1. Maria Altmann was an Austrian-American Jewish refugee from Austria, who fled her home country after it was annexed to the Nazi's Third Reich.
11 Facts About Maria Altmann
1. 2.
Maria Altmann is noted for her ultimately successful legal campaign to reclaim from the Government of Austria five family-owned paintings by the artist Gustav Klimt that were stolen by the Nazis during World War II.
3.
Maria Altmann was born Maria Victoria Bloch on February 18,1916, in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, the daughter of Marie Therese and Gustav Bloch.
4.
Maria Altmann was a niece of Adele Bloch-Bauer, a wealthy Jewish patron of the arts who served as the model for some of Klimt's best-known paintings and who hosted a Viennese salon that regularly attracted the most prominent artists of the day, including Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Arthur Schnitzler, Johannes Brahms, Franz Werfel, Alma Mahler, Leo Slezak, Otto Wagner, George Minne, Karl Renner, Julius Tandler, and Klimt.
5.
Maria Altmann's nephew was Canadian businessman and arts patron Peter Bentley.
6.
Maria Altmann became the face of cashmere in California and eventually started her own clothing business.
7.
Maria Altmann's proposal was not treated seriously by the Austrian authorities.
8.
In 2000, Altmann filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Central District of California with her lawyer E Randol Schoenberg under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.
9.
Maria Altmann died on February 7,2011, at her home in the Cheviot Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, 11 days shy of her 95th birthday.
10.
Maria Altmann is portrayed in the 2012 memoir The Accidental Caregiver by Gregor Collins, which documents their chance meeting and three years together, ending at her death in 2011.
11.
Maria Altmann is portrayed by Helen Mirren and Tatiana Maslany in the 2015 film Woman in Gold, chronicling Maria Altmann's nearly decade-long struggle to recover the Klimt paintings.