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| By: Associated Press |
| Published: February 6, 2006 |
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Thousands of art lovers lined up outside a Vienna museum Sunday for a final glimpse of five treasured Gustav Klimt paintings that a court has ordered to be returned to a California woman who says the Nazis stole them from her family.
Officials said 4,000-plus visitors were expected to view the paintings before they are pulled down Monday and packed up at Vienna's prestigious Belvedere Galley, housed in the Austrian capital's ornate Belvedere castle. The gallery said it would remain open until 6 p.m. (1700 GMT) Sunday as a concession to the hundreds still waiting in line in the winter chill.
At least as many visitors passed through the museum on Saturday to gaze at the paintings, which are considered part of Austria's national heritage, museum spokesman Klaus Pokorny said.
"For us, this confirms that these paintings don't leave people cold," he said.
Last week, Austria's government said it could not afford to buy back the works, which were valued collectively at US$300 million and said it would return them to Maria Altmann of California, who says the Nazis confiscated them from her Jewish family in the run-up to World War II. An arbitration court upheld her claim last month.
Altmann, 89, a retired Beverly Hills clothing boutique operator, was one of the heirs of the family that owned the paintings before the Nazis took over Austria in 1938.
Although she waged a seven-year legal battle to recover them, she had also made clear that she preferred the works to remain on public display rather than disappear into a private collection.
Austria's decision to give up the artworks, which have been displayed for decades at the Belvedere, represents the costliest concession since it began returning valuable art objects looted by the Nazis under a cultural property return law enacted in 1998.
Among the Klimt works is the gold-flecked "Adele Bloch-Bauer I," which has been widely replicated on souvenirs.
The other paintings are a lesser-known Bloch-Bauer portrait as well as "Apfelbaum" ("Apple Tree"), "Buchenwald/Birkenwald ("Beech Forest/Birch Forest) and "Haeuser in Unterach am Attersee" (Houses in Unterach on Attersee Lake").
Altmann is the niece of Bloch-Bauer. After Bloch-Bauer died in 1925, the five paintings remained in her family's possession. Her husband fled to Switzerland after the Nazis took over Austria. The Nazis then took the paintings and the Belvedere gallery was made the formal owner.
Gallery director Gerbert Frodl said a multimedia presentation would be created so future visitors would be able to learn the history of the paintings.
"We still don't know who will pick them up and when, but it can happen very quickly," he said.
Austria has returned more than 5,000 artworks to their rightful owners in recent years, including 16 other Klimt paintings, Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel told the Kurier newspaper in an interview for Sunday's editions.
Asked if he would miss the five Klimts being restored to Altmann, Schuessel said, "The paintings are not lost. They're only changing hands from a museum to another owner, and hopefully will still be accessible to the public in the future." |
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