// features //
Fall 2016
Remembering a Past, Forging New Futures
An Interview with E. Randol Schoenberg
Megan Kincaid
As the Neue Galerie New York celebrates its 15-year anniversary this November, the Galerie has taken to Facebook to commemorate those achievements, exhibitions, and acquisitions which have defined the institution thus far. Among these social media reflections, it was stated, I believe quite accurately, that “no other occasion stands out more than the major acquisition in 2006 of Gustav Klimt’s iconic portrait Adele Bloch-Bauer I from 1907.” This watershed acquisition represents more than the addition of a fantastic Klimt painting to the collection of the Museum for Austrian and German art. It recalls a remarkable story of oppression and redemption, loss and recovery. The journey of Maria Altmann, heir to the Bloch-Bauer estate, and E. Randol Schoenberg, her attorney, to recover the portrait from an Austrian museum after it was looted under the Nazi ambit, along with numerous other possessions, was popularly recounted inWoman in Gold, the 2015 film starring Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds. The film memorializes the persecution of Jewish families and the sine qua non of the fight for justice and the restitution of the family’s inheritance as a means of correcting history.
Schoenberg made history when he won the landmark repatriation case involving the stolen Klimt, Republic of Austria v. Altmann, before the Supreme Court, and later served as the President of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. The Current conversed with the famed attorney about the contemporary potency of the story hidden beneath the gold plating of this now-notorious Klimt, the difficulties of repatriation, the politics of displaying Austrian work outside the country, and his efforts to honor the memory and history of the Holocaust after the Bloch-Bauer case. This interview has been edited and condensed.
Megan Kincaid: The Current editorial board often discusses how temporal distance seems to weaken the potency of and connections to the Holocaust, which can, problematically, lead to the diffusion of responsibility and the whitewashing of history. But with the release of the film Woman in Gold and the publicity surrounding your case, it seems as though there is a renewed opportunity to strengthen and forge these vital connections.
E. Randol Schoenberg: I think it’s different generations, right? I grew up being more aware because all my grandparents had fled the Nazis, but of course for your generation, things are more distant. One of the nice things about the film is that it hasn’t just been for older people; it seems younger people like it as well. It’s been a good way of introducing some of the historical events to younger people, because it is also a love story between Maria and her husband and a courtroom drama, so there are a lot of hooks for people—especially Americans—to access the story. In a way, it shows people what things were like back then, as there are fewer and fewer opportunities to meet people like Maria Altmann, who passed away at age 95, five years ago. There are not so many of those people left that can really tell these stories, so it is nice to have that story memorialized in a film—obviously fictionalized a little bit, as all films are.
One of the filmmakers really made that exact issue that you talked about a theme in the film. So they changed my character a little bit: I’ve always been someone very interested in the past, my genealogy, and my own family history, but they made my character a little bit clueless and disinterested in the beginning of the film, because they wanted to show how someone in the younger generation could really get sucked into a story like this and really make that emotional connection. So they have that pivotal scene in the middle of the movie when my character goes to the Vienna Holocaust memorial and then breaks down and comes home, playing with my food and staring up into space (which didn’t happen, but it’s a way of showing how someone who thought their life was just in the present, is somehow now feeling the past). That was one of the major themes of the film that the filmmakers tried to draw out, and I think it worked very well, because I’ve seen how it has worked with younger people, older people, middle-aged--all types. They like how the film reminds them of where we come from.
And Helen Mirren herself actually added that line in the beginning of the movie where she wags her finger at the Randy character and says: “Keep these memories alive because people forget—especially the young.” That is very resonant and brings people into the story.
MK: While you won this case and the paintings were returned to their rightful heirs, Woman in Gold tempers this victory, reminding the viewer that this case is ultimately a novelty by displaying the statistic, “more than 100,000 works of art remain unaccounted for,” at the end of the film. What are some of the most difficult obstacles in repatriating stolen artworks—and other objects of cultural significance—to the descendants of Holocaust victims?
ERS: You can use whatever number you want, but there were so many people who were murdered and all of them had something. They had jewelry, artworks, furniture, clothes, etcetera. There were millions and millions of things that were never recovered. What we talk about today are the really valuable ones that have come into public museums, which are worth looking for and trying to recover. So anytime you have a statistic like that, it is really arbitrary.
What are some of the issues? One is finding and identifying your lost property. So a lot of times, even if there there are documents, it will be: “a landscape by the School of Rembrandt.” That would be nice to have, but what is it? Or it will be Portrait of a Woman by Degas, right? So what are you going to do with that information? It is not enough to identify the specific work. Sometimes you are lucky and you have a photograph of the painting—that was the situation in a Picasso painting case I handled, where there was an actual photograph of the painting on the wall of the Thannhauser Gallery, which allowed me to identify this painting very clearly. But, for example, with Maria Altmann’s brother, Bernhard Altmann, the Nazis made a whole catalogue of his collection, including pictures, when they put it up for auction. There were four paintings by Canaletto, a very famous Venetian artist. There are photographs of the paintings, so you can identify them and have measurements. One of them has been located; the other three—for two of which we have photographs—have not been found yet. And these are paintings that would be worth about $5 million today. They are somewhere, in someone’s house probably. And maybe the owner will die and the heirs will go over to the auction house, and it will come out into the open. But this might take decades.
