Stealing Klimt

imagine… • Season 11 • Episode 2

About this episode

Alan Yentob tells the story of the struggle by 90-year-old Maria Altmann to recover five Gustav Klimt paintings stolen from her family by the Nazis in 1938 and which have hung in the Austrian National Gallery ever since. It chronicles Maria's early life in glittering fin-de-siecle Vienna, her escape from Nazi terror and her fight to recover the Klimts against all the odds, which takes her to the US Supreme Court and pits her not just against Austria, but also against the Bush administration.