Like Altmann, Mr. Schoenberg’s roots went deep into Austria’s past. His grandfather was composer Arnold Schoenberg, who died before Randol was born. (Mr. Schoenberg said he plays violin “very badly.”)
“[Altmann] and my grandmother were very close friends,” he said of his client, who died in 2011 at 94. “At the time [the case] started, her husband had died, my grandparents had died, so she was sort of the last link” to the Jewish Viennese community all but destroyed upon Nazi Germany’s takeover in 1938 and the subsequent world war.
Prior to the rise of Nazism in Europe, Vienna was viewed by many as the cultural center of the world. In addition to Klimt and Schoenberg, the city was home to composers Richard Strauss and Erich Wolfgang Korngold, stage pioneer Max Reinhardt, and psychiatrist Sigmund Freud and his many acolytes and rivals. Among the talent percolating were Billy Wilder and Otto Preminger, who went on to become great film directors after migrating to America.
“I was very keen on presenting the Bloch-Bauer family as the epitome of that Jewish community that was shattered almost overnight in 1938,” Mr. Curtis said. “I think that community thought of themselves as more Austrian than Jewish, and I think that’s one of the reasons that a lot of them thought, ‘We’ll be fine, because we’re Austrians.’
“And you could argue that once the Jews left, [Vienna] never regained its status as a great city.”
Yet Klimt’s painting of Adele Bloch-Bauer, despite its model’s religion, was prized by a high-ranking German who reappropriated it for himself. When Germany was defeated in 1945, the canvas found its way into the Austrian museum.
“She did have a sort of ambivalence toward Austria that I didn’t see quite as much from my grandmother,” Mr. Schoenberg said of Altmann, who was but 22 when she escaped her homeland. “I remember she said, ‘I could take it or leave it,’ whereas the older ones still felt really tied to it.”
The portrait of her aunt was another matter.
“I was very struck by the way she talked with great pride,” Mr. Curtis said, “that ‘My aunt hangs in the balance.’”
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