Mahler family fights for Munch masterpiece
Last Updated: Sunday, February 12, 2006 | 4:16 PM ET
CBC Arts
The granddaughter of composer Gustav Mahler and his wife Alma says she will petition Austria for the return of Edvard Munch’s Summer Night on the Beach to her family.
“This was her favourite painting. It meant everything to her,” said Marina Mahler of her grandmother Alma in an interview with The Guardian newspaper.
The Norwegian masterpiece hangs in the Austrian Gallery and is considered one of the gems of early 20th century art.
The painting has a long, complex history. The latest attempt will mark a 60-year battle by the Mahlers to reclaim the work.
"No painting has ever touched me in the way this one has."—Alma Mahler
Alma Mahler, herself a gifted composer, went on to marry Walter Gropius, the founder of Bauhaus, and then writer Franz Werfel, who was Jewish. Alma Mahler fought to get the painting back until her death in New York in 1964.
Gropius gave the painting as a gift to his wife upon the birth of their daughter, Manon, who died of polio at age 18. For Alma, the painting became linked to Manon. “No painting has ever touched me in the way this one has,” wrote Alma in her autobiography, Mein Leben.
In 1937, Alma loaned the painting to the Austrian Gallery for safekeeping. A year later, she and Werfel fled Austria as tanks rolled in. Her stepfather, Carl Moll, a Nazi sympathizer, removed the painting from the gallery without her approval. In 1939, he sold it back to the gallery.
Claims are overturned on technicalities
She filed a claim to the Austrian restitution commission in 1953, which upheld her claim but overturned it on a technicality.
A new restitution law enacted in 1998 raised hopes in the Mahler family for the painting’s return. Marina Mahler, who lives in Los Angeles, filed a claim to the restitution advisory board in 1999. The board rendered a judgment that acknowledged her ownership on “historical and moral grounds.” But then threw out the claim, saying the matter had been dealt with in 1953.
Gert-Jan van den Bergh, Mahler’s lawyer, says the outcome bewildered him. He sees it as “a trifle cynical to confirm Marina Mahler’s claim on moral grounds then to deny it on purely formalistic ones.”
The Austrian Gallery has declined to comment on the case.
The Mahler situation is one in a long series of restitution cases involving Nazi-looted art. The Dutch government recently agreed to return more than 200 paintings by Old Masters to the relatives of a Jewish art dealer whose collection was ransacked by the Nazis.
The niece of an Austrian-Jewish industrialist just won her fight with the Austrian government for the return of works by Gustav Klimt, taken by the Nazis when they invaded Austria.
As Mahler prepares another claim, she has gathered the support of Franz-Stefan Meissell, a Vienna University expert in restitution cases.
“I truly hope after years of delays and refusals, that Alma …will at last be given just treatment,” said Marina Mahler.
