(ANSA) - NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 10 - New York billionaire and collector Ronald Lauder will continue to own a famous painting by Gustav Klimt after agreeing to return it and buy it again from the heirs of a Jewish woman who had had it in her home before the Second World War.
The heir to the Estee Lauder cosmetics house, who is also president of the WorldJewish Congress, had bought the painting for the first time, painted in 1910 and depicting a woman in a hat with a black feather, fifty years ago from a Manhattan gallery and he had exhibited it several times at the Neue Galerie, the museum dedicated to Austrian and German art of the twentieth century which he founded in 2001.
The original owner, Irene Beran, had owned it until at least 1934, when she lived in Brno, now part of the Czech Republic.
Both Lauder and Irene's heirs have agreed that the story of the picture between 1934 and 1957 (the year it resurfaced in an exhibition in Salzburg) is not clear.
The 'hole' in the painting's history and the fact that it coincided with the seizures of works of art belonging to Jews during the Nazis led Lauder to proceed with the return, indicated a spokesman quoted by the New York Times.
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