Once you do identify the painting, the question is: where is it? What jurisdiction is it under? Is it in private or public hands? For example, in Austria there are Klimt paintings in private collections that are known to be stolen works, but you can’t touch them because the statute of limitations has run and there is no chance of recovering them. If they are in public museums, there is a law that allows you to recover them—that's the one we used in the Maria Altmann case. So it depends on the jurisdiction, the owner—all of those things are critical factors. There are a lot of hurdles to get over, and very few cases [that actually reach the courtroom].
MK: Once provenance research reveals an art object in the collection of a museum was stolen, what is the responsibility of the museum to return the work? If a museum acknowledges publicly—for example, on the object label and in online catalogues—that the work was stolen, should it keep the object on display?
ERS: I come from the perspective that stolen property needs to be returned. There are actually a couple ways that the law deals with this. In the United States the rule is that “a thief cannot convey good title.” That means that if you get something from a thief, even if it’s in good faith, you’re out of luck. There is a Latin phrase (it is always good in law to be able to trace back to Roman Law) “caveat emptor” [let the buyer beware]. That’s the principle in American law; if you buy something, you take the risk that it’s stolen, because if it is stolen, it’s going back to the original owner. The European model is different. In most cases they favor the good faith purchaser, again it is Latin, the “bona fide” purchaser. They say that a good faith purchaser can keep the stolen good against the original owner. Usually it is a King Solomon-type choice between two innocent parties. In the law they can’t say “cut it in half,” so they have to take one side or another. Where we have complications is when works have traveled from Europe or other countries to the United States.
I tend to have little sympathy for the museums because you are talking about individual families who have lost these items, and the museums which have received them. The museum directors are playing with other people’s money, so it is easy for them to say: “I’m standing on principle, I have to keep this in my museum.” They don’t own the museums, they don’t own the paintings, they aren’t paying for the lawsuits. If the shoe was on the other foot, and the museum directors had something stolen from their house, and they weren’t able to call the police, which is the case for victims of the Holocaust (even after the war there was no government agency helping people recover their property), they might feel differently. So, I have less sympathy for the museum perspective than maybe the museum officials would like.
MK: From an ethical perspective, then, what should museums do to actively assist the families of Holocaust victims in recovering stolen property?
ERS: I think one thing, which is easier to do now, is for the museums to put all the paintings [in their collection] on a website. It is not difficult nor extraordinary; a lot of museums haven’t even done that yet. But that is the beginning. For example, when Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of a Nazi art dealer in southern Germany, was found to have all these paintings, it took two years to put them on the internet. And then people could finally look at them and discern if they were the paintings they were looking for. But that is the first step: making the collection accessible. If I were advising a museum on how to do the right thing, also consistent with its mission, I’d say to make its collection accessible, so that a family—whether they ended up in Australia or Israel—can access it online. If there is a claim, then you can really research it. But to say to a museum that has tens of thousands of artworks in storage to hire people to go through it and figure out where every piece was at every particular time in history, or even just during World War II, is very cumbersome. I can understand why they don’t do that so often. The easiest part for the museum is how they behave when there is a dispute--that is where you have to judge them.
MK: When you discuss judging a museum’s behavior during a dispute, it reminds me of the institutional resistance to restitution on the part of the Belvedere Museum—carried out by individuals—as depicted in Woman in Gold. And, in a sense, through their resistance to justice, these individuals were perpetuating the atrocities of the Holocaust in the present day. It was certainly one of the most provoking aspects of the film. To what extent were their sentiments accurately portrayed in the film? Was there actually yet more resistance and recalcitrance than was shown?
ERS: If anything, it was worse in real life than it was in the film. It is a strange thing and I was very critical after winning the case, which the Austrians didn’t understand. The Austrian officials felt they needed to fight. They were not right legally; it was not defensible. They were Austrian officials dealing with a persecuted family, and they had a duty to get it right. They felt, as long as there is an argument, we have to fight because that is our duty to our country. That was really disappointing. And it was like that throughout; they were constantly delaying and stalling and avoiding talking to us. Not dealing with the issues. It was really very difficult.
MK: After you won the case, Mrs. Altmann and her family sold the painting to Ronald Lauder so that he could display the painting at his museum, the Neue Galerie. The sale was carried out under the stipulation that the painting would always remain on public display. For this particular piece, and the story now synonymous with the painting, is there a heightened importance in its inclusion in the corpus of public art?
