The heirs of art collector and Holocaust victim Nora Stiasny will have to pay $11.3 million (10.5 million euros) to the Austrian state for the improper return of a Gustav Klimt painting, the Austrian Ministry of Culture said Friday.
After years of negotiations, the Austrian government and Stiansy’s heirs have reached an agreement whereby the latter will pay 10.5 million euros to the state for the incorrect return of a painting by Klimt, since instead of ‘Apfelbaum II’, the family delivered ‘Roses under the trees’.
The funds will be invested in the House of Austrian History, a historical museum that has just moved, the Ministry of Culture has announced.
Nora Stiasny, a Nazi deportee and Holocaust victim, was forced to sell the Austrian painter Klimt’s oil painting ‘Apfelbaum II’ due to persecution.
Later, in 2001, the Advisory Board for the Restitution of Works of Art recommended to the Austrian Government to return the above mentioned painting to Stiansy’s descendants from the Belvedere Museum in Vienna, under the belief that it was the painting she was forced to sell in 1938, the year of Austria’s annexation to Nazi Germany.
However, experts later came to the conclusion that the painting originally sold by Stiansy was not ‘Apfelbaum II’ but ‘Rosen unter Baeumen’ (Roses under the Trees), also by Gustav Klimt, a work that would be removed from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris – where it had been kept since 1980 – and returned to the family heirs.
However, by then, Stiansy’s family had already sold the ‘Apfelbaum II’ and the current owners, after years of negotiations, have not agreed to sell or return the work to the Austrian State, considering the oil painting their private property.
«Both the heirs and the Austrian Government then tried to contact the current owners of ‘Apfelbaum II’ regarding a possible repurchase. However, they showed no interest in entering into a corresponding dialogue,» the statement from the Austrian Ministry of Culture has stated.
For her part, the head of Art and Culture Andrea Mayer has stressed in the statement that, «although it is painful that there is no possibility of returning the painting ‘Apfelbaum II’ to Austria,» she is pleased that the «long and complicated history» in this return has come to an end. He also recalled that this and other cases of return of works of art «are based on the systematic exclusion, persecution and murder of countless people during National Socialism».
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
