US Returns Stolen Schiele Artworks to Heirs of Jewish Cabaret Star
Seven artworks by Austrian painter Egon Schiele have been returned to the heirs of Fritz Grünbaum, a Jewish cabaret star who owned them before being killed by the Nazis in 1941. The artworks, valued at between $780,000 and $2.75m each, had been on display at prominent museums in the US. The Grünbaum family had been seeking their return for over two decades. Lawsuits were filed in multiple courtrooms over the claims.
In 2018, a New York civil court ruled that the pieces were never sold or surrendered by Mr. Grünbaum. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, as well as the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California, voluntarily agreed to hand the pieces over to prosecutors after learning that they had been stolen.
Other pieces were in the possession of Ronald Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress, and the estate of Serge Sabarsky, a renowned art collector, who also agreed to return them. Mr. Grünbaum owned a total of 81 Schiele pieces before his death in a concentration camp at Dachau in Germany.
His wife, Elisabeth, was forced to surrender his art collection to Nazi officials after he was arrested in 1938. She later died in a concentration camp in 1942. Adolf Hitler had declared Schiele’s pieces as degenerate art and they were sold to finance the Nazi Party. Some of them ended up with a New York dealer called Otto Kallir, who sold them to various buyers.
To fight for the return of two Schiele pieces from London-based collector Richard Nagy, Mr. Grünbaum’s heirs went to court in New York State in 2018. Judge Charles V Ramos ruled in their favor, stating that it was unlikely Mr. Grünbaum voluntarily gave away the artworks when detained at Dachau. This prompted the heirs to approach the Manhattan District Attorney to determine if other Schiele pieces belonging to Mr. Grünbaum would also count as stolen property under New York law.
Using this approach, prosecutors were able to trace the path of the seven artworks through New York and into different collections. Timothy Reif, a relative of Mr. Grünbaum, commended New York prosecutors for their role in returning the artworks to their rightful owners. He expressed that the recovery of these long-lost artworks brings a measure of justice for the victims of murder and robbery.
Among the artworks returned is a piece titled I Love Antithesis valued at $2.75m and Standing Woman, which was previously displayed at MoMA and is valued at $1.5m. Last week, Manhattan prosecutors also seized three other artworks from galleries in Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Ohio. The New York State Supreme Court determined there is reasonable cause to believe that the artworks constitute stolen property. While the pieces remain at the museums for now, the ongoing federal case aims to establish their true ownership.
