Two works by Egon Schiele were returned on Friday (19 January) to the heirs of Austrian Jewish cabaret performer Fritz Grünbaum, whose art collection the works were allegedly seized by Nazi Germany before he was killed in the Holocaust. Both works were given to Christie’s, the auction house said.
A restitution ceremony with the Manhattan District Attorney’s office took place in New York on Friday. The pencil drawing Portrait of a man (1917) had been in the collection of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, while Girl With Black Hair (1911), one of the first watercolors, was made at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College in Ohio.
“It gives me enormous personal satisfaction that we can continue to tell Fritz Grünbaum’s story and do the important work of preserving history and deepening our understanding of forced art sales during the Nazi era,” said Marc Porter, president of Christie’s. the Americas, in a statement.
The auction house did not catalog the works, but the Prosecutor’s Office assessed them Black haired girl to $1.5 million and Portrait of a man to $1 million in September.
In September, the Manhattan district attorney ordered the works seized on suspicion that the paintings had been stolen from Grünbaum, who was killed in the Dachau concentration camp in 1941, and at some point trafficked through New York. The heirs of Grünbaum, a French performer who would criticize the Nazi regime on stage, alleged that he was illegally forced to sign his proxy while in Dachau concentration camp, which led to his art collection being sold illegally and widely scattered The son of an art dealer, Grünbaum owned more than 400 works of art, including 81 by Schiele.
“As the heirs of Fritz Grünbaum, we are pleased that this man who fought for what was right in his time continues to make the world more just decades after his tragic death,” Timothy Reif, one of Grünbaum’s heirs, said in a statement.
According to the district attorney’s office, the Grünbaum collection was inventoried by Franz Kieslinger, an art historian who seized the works from a Nazi-controlled warehouse in 1938. Schiele’s work had been declared “degenerate” during the Nazi Party’s campaign against modern art, and much of it was sold abroad in a program overseen by Joseph Goebbels, the party’s chief propagandist.
In September, the Manhattan District Attorney also issued a warrant for the seizure of a third Schiele work that once belonged to Grünbaum, Russian prisoner of war (1916), now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC). In April, the museum will go to court and they argue that he is the legal owner of the watercolor and pencil work. An AIC spokesman said that, based on the museum’s extensive research, Grünbaum’s sister-in-law inherited it Russian prisoner of war and went on to sell the work in 1956.
Grünbaum’s heirs obtained other Schiele works after decades of legal battles. Christie’s offered six recently restored works by Schiele on paper during the auction house’s latest November sales in New York. Some of the proceeds from the Grünbaum Schieles went to support musicians from underrepresented communities through the Grünbaum Fischer Foundation.
