AUSTRIA: Austria's culture minister has agreed to abide by a court ruling and to give up ownership of five precious Gustav Klimt paintings to a Californian woman who says the Nazis stole them from her Jewish family.
Elizabeth Gehrer said Austria would comply with the arbitration court's decision yesterday that the country is obliged to give the paintings to Maria Altmann. Ms Altmann (89) was one of the heirs of the family who owned the paintings before the Nazis took over Austria in 1938.
Ms Gehrer said her ministry was exploring ways to be able to keep at least two of the best-known pictures on display in Austria but ruled out buying them, saying there was no money for such a solution. The paintings are worth at least $150 million.
But for Klimt lovers, at least one of the disputed paintings - the oil and gold- encrusted portrait Adele Bloch-Bauer I - is priceless. Ms Altmann is the niece of Adele Bloch-Bauer, who died in 1925.
The subject's family commissioned her famous portrait and owned it, along with the four other Klimt paintings disputed in the case.
Austria considers the paintings part of its national heritage. Klimt was a founder of the Vienna Secession art movement that for many became synonymous with Jugendstil, the German and central European version of Art Nouveau.