Leonard Lauder Is Sued Over a Klimt Painting
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The grandson of a woman who died during the Holocaust has sued Leonard Lauder for the recovery of a Gustav Klimt painting, “Blooming Meadow” (1904-05), which he claims belonged to his grandmother and was taken from her as a result of Nazi persecution.
According to the complaint, filed yesterday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the plaintiff, Georges Jorisch, was born in Austria. In 1938, he escaped with his father, Louis, to Belgium, where they succeeded in hiding out until the end of the war. His mother and his grandmother, Amalie Redlich, remained in Vienna. In 1941, they were deported to the Jewish ghetto in Lodz, Poland, and were never heard from again.
In 1947, Louis Jorisch filed a claim with the Austrian government seeking, among other artworks, three Klimt paintings that belonged to his mother-in-law. He described one as a landscape of an Italian village with a church (later identified as “Church in Cassone”), and the other two as “flowery meadow[s].” Louis died in 1949.
In 2003, Georges Jorisch hired an attorney, E. Randol Schoenberg, who began researching the provenance of all the Klimt paintings that could be described as a “flowery meadow.” A process of elimination yielded “Blooming Meadow” as the only painting that matched the description and lacked an established pre-World War II provenance. It took some further detective work to track the painting to Mr. Lauder.
According to Mr. Schoenberg, the key evidence comes from two documentary sources: A 1956 catalogue of Klimt paintings includes an entry for “Flowery Meadow” attributed to “the Estate of Amalie Redlich”; however, it does not contain a reproduction of the painting. A 1967 dissertation on Klimt includes an entry for a painting called “Garden Landscape (Blooming Meadow),” including the same exhibition history as that of the painting in the 1956 catalogue, as well as an image of the painting now belonging to Mr. Lauder.
Mr. Schoenberg passed this evidence to the deputy director and chief curator of the Belvedere Gallery in Vienna, Alfred Weidinger, who thereby concluded in his new catalogue raisonnée of Klimt’s works, published this month, that the painting now owned by Mr. Lauder was also owned by Amalie Redlich.
Last month, Mr. Schoenberg, who had previously been in touch with Mr. Lauder to request provenance information for the painting, demanded its return, and Mr. Lauder refused. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Lauder declined to comment on the lawsuit. Mr. Schoenberg also represented Maria Altmann in her successful attempt to recover six Klimt paintings that belonged to her uncle, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, until he fled Austria in 1938. Ms. Altmann subsequently sold one of the paintings, “Adele Bloch Bauer I,” to Ronald Lauder, Leonard’s brother and the president of the Neue Galerie, for a reported $135 million. Ronald Lauder has been criticized recently for not providing complete provenance information for the works in the Neue Galerie’s collection. Mr. Lauder built his collection with the assistance of the dealer Serge Sabarsky, who also sold “Blooming Meadow” to Leonard Lauder in 1983. In the complaint, Mr. Schoenberg concludes that Sabarsky, who died in 1996, smuggled “Blooming Meadow” out of Austria, because there is no record of an export permit being issued for it.