The artwork depicts an apple tree amidst a cloudy landscape. Since 1998, Austria has returned dozens of paintings that hung on the walls of its cultural institutions, among them Klimt's "Apple Tree II" (1916). "It is not the case that the export procedure was used as a tool to force Lederer into an agreement," Clemens Jabloner, head of the Austrian Art Restitution Advisory Board, said at the time. Yet in 2015 the restitution committee advised the government not to return it. The frieze fulfilled all the conditions for restitution, confirms Austrian provenance researcher Lillie. In 2009, an extension was added for cases of post-war export bans and disadvantaged sales. In 1998, Austria created a restitution committee, and passed a law enabling heirs to reclaim their artworks. "What people don't know is that a lot of it" - the aggressive government acquisition of artworks - "took place after the war," says the heir. Erich Lederer, who had moved to Geneva, was therefore forced to sell the work at a cut-rate price, claim the heirs.īy 1972, Lederer had lost all hope of getting the artwork sent to Switzerland, and accepted the government's offer of 15 million shillings, around $750,000 dollars. "From the beginning they told Erich that the frieze wasn't up for discussion," says one of the heirs, who prefers to remain anonymous. The frieze was returned to the Lederer family - at least in theory. But the work could not leave Austria since it was subject to an export ban, put in place to prevent émigré families from taking away what was beginning to be considered Austria's cultural heritage. Theirs was one of the first art collections seized by the Nazis in 1938. When the war ended, Erich Lederer, August and Serena's son, took it upon himself to get back his family's collection. It was rumored that Klimt was the father of Serena Lederer's daughter, Elisabeth Bachofen-Echt An era forwarded by Klimt, among other artists. The visual representation of the composer's "Ninth Symphony" as interpreted by Richard Wagner is an image of Vienna's modernism. Gustav Klimt painted the 34-meter-long (112-foot-long) fresco for the Viennese Secession's celebratory exhibition of Beethoven's life and work in 1902. Read more: Vienna marks 100 years since artistic heyday "It was inconceivable for people that there could be a claim for the frieze," says Austrian provenance researcher Sophie Lillie. In 2013, the heirs of the Lederer family, who had owned the frieze before it was looted by the Nazis, demanded its restitution, adding an unexpected chapter to the work's contentious past. In 2004, it was chosen as the main motif for Austria's 100-euro gold and silver commemorative coins. Every year, thousands of visitors from around the globe enter Vienna's Secession building to contemplate the work. The "Beethoven Frieze" by artist Gustav Klimt is one Austria's most valuable cultural treasures.
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