FAMILY PORTRAIT.(The Talk of the Town)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 25-OCT-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

In the past several years, Maria Altmann, an amiable eighty-eight-year-old resident of Los Angeles with a lilting Austrian accent, has become something of an art-world personage. The other day, serving a picnic of Lipton tea and homemade Liptauer cheese in her living room, she spoke of friendships with the philanthropist Ronald Lauder ("Charming!"), who co-founded the Neue Galerie, in New York, and with the chairman of Christie's in America ("He just called!"). She smiled and said, "Of course, when they think I get the painting, they all . . ." Altmann lives in a small redwood bungalow with an orange tree in front, a fantastic collection of miniature seventeenth-century French watches, and a poster of "Adele Bloch-Bauer I," a 1907 portrait of her aunt by Gustav Klimt. The painting,...

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