A doubtlessly Nazi-looted drawing by famed Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele is on the centre of an possession dispute involving members of the Lehman Brothers US banking dynasty.
Schiele’s Portrait of the Artist’s Spouse (1917) was bought in 1964 by Robert Owen Lehman Sr—an artwork collector and banker who steered the Lehman Brothers funding agency by way of the Nice Despair—as a vacation reward for his son, Robert Owen Lehman Jr. Now, the heirs of two Jewish artwork collectors—Karl Mayländer and Heinrich Rieger—have alleged that their family members had been dispossessed of the work in the course of the Holocaust. Mayländer, a textile service provider who seems in two Schiele portraits, and Rieger, Schiele’s dentist, had been each killed by the Nazis in the course of the Second World Warfare.
A trial over the contested possession of the drawing started on 7 Might in Rochester, New York, with heirs of three Jewish households making their claims to the Schiele work. Court docket papers filed upfront of the trial define proof of rightful possession from every celebration.
Representatives for the Robert Owen Lehman Jr. Basis, which has owned the drawing since 2016, have claimed that there aren’t any surviving information of the drawing’s provenance from 1930 to 1964, including that the piece had not been listed in “any database of stolen or looted works” for many years after the top of the Second World Warfare, in line with The New York Occasions. The heirs insist that the inspiration didn’t totally examine the piece’s provenance, citing paperwork that proves possession.
Robert Owen Lehman Sr. paid round $5,600 for the gouache and black crayon illustration when he initially bought it from Marlborough Advantageous Artwork in London. The 17 inch by 18 inch paintings depicts Schiele’s spouse Edith, who like Egon died of the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918.
Portrait of the Artist’s Spouse is notable not just for its artistry, but additionally its historical past with the Lehmans, a household whose storied monetary empire dates again to 1850 when three brothers based Lehman Brothers. Upon Robert Owen Lehman Sr’s dying in 1969, almost 3,000 works from the devoted artwork patron’s assortment—together with items by Goya and Rodin—had been donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, which named a wing after him.
Robert Owen Lehman Jr didn’t be a part of the household enterprise—which filed for chapter in September 2008, accelerating the worldwide monetary disaster that got here to be often called the Nice Recession—as a substitute selecting to change into a documentary filmmaker. After he and his first spouse, Aki Lehman, divorced, she claimed that the drawing had been destroyed or misplaced. Following her dying in 2013, he discovered beneath her mattress.
Lehman Jr gave the drawing to his basis in 2016 with the intention to promote the work and use the proceeds to “promote the appreciation and public consciousness of classical music and encourage the creation of latest inventive work together with musical composition”.
After the inspiration consigned the work on the market with Christie’s, the public sale home reviewed its database of details about looted artwork, the place potential connections to Mayländer and Rieger had been noticed. The heirs had been then contacted by Christie’s, precipitating the possession dispute and subsequent trial.
The Susan Zirkl Memorial Basis Belief and its trustee, Michael D. Lissner, declare that the drawing had been owned by a relative of Zirkl, Mayländer, who was deported to the Polish Lodz ghetto the place he was killed in 1941. After the conflict, the paintings got here into the possession of an acquaintance, Etelka Hofmann, who might have offered it to a collector in 1960.
Schiele’s iterative material and prolific manufacturing make the provenance identification of his doubtlessly Nazi-looted works uniquely tough. Lehman Jr testified that whereas he had sympathy for heirs whose family members suffered beneath the Nazi regime, he had “spent a very good 12 months attempting to get these two events and myself collectively to make some kind of equitable, honest division of the paintings”.
Avi Bar, one of many Rieger heirs, instructed the Occasions that the dispute underscores “the justice of returning what was stolen in the course of the Holocaust to the rightful heirs have to be finished”.
