Maria Altmann’s art war

10.02.2011                     06.Adar l, 5771

Restitution:

Maria Altmann’s art war

Altman, who died on Monday at 94, waged a remarkable fight for return of a Klimt portrait of her aunt, which had been seized by the Nazis.

Maria Altman, who escaped Nazioccupied Vienna as a newlywed and returned to wage a triumphant fight to recover Gustav Klimt's iconic gold portrait of her remarkable aunt, has died. She was 94.
Altmann died on Monday, February 7, at her home in the Cheviot Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles after a long illness, said family friend E. Randol Schoenberg.
Altmann was an 82-year-old grandmother living in Cheviot Hills in 1998 when she enlisted Schoenberg, an attorney who was the son of a friend, to investigate the Nazi theft of her Jewish family’s Klimt collection. The collection included Klimt’s famousPortrait of Adele Bloch- Bauer, hanging in the Austrian National Gallery….