ERS: The family recognized the importance of the paintings and the fame of “the Gold Portrait.” It was important to them that it remain in the public eye and that it become a more famous painting. Sometimes the backstory can amplify the importance of a painting. The reason the Mona Lisa is so famous is because it was stolen; there was a manhunt for six years until they found it. There were songs written about it. That’s what made it the most famous painting in the world. And our lawsuit did that for “the Gold Portrait.” By the time the case was finished, the portrait wasn’t just one of Klimt’s great paintings: now it is the emblem of what happened to the Jews in Vienna. It became this larger than life image, so the family really didn’t want it to go back into a private collection.
At the same time, since there were a number of heirs, they realized that it was a very valuable inheritance. They didn’t want to give it away; they had just fought so hard to get it back. It had been kept from them for 60 years. This was their inheritance from their rich uncle who died without any of his property. It was something they also wanted to monetize. So Lauder’s was the perfect solution: he wanted it for his museum. Steve Thomas, the lawyer who handled the sale tells me he absolutely could’ve gotten more for the painting. But this was already going to be the most valuable painting [editor’s note: in 2006, the portrait broke previous records for the highest sale of any painting in history, selling at $135 million], and our clients said they wanted it on public display. So they gave up a little value for that. The other paintings were sold at auction, but the paintings do get back into the public eye. For example, I believe the second portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer was bought by Oprah Winfrey and she loaned it to New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Those two statues that are next to “the Gold Portrait” [at the Neue Galerie] were also returned to the family a year later, and I encouraged the family to donate them to the Galerie. Actually, the reason the statues were identified was because they were photographed in front of “the Gold Portrait” in 1907, and arrived at the Belvedere Museum around 1941.
MK: People often discuss the large risk—the “no win, no fee” contingency basis—you assumed in taking on this case independently. To what extent did your familial connection to this moment in Austrian history—not only to the Holocaust, but also to the cultural Renaissance in Vienna, to which your grandparents, composers Arnold Schoenberg and Erich Zeisl, were so central—compel you to litigate this case, despite the risks?
ERS: My grandmother—my mom’s mom—was the only grandparent that I really remember. Mainly, my connection to history was my grandmother, and she was very close friends with Maria and Fritz Altmann. My mom’s parents and the Altmanns were close friends when both families escaped from Austria in 1938. They both ended up in Los Angeles and both had kids, so my mom grew up with the Altmann kids. I knew them growing up; they were at all my grandmother’s birthday parties, came on family trips with us. They were the typical close family friends. So when Maria asked me to help with the case, I said “of course.” Why wouldn’t I help her out? It was so interesting. I was immediately taken with the case.
My family background was the reason that she came to me. And it was also very hard for me when I was working at a big law firm because I knew enough about Austria; I had just recovered my grandfather Arnold Schoenberg’s archives from USC and my father, aunt, and uncle had brought them to Vienna. When I go to Austria, being a Schoenberg is like being connected to a royal family. They don’t treat living composers too well, but when you are a dead Austrian composer, there is nothing better. They name streets after you. It’s like I am part of a known family there—it is not the same in the United States. I knew that my handling this case would be a big deal in Austria and it was hard for me to explain to people in the United States how, as a young whippersnapper lawyer, I thought I could do this. It’s a tiny fishbowl of a country. It was impossible for me to explain that to people here, but it gave me the feeling that this was something I could do because people will listen to me because I represent not only this famous composer family, but also an exile community. That gave me a little bit of a leg up in Austria that wouldn’t have been obvious here. My family background played a large role in allowing me, as a young, inexperienced attorney, to do something like this.
MK: You mention your role as a representative of the exile community in Austria. What were the perspectives and opinions of the existing Viennese Jewish community about the painting being removed from Austria and returned to the Bloch-Bauer descendants?
ERS: You touched on it earlier with the painting being on display in the United States now. There is this conflict because there is a Jewish community in Vienna, but they are not descendants of Jews who lived there before the war--they are Jewish families who came to Vienna after the war from the surrounding areas. The old Austrian families either fled or completely assimilated and aren’t Jewish anymore. When you have these restitution issues, is the new Jewish community of Vienna the successor to the Jewish community that was there before the war? Or did that community move to Los Angeles, New York, London, or Melbourne?
Should “the Gold Portrait” be in Vienna as an example of the Jewish life in Vienna before World War II or should it move—like Maria Altmann and my family and many other—to the United States and be an example of the culture that came here? So that is very tricky, there is no clear answer, and you can see it from either side. You see people arguing that it is terrible that these things leave because we don’t want to take out all the Jewish contributions from Austrian culture; we want to preserve them. In my family, it is sort of “a Schoenberg giveth and a Schoenberg taketh away.” I helped bring my grandfather’s archive to Vienna from the United States, and I took “the Gold Portrait” out of Vienna.
