QUICK TAKES - June 6, 2009

The City Council in Linz, Austria, has voted to return a Gustav Klimt picture worth about $15 million to the heirs of a Holocaust victim after new evidence indicated that the portrait was looted by the Nazis.

The painting, which hangs in the city’s Lentos Art Museum, is of Ria Munk. On the basis of new research, Mayor Franz Dobusch recommended that the painting be returned to the heirs of Ria Munk’s mother, Aranka, who commissioned the portrait after Ria’s death. Austria was forced to relinquish five Klimt paintings in 2006 after a court ordered their return to Maria Altmann of Los Angeles.