Looted painting fetches $40 million

From Montreal Gazette: Looted painting fetches $40 million
A prized landscape by painter Gustav Klimt that was stolen by the Nazis, then returned this year to the Montreal heir of its rightful owner, sold for $40.4 million on Wednesday (Nov 3, 2011) at Sotheby's auction house in New York.

Georges Jorisch, 83, of Montreal is the only surviving relative of Amalie Redlich, who owned the painting Litzlberg am Attersee (Litzlberg on the Attersee) before it was stolen in the Second World War. The Austrian government and officials of the museum where the painting was previously displayed said in April a portion of the money earned in the sale would go to Jorisch.

The painting depicts a pastoral scene of towering, wooded hills rising from water into a bright sky. It was stolen after the German annexation of Austria in 1938 and only returned this spring to Jorisch.

Art experts determined there was no doubt it was part of a collection belonging to Redlich that was looted by the Nazis during the Second World War.

Redlich and her daughter, Mathilde, were deported to Lodz, Poland, in 1941 and presumed executed. Mathilde's husband and son, Georges, had fled Vienna in 1938. When they returned after the war, all of Redlich's paintings were gone.

The painting was purchased by an art collector in Salzburg; it was later traded to the Salzburg state gallery, and in 1952 joined the inventory of the Salzburg Modern Art Museum.

This is the second time Jorisch and his legal team have successfully reclaimed a painting by Klimt.

In 2010, the Church of Cassone-Landscape with Cypresses was sold at Sotheby's for $45.4 million. That painting was also part of his grandmother's pilfered collection.

The painting resurfaced in 1962, loaned out for an exhibit celebrating the 100th anniversary of Klimt's birth.

Jorisch split an undisclosed portion of the proceeds of the auction with the collector who owned the painting at the time.

Under a 1998 restitution law in Austria, the country has returned 10,000 Nazi-stolen paintings to the descendants of their former owners.

The estate of another Montrealer, Max Stern, owner of the Dominion Gallery, has also been successful in recovering stolen art.

Stern owned a gallery in Dusseldorf and fled because of anti-Semitism in 1937.