I think overall, for Klimt and for Austria, it is a good thing to have paintings outside of the country. Klimt died relatively young, at the end of World War I. His paintings weren’t sold outside of the country, so there aren’t very many good examples of his work outside Austria. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) was so Francophile after World War I and World War II that they didn’t buy any German or Austrian art. They belatedly got a few examples, but skipped from impressionism to abstract expressionism, without getting the abstract and the expressionist parts which all came from Germany and Austria. So that was the conceit of the Francophile New York art community: that they could go from Van Gogh and the French impressionists straight to Pollock and Motherwell, skipping over everything in the middle. That’s why you have the Neue Galerie in New York, which has all these paintings that you can’t see in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the MoMA. So people know Klimt, and they like his works, but they don’t necessarily know his name. “The Gold Portrait” coming to New York and the film helped elevate his name in the pantheon of early twentieth century art.
MK: You are currently writing a book about the case. What perspectives do you hope to add to this story?
ERS: The book! If I ever finish it—I'm still at month three. It’s really hard in the beginning because there are so many characters to describe, and I get buried in all the old emails. It’s challenging for me to distill it. There is a book Anne-Marie O’Connor wrote, The Lady in Gold, which is excellent. It gives a great history of the time frame of Klimt and what happened to the Bloch-Bauers and a lot of other Jewish families. It does talk about the case, but not so much. The film, obviously, gives a romantic, stylized version of what happened. But I think in terms of the process for a lawyer and working on these restitution cases, that story really hasn’t been told. And it might be of interest because things are changing in Cuba, things are changing in Iran—there are going to be other communities that are going to go through these belated attempts at restitution and it might be useful for those people to see what I went through to get to this result.
MK: You served as the President of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust for 10 years. Can you speak about your work there? How can the Holocaust museum, which relies so heavily on physical artifacts and personal memory, respond to the growing presence of digital spaces? How is this preservation a continuation of your work on the Maria Altmann case?
ERS: I served 10 years as President, and I’ve now stepped down, so I am a past President, which makes me an Honorary Director. I helped build the new museum and design the permanent exhibit.
Maybe because of this growing presence of the digital, museums have a great power. Being in the physical presence of the object hits people in a very real way. I see it with students when they are there in that space and they see the kids’ shoes from Auschwitz, the letters, the photographs. There are authentic artifacts which grip them. Especially with the Holocaust—where there are people who deny it ever happened—it is important to be able to expose more and more young people—and old people—to the actual documentary, physical evidence.
We also have survivors come and speak at the Museum, which is a real draw—and very effective. The big transition coming for Holocaust museums is that the survivors won’t be there, right? And the next generation will tell the stories of their parents, which won’t quite have the same visceral impact. People try to record survivors, take three-dimensional images and holograms, but it is not going to be the same when the survivors aren’t there. So it is important for us to have these museums to collect the very effective artifacts and put them in one place for people to experience them.
Our Museum, for example, has a fully online catalogue and a state-of-the-art archive. We get inquiries all the time from people all over the world who find things in our archive. We had a collection of postcards sent from the camps, and someone in Sweden found a postcard he had sent to his parents when he was in one of the ghettos. Putting things online makes them available, and is really a very important part of our mission.
Also we have, if you look at the Facebook page of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, the second most liked Facebook page of any Holocaust museum in the country, behind the one in Washington, D.C. Part of our program is very social media-oriented, so we do frequently post—and the museum archives are a great source of material and content for that. We talk about things that are in the archives, which allows us to discuss events and history, teaching people in a social media context.
Museums have a bunch of programs with standard, traditional people attending, which I think is the core, but we also have a lot of outreach through social media and other programs with various schools. It seems to be working very well. There is a great need for it.
I never wanted our Museum to have a particular lesson; it is much more freeform. The Museum of Tolerance is a different type of museum, where you walk through a story. Ours is much more encyclopedic, so you really have to pick your own way.
One of the things I added to our new museum design, is that it is bracketed by front pages of local Los Angeles newspapers from 1933 to 1945, where they reported on what was going on. It is very interesting to see how the Holocaust was reported, and it makes you think about how the news is being reported today. What am I paying attention to? What am I missing? What is right in front of me and yet I’m not realizing is going on? The news has a lot of content everyday, and one of the lessons you want to take away is paying attention to what is going on in the world. Because one minute you might be hanging out, doing your own thing in Los Angeles, and the next thing you know, there are American soldiers captured and sent to concentration camps. They are minding their own business and not paying attention to the world, and the next thing you know, American troops are sent over there. Making young people aware that they are a part of a larger world, and they have to pay attention to what is going on.
Take for example what is happening in Syria: it is a hard problem to know how to solve, but we have been hoping it would go away on its own. Now there are a million refugees and it is destabilizing Europe, and finally destabilizing the United States. And this problem that we thought was so far away and didn’t think would affect us—that it is not worth our sacrificing anything to try to solve—is a problem of the world. Those types of infections spread. And we saw this in the Nazi period, where people said “okay, Jews, Germany, let them deal with it.” And a few years later, it’s world war.
MK: In some ways, your diverse career—from lawyer to subject of blockbuster film to holocaust museum president—has always involved unearthing truths and history. It wasn’t just about repatriating a painting or redesigning the museum, but was really about recovering Jewish history and shaping its legacy for posterity.
