Maria Altmann, Recovered Family’s Nazi-Looted Art, Is Dead at 94
Maria Altmann, whose seven-year battle to recover her family’s Nazi-looted paintings riveted the art and legal worlds, has died.
Altmann died at her home in Los Angeles on Feb. 7 at the age of 94 after a prolonged illness
Stripped of her childhood wealth, she became a multi-millionaire in her late eighties, after forcing the Austrian government to return five family-owned works by the Viennese art nouveau painter Gustav Klimt.
Subsequently, the paintings were sold for a total of $327.7 million. The crown jewel was the artist’s iconic “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer,” Altmann’s aunt, which is now on permanent display at Ronald S. Lauder’s Neue Galerie in New York.
Maria Viktoria was born in Vienna in 1916 into a fabulously wealthy family of assimilated Jews, all of whose possessions and art were taken by the Nazi regime after the 1938 annexation of Austria.
In 1999, E. Randol Schoenberg, a young Los Angeles lawyer, took up the seemingly hopeless effort to recover the Klimt painting. He took the case up to the U.S. Supreme Court and in 2006 Austria acceded to his demands.
Finding refuge in Los Angeles after World War II, Altmann supported herself by selling clothes for mature women from her home.
Even after regaining most of her fortune, she continued to live in a modest home in the Cheviot Hills section of Los Angeles and refused to part with her “beloved 1994 Chevy.”
An ardent opera buff. Altmann had little involvement with the Jewish community. In 2005, she said, “Unfortunately, I wasn’t really raised Jewish. My husband, whose family came from Poland, was very strongly Jewish.
“We used to have arguments about that. I agreed to have a ritual circumcision for our sons, if he let me have a Christmas tree.”
Perhaps her closest relationship to the Jewish people, she said, derived from a sense of shared fate.
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning journalism this Passover.
In this age of misinformation, our work is needed like never before. We report on the news that matters most to American Jews, driven by truth, not ideology.
At a time when newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall. That means for the first time in our 126-year history, Forward journalism is free to everyone, everywhere. With an ongoing war, rising antisemitism, and a flood of disinformation that may affect the upcoming election, we believe that free and open access to Jewish journalism is imperative.
Readers like you make it all possible. Right now, we’re in the middle of our Passover Pledge Drive and we still need 300 people to step up and make a gift to sustain our trustworthy, independent journalism.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Only 300 more gifts needed by April 30
