FAMILY PORTRAIT.(The Talk of the Town)

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, known as the Gold Portrait, is rendered in oil, with silver and gold leaf. It has hung in the Austrian National Gallery, in Vienna, ever since the Nazis seized it from the collection of Altmann's uncle Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, a socially prominent Jewish banker and beet-sugar magnate, after he fled Austria, in 1938.

Altmann herself fled the Nazis that year, a few months after she was married. (Hers was the last big Jewish wedding to take place in Vienna before the occupation, and Ferdinand gave her a diamond necklace that had belonged to Adele as a wedding gift. It was taken by the Gestapo and, Altmann believes, eventually given to Hermann Goring's wife.) Altmann is now suing the Republic of Austria for the return of the Gold Portrait and five other Klimt paintings--worth perhaps as much as two hundred million dollars--and, in June, won a 6-3 Supreme Court decision allowing the case to be tried in an American court. (Her lawyer, E. Randol Schoenberg, is the grandson of two Austrian composers: Arnold Schoenberg and Eric Zeisl.) This week, a judge in the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles will meet with both parties to determine scheduling for the trial. "I want to see this settled before I go to another world," Altmann said. "I want them to admit that they were wrong and that the paintings are ours."

The case involves a thicket of legal issues, centering on the interpretation of Adele Bloch-Bauer's will, which was written two years before her death, of meningitis, in 1925. In the will, Adele asked her husband, Ferdinand, "to leave my two portraits and the four landscapes by Gustav Klimt" to the National Gallery. "She wrote, 'I am requesting my husband,' " Altmann said. "The German word is ich bitte--ich bitte means I beg, I ask." Besides, Altmann's ...