ERS: Lawyering is telling a story, very much like the work I did with the Museum because it is taking a mass of information and distilling it down to sound bites that are digestible by the average person—by the juror, by the judge. And it is the same thing when you are putting together a museum. There is a massive amount of information and exhibits. And you need to distill it. What image will be the image for this type of scene? You have to do that type of thing, to make sure it packs a punch. So I think being a lawyer was good training for museum work. Not everyone gets the opportunities I have, and I’m glad I’ve made the most of them.
Schoenberg made history when he won the landmark repatriation case involving the stolen Klimt, Republic of Austria v. Altmann, before the Supreme Court, and later served as the President of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. The Current conversed with the famed attorney about the contemporary potency of the story hidden beneath the gold plating of this now-notorious Klimt, the difficulties of repatriation, the politics of displaying Austrian work outside the country, and his efforts to honor the memory and history of the Holocaust after the Bloch-Bauer case. This interview has been edited and condensed.
Megan Kincaid: The Current editorial board often discusses how temporal distance seems to weaken the potency of and connections to the Holocaust, which can, problematically, lead to the diffusion of responsibility and the whitewashing of history. But with the release of the film Woman in Gold and the publicity surrounding your case, it seems as though there is a renewed opportunity to strengthen and forge these vital connections.
E. Randol Schoenberg: I think it’s different generations, right? I grew up being more aware because all my grandparents had fled the Nazis, but of course for your generation, things are more distant. One of the nice things about the film is that it hasn’t just been for older people; it seems younger people like it as well. It’s been a good way of introducing some of the historical events to younger people, because it is also a love story between Maria and her husband and a courtroom drama, so there are a lot of hooks for people—especially Americans—to access the story. In a way, it shows people what things were like back then, as there are fewer and fewer opportunities to meet people like Maria Altmann, who passed away at age 95, five years ago. There are not so many of those people left that can really tell these stories, so it is nice to have that story memorialized in a film—obviously fictionalized a little bit, as all films are.
One of the filmmakers really made that exact issue that you talked about a theme in the film. So they changed my character a little bit: I’ve always been someone very interested in the past, my genealogy, and my own family history, but they made my character a little bit clueless and disinterested in the beginning of the film, because they wanted to show how someone in the younger generation could really get sucked into a story like this and really make that emotional connection. So they have that pivotal scene in the middle of the movie when my character goes to the Vienna Holocaust memorial and then breaks down and comes home, playing with my food and staring up into space (which didn’t happen, but it’s a way of showing how someone who thought their life was just in the present, is somehow now feeling the past). That was one of the major themes of the film that the filmmakers tried to draw out, and I think it worked very well, because I’ve seen how it has worked with younger people, older people, middle-aged--all types. They like how the film reminds them of where we come from.
And Helen Mirren herself actually added that line in the beginning of the movie where she wags her finger at the Randy character and says: “Keep these memories alive because people forget—especially the young.” That is very resonant and brings people into the story.
MK: While you won this case and the paintings were returned to their rightful heirs, Woman in Gold tempers this victory, reminding the viewer that this case is ultimately a novelty by displaying the statistic, “more than 100,000 works of art remain unaccounted for,” at the end of the film. What are some of the most difficult obstacles in repatriating stolen artworks—and other objects of cultural significance—to the descendants of Holocaust victims?
ERS: You can use whatever number you want, but there were so many people who were murdered and all of them had something. They had jewelry, artworks, furniture, clothes, etcetera. There were millions and millions of things that were never recovered. What we talk about today are the really valuable ones that have come into public museums, which are worth looking for and trying to recover. So anytime you have a statistic like that, it is really arbitrary.
What are some of the issues? One is finding and identifying your lost property. So a lot of times, even if there there are documents, it will be: “a landscape by the School of Rembrandt.” That would be nice to have, but what is it? Or it will be Portrait of a Woman by Degas, right? So what are you going to do with that information? It is not enough to identify the specific work. Sometimes you are lucky and you have a photograph of the painting—that was the situation in a Picasso painting case I handled, where there was an actual photograph of the painting on the wall of the Thannhauser Gallery, which allowed me to identify this painting very clearly. But, for example, with Maria Altmann’s brother, Bernhard Altmann, the Nazis made a whole catalogue of his collection, including pictures, when they put it up for auction. There were four paintings by Canaletto, a very famous Venetian artist. There are photographs of the paintings, so you can identify them and have measurements. One of them has been located; the other three—for two of which we have photographs—have not been found yet. And these are paintings that would be worth about $5 million today. They are somewhere, in someone’s house probably. And maybe the owner will die and the heirs will go over to the auction house, and it will come out into the open. But this might take decades.
Once you do identify the painting, the question is: where is it? What jurisdiction is it under? Is it in private or public hands? For example, in Austria there are Klimt paintings in private collections that are known to be stolen works, but you can’t touch them because the statute of limitations has run and there is no chance of recovering them. If they are in public museums, there is a law that allows you to recover them—that's the one we used in the Maria Altmann case. So it depends on the jurisdiction, the owner—all of those things are critical factors. There are a lot of hurdles to get over, and very few cases [that actually reach the courtroom].
