Sometimes it is a simple case of cash that lies at the heart of an ownership contest. A recent row between the town of Florence and the Tuscan State, in which both the city and the state each contends that the sculpture is uniquely its own, highlights what is at stake when you go up against a beloved artifact in its home environment to challenge to whom the work actually belongs. This tussle is about the division of the spoils generated by the millions of international tourists and their wallets, and there is no push to relocate the actual artifact itself, just its residuals. When Art generates significant income through tourism, Nationalism and Capitalism are its twin shadows, but it is an uneasy brotherhood of mutual distrust.
At other times the circumstances of ownership are layered with more than just cash value. Did Adele Bloch-Bauer ever expect one of her portraits to be the most expensive painting in the history of the world? After a protracted legal battle between her niece Maria Altmann and the Republic of Austria. five pictures that had been relinquished to the Belvedere Museum in Vienna after their illegal seizure by the Nazis were in 2006 put into the hands of their rightful owners. The surviving niece, who had fled to Los Angeles to escape the oncoming Holocaust, exhibited the pictures briefly at the LA County Museum, and then sold them by auction at Christie’s, where the most famous among them (above) fetched an astonishing $135 Million. It now hangs in the Neue Galerie on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
What was a jewel in Austria’s multi-faceted crown – a portrait by a Viennese artist of one of the city’s beguiling patronesses voluptuously enveloped in her spectacular wealth like an Egyptian queen – has recently and vulgarly been called the American Mona Lisa. It is, of course, only American insofar as America was where coincidence or fate led it; it was American lawyers that wrestled the paintings from the Republic of Austria, it was American Dollars that purchased them and it is America that will give them permanent residence. Although some Austrians think the wounds of the loss particularly egregious, having been inflicted by a legal team headed up by their native son Arnold Schoenberg’s grandson, they should not quibble over whose treachery is the greatest; Schoenberg’s for leaving Austria for the safety of the Capitalist West Coast, his grandson for outsmarting the Austrian authorities, those authorities for lying about the ownership of the pictures, or the Nazis for looting the art in the first place.
The money from the sale of the pictures has yet to surface. (Presumably Maria got the new kitchen she had promised herself in Adele’s Wish, one of the movies covering the story.) There is no Altmann or Bloch-Bauer or Klimt Foundation in any of the databases, and no major bequests yet by any of the families involved. At 94, Maria must at least have made plans for its charitable dispersal to avoid or to reduce the current 55% Estate Tax that will fall due at her death, otherwise one of the greatest beneficiaries of the Rape of Europe will be the American government.
Rendered simplistically, Austria abandoned the Bloch-Bauers and so the Bloch-Bauers abandoned Austria. Despite their wounded pride, Austria was unable to depict Adele as an impoverished hostage sold obscenely into American slavery because Austrian reserves of moral authority had been emptied; the Nazis had confiscated the chattels of the Jewish Bloch-Bauer household and the authorities did not intervene. They then accepted the looted art and appropriated it as their own. Ex-private citizen Maria Altmann delivered a blow of devastating impact to the State by attacking its patrimonial identity. Taking away the nation’s art made a fundamental mythology disappear along with it, and the blow to the nation’s pride was immense.
Happily, Ronald Lauder’s Mona Lisa is surrounded exclusively by other Austrian artifacts in the Neue Galerie on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, in a typically American home-from-home recreation of The Old Country. But the plundering begins again; her image is now available as a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle, a 2,000 piece jigsaw puzzle, a mug, a vase, a bangle, a t-shirt, and a waste-paper basket.
