Seven works of art returned to heirs of Jewish collector killed by Nazis

Seven works by Austrian expressionist artist Egon Schiele, including some in the MoMA collections, were officially returned Wednesday to the heirs of a Jewish collector killed by the Nazis in the Dachau concentration camp in 1941, the prosecutor's office announced. Manhattan. This restitution represents an important victory for the heirs of Fritz Grünbaum, who have been fighting in court for years to regain possession of his works.

According to the prosecution, they were “voluntarily” returned by the institutions which held them, “once proof of their theft by the Nazis had been presented to them”. An official restitution ceremony is planned for 7 p.m. (local time). One of the heirs, Judge Timothy Reif, congratulated the authorities for having "succeeded in solving crimes committed more than 80 years ago."

The seven works had been “seized” in 2023 by the anti-art trafficking unit of the Manhattan public prosecutor's office, two of them at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), but also at the Morgan Library in New York, at the Santa Barbara Art Museum (California), in the Ronald Lauder collection and within the Vally Sabarsky trust, named after the art dealer Serge Sabarsky, who died in 1996, indicates the prosecution from Manhattan.

The works, drawings by Egon Schiele, a figure of Austrian expressionism who died in 1918 at the age of 28, are valued between 780,000 and 2.75 million dollars and their total value exceeds 9 million dollars, according to the same source. Fritz Grünbaum, an Austrian Jewish cabaret artist, was a major art collector who owned over 80 drawings by Schiele, and a critic of the Nazi regime. He was killed in the Dachau concentration camp in 1941.

American justice took up one of the heirs' key arguments. Captured by the Nazis in 1938, Grünbaum was forced to sign a power of attorney in Dachau in favor of his wife, Elisabeth. She herself was then forced to hand over the entire collection to the Nazi authorities, before being deported and killed at the Maly Trostinec concentration camp, near Minsk, in what is now Belarus.

The works reappeared on the art market in the 1950s, first in Switzerland, then resold in New York. A New York magistrate had already ruled in favor of the Grünbaum heirs in 2018, and ordered the restitution of two works by Schiele, writing in his judgment that “a signature at gunpoint” could not have no value.