MK: Once provenance research reveals an art object in the collection of a museum was stolen, what is the responsibility of the museum to return the work? If a museum acknowledges publicly—for example, on the object label and in online catalogues—that the work was stolen, should it keep the object on display?
ERS: I come from the perspective that stolen property needs to be returned. There are actually a couple ways that the law deals with this. In the United States the rule is that “a thief cannot convey good title.” That means that if you get something from a thief, even if it’s in good faith, you’re out of luck. There is a Latin phrase (it is always good in law to be able to trace back to Roman Law) “caveat emptor” [let the buyer beware]. That’s the principle in American law; if you buy something, you take the risk that it’s stolen, because if it is stolen, it’s going back to the original owner. The European model is different. In most cases they favor the good faith purchaser, again it is Latin, the “bona fide” purchaser. They say that a good faith purchaser can keep the stolen good against the original owner. Usually it is a King Solomon-type choice between two innocent parties. In the law they can’t say “cut it in half,” so they have to take one side or another. Where we have complications is when works have traveled from Europe or other countries to the United States.
I tend to have little sympathy for the museums because you are talking about individual families who have lost these items, and the museums which have received them. The museum directors are playing with other people’s money, so it is easy for them to say: “I’m standing on principle, I have to keep this in my museum.” They don’t own the museums, they don’t own the paintings, they aren’t paying for the lawsuits. If the shoe was on the other foot, and the museum directors had something stolen from their house, and they weren’t able to call the police, which is the case for victims of the Holocaust (even after the war there was no government agency helping people recover their property), they might feel differently. So, I have less sympathy for the museum perspective than maybe the museum officials would like.
MK: From an ethical perspective, then, what should museums do to actively assist the families of Holocaust victims in recovering stolen property?
ERS: I think one thing, which is easier to do now, is for the museums to put all the paintings [in their collection] on a website. It is not difficult nor extraordinary; a lot of museums haven’t even done that yet. But that is the beginning. For example, when Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of a Nazi art dealer in southern Germany, was found to have all these paintings, it took two years to put them on the internet. And then people could finally look at them and discern if they were the paintings they were looking for. But that is the first step: making the collection accessible. If I were advising a museum on how to do the right thing, also consistent with its mission, I’d say to make its collection accessible, so that a family—whether they ended up in Australia or Israel—can access it online. If there is a claim, then you can really research it. But to say to a museum that has tens of thousands of artworks in storage to hire people to go through it and figure out where every piece was at every particular time in history, or even just during World War II, is very cumbersome. I can understand why they don’t do that so often. The easiest part for the museum is how they behave when there is a dispute--that is where you have to judge them.
MK: When you discuss judging a museum’s behavior during a dispute, it reminds me of the institutional resistance to restitution on the part of the Belvedere Museum—carried out by individuals—as depicted in Woman in Gold. And, in a sense, through their resistance to justice, these individuals were perpetuating the atrocities of the Holocaust in the present day. It was certainly one of the most provoking aspects of the film. To what extent were their sentiments accurately portrayed in the film? Was there actually yet more resistance and recalcitrance than was shown?
ERS: If anything, it was worse in real life than it was in the film. It is a strange thing and I was very critical after winning the case, which the Austrians didn’t understand. The Austrian officials felt they needed to fight. They were not right legally; it was not defensible. They were Austrian officials dealing with a persecuted family, and they had a duty to get it right. They felt, as long as there is an argument, we have to fight because that is our duty to our country. That was really disappointing. And it was like that throughout; they were constantly delaying and stalling and avoiding talking to us. Not dealing with the issues. It was really very difficult.
MK: After you won the case, Mrs. Altmann and her family sold the painting to Ronald Lauder so that he could display the painting at his museum, the Neue Galerie. The sale was carried out under the stipulation that the painting would always remain on public display. For this particular piece, and the story now synonymous with the painting, is there a heightened importance in its inclusion in the corpus of public art?
ERS: The family recognized the importance of the paintings and the fame of “the Gold Portrait.” It was important to them that it remain in the public eye and that it become a more famous painting. Sometimes the backstory can amplify the importance of a painting. The reason the Mona Lisa is so famous is because it was stolen; there was a manhunt for six years until they found it. There were songs written about it. That’s what made it the most famous painting in the world. And our lawsuit did that for “the Gold Portrait.” By the time the case was finished, the portrait wasn’t just one of Klimt’s great paintings: now it is the emblem of what happened to the Jews in Vienna. It became this larger than life image, so the family really didn’t want it to go back into a private collection.
