Egon Schiele
U.S. museums and collectors agree to return seven works of art owned by Fritz Grünbaum after his family fought for their return for 20 years
Seven works of art by Egon Schiele held in the United States will be returned to the heirs of a Jewish cabaret star who owned them before they were murdered in the Dachau concentration camp, Manhattan prosecutors have announced. This marks a turning point in one of the art world’s longest conflicts. Carrying out restitution proceedings for looted art from the Nazi era.
The Austrian expressionist’s works, including a self-portrait, will be voluntarily returned to the heirs of Fritz Grünbaum during a ceremony at the Manhattan district attorney’s office on Wednesday, the New York Times reported.
The works are valued at between $780,000 and $2.75 million (£630,000 and £2.2 million) each and were previously held at the Museum of Modern Art and the Morgan Library & Museum, both in New York, as well as at Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California private collectors, Serge Sabarsky and Ronald S. Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress.
These include the watercolor and pencil work Prostitute (1912), the pencil-on-paper drawing “Portrait of the Artist’s Wife, Edith” (1915), and the Self-Portrait (1910) in black chalk and watercolor on brown paper.
Grünbaum, a well-known Austrian comedian and songwriter, had compiled almost 450 works in the years before the start of World War II. The collection, which consisted primarily of works from the flourishing Austrian pre-war modernism, included 81 works of art by Schiele, a protégé of Gustav Klimt.
Grünbaum was arrested by the National Socialists in his hometown of Vienna in May 1938 and died in the Dachau concentration camp in January 1941. The exact whereabouts of his art collection during the Nazi era are unclear, but about a quarter of his works came onto the international market through a Swiss art dealer in the 1950s.
Grünbaum’s heirs have been trying to get the works from his collection back for more than 20 years. In 1998, the Schiele paintings “Portrait of Wally” and “Dead City” were the subject of a diplomatic dispute between Austria and the United States after they were loaned to the Museum of Modern Art and then held in New York following a subpoena. The works were later returned.
Grünbaum’s heirs tried to legally force the return of twelve Schiele works from the Austrian Albertina and Leopold museums, but a government commission rejected the return claims in 2010 and 2015 on the grounds that the works were never confiscated by the Nazi regime but were sold by his own relatives been.
A court challenge in the United States proved more successful: In 2015, a Manhattan judge ruled in favor of the heirs, who said they had evidence that Grünbaum had been forced to sign a document giving up his valuable collection. An appeal against the verdict was rejected last May.
Schiele artworks believed to have been stolen during the Holocaust confiscated from US museums
Last week, New York investigators seized three Schiele works from the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Museums in Pittsburgh and the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College in Ohio.
In a statement, Oberlin said it was cooperating with investigators and was confident that the college “legally acquired” the work Girl with Black Hair in 1958 and that “we legally own it.”
It is not expected that the Manhattan ruling will have any immediate consequences for the heirs’ lawsuit against the two Austrian museums.
The U.S. Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 generally prohibits foreign states and their agencies from being sued in U.S. courts, but provides an “expropriation exception” for actions that involve the expropriation of property “in violation of international law ” goes.
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