Scene Oil
Music, art and memory: Mahler’s family fights for return of Munch oil painting masterpiece by Candice Christie
The first time Marina Mahler, granddaughter of the great composer Gustav and his talented, passionate wife, Alma, saw her grandmother’s most beloved oil painting, she stayed still in front of it for a long time. “I felt I knew Alma for the first time. This was her favourite oil painting. It meant everything to her.”
The work is Edvard Munch’s hypnotic Summer Night on the Beach, which hangs in the Austrian Art Gallery, one of the gems of a world-renowned collection of early 20th-century art.
Alma Mahler was an extraordinary figure, who married not only Gustav Mahler, but later the founder of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius, and the writer Franz Werfel. She was a gifted composer, but Gustav begged her to “be a wife, and not a colleague”.
After the war, growing up in Los Angeles, Marina Mahler remembers a woman who was “luminous in a way I have never seen anyone else to be”; who awed the neighbours by appearing in the California hills dressed in black, draped in jewels and emerging from a chauffeur-driven car; whose home in New York was “dark and mysterious with chests and cupboards and signed photos everywhere, and intriguing drawers – and the musty smell of Mitteleuropa”.
The fate of her favourite oil painting, however, haunted her until the end of her life. She never accepted it rightfully belonged to the Austrian Art Gallery and fought endlessly to retrieve it – and now her granddaughter has taken up the battle.
As the tanks rolled into Vienna in 1938, Alma Mahler, then married to Werfel, a Jew, was forced to flee the country.
Her Nazi step-family – who undertook a murder-suicide pact at the end of the war – looted her belongings. Her half-sister Marie Eberstaller even made off with Alma’s carpets and silver. And without her permission they sold her beloved Munch to the Austrian Art Gallery. “She fought to her deathbed for the return of her oil painting,” said Ms Mahler.
Ms Mahler’s hopes were dashed when, in 1999, the Austrian restitution committee ruled that the oil painting lawfully belonged to the art gallery. But now, in the light of heavyweight support from such figures as Franz-Stefan Meissel, a Vienna University-based legal expert in restitution cases, and new Austrian legislation aimed at settling remaining restitution questions, she is determined to get the decision reversed.
According to Professor Meissel, if the oil painting were restored to Ms Mahler it would represent a “triumph of justice” – albeit late in the day.
“I would like to conclude this. This issue is not completed, and it needs to end,” the British-born Ms Mahler said. “It’s time for both sides to be gracious. Our new research is completely irrefutable.”
In the coming weeks she will file another formal restitution request to the Austrian authorities – and, according to her lawyer, Gert-Jan van den Bergh, “take whatever steps are necessary to ensure that justice will be done”.
It has been a dramatic few weeks in the Nazi loot restitution game. On Wednesday the Dutch government announced it was returning 202 Oil Paintings, valued at around $50m (£28.7m), to the descendants of the Jewish collector Jacques Goudstikker. And in Vienna itself, thousands of art lovers queued up outside the Austrian Art Gallery last month for a final glimpse of one of the world’s best-loved oil paintings – Adele Bloch-Bauer I, a shimmering, sensuous, gold-flecked portrait made by Gustav Klimt at the height of his powers, which, if put to the hammer, could become the most expensive oil painting ever sold.
The Klimt was the focus of a six-year struggle by its Californian claimant, and it was resolved by arbitration only after the Austrian state itself faced trial in the US. Austria is desperately calculating how, or whether, it can afford to raise the
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January 17, 2012 6:25 am
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