At the same time, since there were a number of heirs, they realized that it was a very valuable inheritance. They didn’t want to give it away; they had just fought so hard to get it back. It had been kept from them for 60 years. This was their inheritance from their rich uncle who died without any of his property. It was something they also wanted to monetize. So Lauder’s was the perfect solution: he wanted it for his museum. Steve Thomas, the lawyer who handled the sale tells me he absolutely could’ve gotten more for the painting. But this was already going to be the most valuable painting [editor’s note: in 2006, the portrait broke previous records for the highest sale of any painting in history, selling at $135 million], and our clients said they wanted it on public display. So they gave up a little value for that. The other paintings were sold at auction, but the paintings do get back into the public eye. For example, I believe the second portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer was bought by Oprah Winfrey and she loaned it to New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Those two statues that are next to “the Gold Portrait” [at the Neue Galerie] were also returned to the family a year later, and I encouraged the family to donate them to the Galerie. Actually, the reason the statues were identified was because they were photographed in front of “the Gold Portrait” in 1907, and arrived at the Belvedere Museum around 1941.
MK: People often discuss the large risk—the “no win, no fee” contingency basis—you assumed in taking on this case independently. To what extent did your familial connection to this moment in Austrian history—not only to the Holocaust, but also to the cultural Renaissance in Vienna, to which your grandparents, composers Arnold Schoenberg and Erich Zeisl, were so central—compel you to litigate this case, despite the risks?
ERS: My grandmother—my mom’s mom—was the only grandparent that I really remember. Mainly, my connection to history was my grandmother, and she was very close friends with Maria and Fritz Altmann. My mom’s parents and the Altmanns were close friends when both families escaped from Austria in 1938. They both ended up in Los Angeles and both had kids, so my mom grew up with the Altmann kids. I knew them growing up; they were at all my grandmother’s birthday parties, came on family trips with us. They were the typical close family friends. So when Maria asked me to help with the case, I said “of course.” Why wouldn’t I help her out? It was so interesting. I was immediately taken with the case.
My family background was the reason that she came to me. And it was also very hard for me when I was working at a big law firm because I knew enough about Austria; I had just recovered my grandfather Arnold Schoenberg’s archives from USC and my father, aunt, and uncle had brought them to Vienna. When I go to Austria, being a Schoenberg is like being connected to a royal family. They don’t treat living composers too well, but when you are a dead Austrian composer, there is nothing better. They name streets after you. It’s like I am part of a known family there—it is not the same in the United States. I knew that my handling this case would be a big deal in Austria and it was hard for me to explain to people in the United States how, as a young whippersnapper lawyer, I thought I could do this. It’s a tiny fishbowl of a country. It was impossible for me to explain that to people here, but it gave me the feeling that this was something I could do because people will listen to me because I represent not only this famous composer family, but also an exile community. That gave me a little bit of a leg up in Austria that wouldn’t have been obvious here. My family background played a large role in allowing me, as a young, inexperienced attorney, to do something like this.
MK: You mention your role as a representative of the exile community in Austria. What were the perspectives and opinions of the existing Viennese Jewish community about the painting being removed from Austria and returned to the Bloch-Bauer descendants?
ERS: You touched on it earlier with the painting being on display in the United States now. There is this conflict because there is a Jewish community in Vienna, but they are not descendants of Jews who lived there before the war--they are Jewish families who came to Vienna after the war from the surrounding areas. The old Austrian families either fled or completely assimilated and aren’t Jewish anymore. When you have these restitution issues, is the new Jewish community of Vienna the successor to the Jewish community that was there before the war? Or did that community move to Los Angeles, New York, London, or Melbourne?
Should “the Gold Portrait” be in Vienna as an example of the Jewish life in Vienna before World War II or should it move—like Maria Altmann and my family and many other—to the United States and be an example of the culture that came here? So that is very tricky, there is no clear answer, and you can see it from either side. You see people arguing that it is terrible that these things leave because we don’t want to take out all the Jewish contributions from Austrian culture; we want to preserve them. In my family, it is sort of “a Schoenberg giveth and a Schoenberg taketh away.” I helped bring my grandfather’s archive to Vienna from the United States, and I took “the Gold Portrait” out of Vienna.
I think overall, for Klimt and for Austria, it is a good thing to have paintings outside of the country. Klimt died relatively young, at the end of World War I. His paintings weren’t sold outside of the country, so there aren’t very many good examples of his work outside Austria. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) was so Francophile after World War I and World War II that they didn’t buy any German or Austrian art. They belatedly got a few examples, but skipped from impressionism to abstract expressionism, without getting the abstract and the expressionist parts which all came from Germany and Austria. So that was the conceit of the Francophile New York art community: that they could go from Van Gogh and the French impressionists straight to Pollock and Motherwell, skipping over everything in the middle. That’s why you have the Neue Galerie in New York, which has all these paintings that you can’t see in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the MoMA. So people know Klimt, and they like his works, but they don’t necessarily know his name. “The Gold Portrait” coming to New York and the film helped elevate his name in the pantheon of early twentieth century art.
MK: You are currently writing a book about the case. What perspectives do you hope to add to this story?
