine and pleasure, dating from the 1600s. She opened a box of photographs of
Gustav Ucicky, presented in a Nazi court to argue that Elisabeth Bachofen-Echt, her great-aunt, was his half sister.

She lifted up Elisabeth's typewritten memoir. “She wrote how he took her on his knee like a father. I'm sure he did, but it had nothing to do with that! She wrote it to save her life!

“She succeeded, but she didn't live very long after that,” the baroness said, raising her eyebrows meaningfully. “Her brother Erich was a good
friend of the Bachofens, but they tried to take everything that belonged to Elisabeth, even after Wolfgang divorced her. There was a long lawsuit after the war.”

The baroness was not convinced that the entire Lederer Klimt collection had been destroyed. “The Belvedere took many paintings away from Schloss Immendorf before it was burned,” the baroness said. “Are some of them sitting in someone's castle right now, somewhere in Austria?”

After the war, Erich Lederer, Elisabeth's brother, went back to Austria. But Austria held on to his family's property. Officials neglected the Lederer mansion until it caved in. Erich found the Klimt
Beethoven Frieze
in a dank monastery, surrounded by rubble.

“My uncle Erich took the photographs to the Belvedere and said, ‘Are you completely crazy? It's sitting in water!' ” she said. “He couldn't take it out of the country. So he finally sold it to the Belvedere. If they loved Klimt so much, would they do this? They just want to hang on to everything.”