[MSN] A Montreal man who claims ownership of a signed oil painting by Austrian symbolist Gustav Klimt that had been looted by the Nazis is vowing to press ahead in his effort to seek restitution for it.

[Museum Security Network Mailing list]

Montreal man seeks Nazi-looted painting from Lauder  
By DAVID LAZARUS, Staff Reporter     
Thursday, 11 October 2007  
MONTREAL — A Montreal man who claims ownership of a signed oil painting by
Austrian symbolist Gustav Klimt that had been looted by the Nazis is vowing
to press ahead in his effort to seek restitution for it. 
Gustav Klimt’s Flowering Meadow  
 
In late September, the dispute between Dorval resident Georges Jorisch and
Leonard Lauder – the billionaire New York cosmetics magnate and
philanthropist who has had the work in his collection at home since 1983 –
made the pages of the New York Times and other newspapers and art
publications around the world. 

“It’s about time,” Jorisch said in a telephone interview with The CJN,
referring to his firm belief that the painting – or compensation for it –
will ultimately be his. “Things are moving.” 

Jorisch, 79, a retired photo equipment salesman, said he recalls seeing the
1906 landscape painting, called Blooming Meadow, hanging in the villa of his
grandmother, Amalie Redlich, outside Vienna in 1938.

“I saw it there myself. There were actually three Klimts there,” said
Jorisch, who is Redlich’s sole surviving grandchild. 

According to E. Randol Schoenberg, the Los Angles-based attorney who is
making the so-far informal claim on behalf of Jorisch, the painting belonged
originally to Redlich’s brother, Viktor Zuckerkandl, a magnate in the steel
industry who was also an art collector and a friend of Klimt’s. 

When Zuckerkandl died in 1926, the work passed to Redlich, Schoenberg said. 

After Redlich was deported to the Lodz ghetto in 1941, where she is believed
to have died, her art, which she had put into storage in 1939, was looted by
the Nazis. 

In an e-mail to The CJN, Schoenberg – who last year was successful in having
five Klimt paintings returned from Austria to a family in California after
eight years in court – said that he would be making a demand for the return
of Blooming Meadow “now, and if that doesn’t resolve it, we will file a
lawsuit. It won’t take eight years.” 

At issue is who rightfully owns the painting. Schoenberg is pointing to the
fact that a new catalogue raisonné of Klimt’s body of work just published by
Alfred Weidinger, associate director of the Albertina Museum in Vienna,
describes Blooming Meadow as having belonged to Redlich. 

As well, according to the New York Times, the listing for a Klimt
retrospective this month at the Neue Gallerie in New York also suggests that
Redlich might have owned Flowering Meadow from the year it was painted –
1906. 

In the same Times report, Leonard Lauder countered that an “exhaustive”
five-year investigation concluded that the work “was never in Amalie
Redlich’s collection as Mr. Jorisch claims. 

“If Mr. Jorisch’s lawyer had provided us with evidence supporting the claim,
we would have resolved this long ago.” 

Lauder’s lawyer, Allan Frackman, is maintaining that based on his own
research, there are documents demonstrating that Flowering Meadow was not
among the six Klimt works in Zuckerkandl’s estate in 1927 and 1928. 

The Times story said that according to the Weidinger catalogue, which
describes Redlich as a previous owner of Flowering Meadow, the work was sold
after the war to Viennese collector Rudolf Leopold. Leopold then sold it to
New York art dealer Serge Sabarsky, a co-founder – along with Lauder’s
brother Ronald – of the Neue Gallerie. Sabarsky, in turn sold the painting
to Leonard Lauder. Sabarsky died in 1996. 

Schoenberg contends that Leopold didn’t have a permit to export the painting
from Vienna to New York. 

A report in the Art Newspaper this month suggests confusion over the
provenance of Flowering Meadow. 

Lauder’s lawyer Frackman maintains that research he showed to Schoenberg
indicates that the painting owned by Redlich was actually Roses Under Trees,
which is at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, even though Redlich is not named as
an owner of that work in the Weidinger catalogue. 

Schoenberg, though, is quoted in the same report as saying that there is
“little doubt that the Lauder painting is the Redlich one,” adding that
documents would exist proving this if Redlich had not died in the Holocaust.


Schoenberg told The CJN that the evidence presented so far by Frackman as to
ownership has been “a one-way street. I have given them everything and they
have given me nothing [because they have nothing].” 

Efforts to reach Frackman by e-mail were unsuccessful. 

Although Schoenberg has said that he wants the dispute over the ownership of
Flowering Meadow to be resolved “amicably,” as of last week, a lawsuit
appeared likely if no settlement is reached. 

Jorisch, an only child, escaped death during the Holocaust by being hidden
in Belgium. He moved to Montreal in 1957, where he married and had four
children. He told The CJN that the Jewish community in his native Austria
failed to help him when he undertook initial efforts to recover Flowering
Meadow about six years ago. 

“What is stolen should go back to the owner,” Jorisch said. 

“I don’t know what [Lauder] believes,” he said. “I just want it back.” 

http://www.cjnews.com/