Holocaust victim's heirs to pay Austria after mix-up over returned Klimt

The family of a Jewish woman who was forced to sell a Gustav Klimt painting in 1938 to survive have agreed to pay Austria $11.3 million after a mix-up over the painting concerned meant the wrong one was returned to them, Austria said on Friday.

The history of the piece

Nora Stiasny, Viennese niece of art collector Victor Zuckerkandl, was deported by the Nazis with her mother Amalie Zuckerkandl to the Izbica ghetto in Poland for being Jewish. She is believed to have been killed there or in the nearby Belzec extermination camp.

Austria returned Klimt's "Apfelbaum II" ("Apple Tree II") to Stiasny's descendants from Vienna's Belvedere museum in 2001, believing it to be the painting she was forced to sell in 1938, the year Nazi Germany annexed Austria.

Experts later determined, however, that the painting she sold was in fact most likely Klimt's "Rosen unter Baeumen" ("Roses Under Trees"), and in 2021 France agreed to return that work to Stiasny's heirs from the Musee d'Orsay.

By then, however, the family had sold "Apple Tree II," and the current owners were not interested in selling it, Austria's culture ministry said in a statement announcing the settlement with Stiasny's family.

"Even though it hurts that it is not possible to bring the painting 'Apple Tree II' back to Austria, it is still gratifying that the long and complicated issue of this painting's restitution is coming to an end with the settlement that has now been reached," the statement quoted the junior minister for art and culture, Andrea Mayer, as saying.