ERS: The book! If I ever finish it—I'm still at month three. It’s really hard in the beginning because there are so many characters to describe, and I get buried in all the old emails. It’s challenging for me to distill it. There is a book Anne-Marie O’Connor wrote, The Lady in Gold, which is excellent. It gives a great history of the time frame of Klimt and what happened to the Bloch-Bauers and a lot of other Jewish families. It does talk about the case, but not so much. The film, obviously, gives a romantic, stylized version of what happened. But I think in terms of the process for a lawyer and working on these restitution cases, that story really hasn’t been told. And it might be of interest because things are changing in Cuba, things are changing in Iran—there are going to be other communities that are going to go through these belated attempts at restitution and it might be useful for those people to see what I went through to get to this result.
MK: You served as the President of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust for 10 years. Can you speak about your work there? How can the Holocaust museum, which relies so heavily on physical artifacts and personal memory, respond to the growing presence of digital spaces? How is this preservation a continuation of your work on the Maria Altmann case?
ERS: I served 10 years as President, and I’ve now stepped down, so I am a past President, which makes me an Honorary Director. I helped build the new museum and design the permanent exhibit.
Maybe because of this growing presence of the digital, museums have a great power. Being in the physical presence of the object hits people in a very real way. I see it with students when they are there in that space and they see the kids’ shoes from Auschwitz, the letters, the photographs. There are authentic artifacts which grip them. Especially with the Holocaust—where there are people who deny it ever happened—it is important to be able to expose more and more young people—and old people—to the actual documentary, physical evidence.
We also have survivors come and speak at the Museum, which is a real draw—and very effective. The big transition coming for Holocaust museums is that the survivors won’t be there, right? And the next generation will tell the stories of their parents, which won’t quite have the same visceral impact. People try to record survivors, take three-dimensional images and holograms, but it is not going to be the same when the survivors aren’t there. So it is important for us to have these museums to collect the very effective artifacts and put them in one place for people to experience them.
Our Museum, for example, has a fully online catalogue and a state-of-the-art archive. We get inquiries all the time from people all over the world who find things in our archive. We had a collection of postcards sent from the camps, and someone in Sweden found a postcard he had sent to his parents when he was in one of the ghettos. Putting things online makes them available, and is really a very important part of our mission.
Also we have, if you look at the Facebook page of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, the second most liked Facebook page of any Holocaust museum in the country, behind the one in Washington, D.C. Part of our program is very social media-oriented, so we do frequently post—and the museum archives are a great source of material and content for that. We talk about things that are in the archives, which allows us to discuss events and history, teaching people in a social media context.
Museums have a bunch of programs with standard, traditional people attending, which I think is the core, but we also have a lot of outreach through social media and other programs with various schools. It seems to be working very well. There is a great need for it.
I never wanted our Museum to have a particular lesson; it is much more freeform. The Museum of Tolerance is a different type of museum, where you walk through a story. Ours is much more encyclopedic, so you really have to pick your own way.
One of the things I added to our new museum design, is that it is bracketed by front pages of local Los Angeles newspapers from 1933 to 1945, where they reported on what was going on. It is very interesting to see how the Holocaust was reported, and it makes you think about how the news is being reported today. What am I paying attention to? What am I missing? What is right in front of me and yet I’m not realizing is going on? The news has a lot of content everyday, and one of the lessons you want to take away is paying attention to what is going on in the world. Because one minute you might be hanging out, doing your own thing in Los Angeles, and the next thing you know, there are American soldiers captured and sent to concentration camps. They are minding their own business and not paying attention to the world, and the next thing you know, American troops are sent over there. Making young people aware that they are a part of a larger world, and they have to pay attention to what is going on.
Take for example what is happening in Syria: it is a hard problem to know how to solve, but we have been hoping it would go away on its own. Now there are a million refugees and it is destabilizing Europe, and finally destabilizing the United States. And this problem that we thought was so far away and didn’t think would affect us—that it is not worth our sacrificing anything to try to solve—is a problem of the world. Those types of infections spread. And we saw this in the Nazi period, where people said “okay, Jews, Germany, let them deal with it.” And a few years later, it’s world war.
MK: In some ways, your diverse career—from lawyer to subject of blockbuster film to holocaust museum president—has always involved unearthing truths and history. It wasn’t just about repatriating a painting or redesigning the museum, but was really about recovering Jewish history and shaping its legacy for posterity.
ERS: Lawyering is telling a story, very much like the work I did with the Museum because it is taking a mass of information and distilling it down to sound bites that are digestible by the average person—by the juror, by the judge. And it is the same thing when you are putting together a museum. There is a massive amount of information and exhibits. And you need to distill it. What image will be the image for this type of scene? You have to do that type of thing, to make sure it packs a punch. So I think being a lawyer was good training for museum work. Not everyone gets the opportunities I have, and I’m glad I’ve made the most of them.
\\MEGAN KINCAID is a senior in Columbia College and Editor in Chief of The Current. She can be reached at [email protected].