Mahler heir celebrates return of Munch painting

LONDON, Nov 10 (Reuters) Ending a 60 year wait, the heir of composer Gustav Mahler will finally be reunited with a painting by Edvard Munch that the family said was taken unfairly from them after they fled the Nazis in 1938.

The latest high-profile art restitution case ended on Wednesday with an agreement by the Austrian culture ministry to return the Norwegian artist's landscape ''Summer Night on the Beach'' to Marina Mahler, the renowned composer's granddaughter.

She told Reuters yesterday that the long battle had left her ''totally exhausted'' but ''feeling a huge sense of peace''.

''It's a long, long story -- not only my story, but my grandmother's story, the world's story and a story about the horror of the last World War,'' she said by telephone from her London home.

Her grandmother, Mahler's wife Alma who herself fought to have the painting returned, died in 1964 aged 85.

Asked what she would do with the priceless work that has been hanging in the Belvedere gallery in Vienna, Mahler added: ''I am going to sit in front of it and look at it for a long, long, long time.'' According to Marina Mahler's lawyer, Gert-Jan van den Bergh, the painting was given to Alma in 1916. Mahler had died in 1911 and she went on to marry Franz Werfel, who was Jewish.

In 1937 she loaned it to the Belvedere, but in 1938 she was forced to flee Austria after the German annexation.

Her stepfather Carl Moll, who Marina said became a Nazi, sold the painting to the Belvedere without Alma's permission for just 7,000 Reichmarks.

Van den Bergh said changes to the law in 2001 had helped pave the way for the return of the Munch landscape.

The Munch restitution follows a decision by Austria earlier this year to hand five works by Gustav Klimt to Maria Altmann, a descendent of Adele and Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer who lost the works to the Nazis.

The first of those paintings to be sold, ''Adele Bloch-Bauer I'', reportedly fetched a then-world-record 135 million dollars earlier this year, and the remaining four sold at auction in New York late on Wednesday for a combined 193 million dollars.

But the same sale was without a Picasso originally offered by composer Andrew Lloyd Webber's art charity after an 11th-hour claim by a German man who said he was the heir of a Jewish banker who lost the painting in Nazi Germany in a ''forced sale''.

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