This morning (26 July), the Manhattan District Lawyer’s Workplace hosted what Matthew Bogdanos, chief of its Antiquities Trafficking Unit, referred to as a “celebration”—returning a Nazi-looted Egon Schiele drawing to heirs of Fritz Grünbaum, an Austrian Jewish cabaret performer and artwork collector who was murdered at Dachau in 1941.
“As a boss, you’re not presupposed to have a favorite,” Bogdanos mentioned on the restitution ceremony, “however there are some instances and a few days the place the tragedies have been so nice and the fun so actual, that it’s a idiot’s errand to faux that it’s simply one other day on the workplace. And that is a type of days.”
The drawing, Seated Nude Girl (1918), was made lower than yr earlier than Schiele’s dying and is believed to depict his spouse, Edith. It had been within the possession of the Papanek household, Austrian Jews who had efficiently fled the Nazis in 1938 and purchased the work many years later with none information of its historical past. After rising suspicious of its provenance lately, the Papaneks particularly sought out Grünbaum’s heirs with a view to “do the appropriate factor” and return the work.
Members of the Grünbaum and Papanek households have been current on the ceremony. “Each of those households have been deeply impacted by the Holocaust,” District Lawyer Alvin L. Bragg mentioned throughout the occasion. “It’s notably transferring for me to be right here alongside them.”
Seated Nude Girl was bought in Manhattan by Helene and Ernst Papanek and given to their son, Gustav, in 1969. It was after Gustav’s dying in 2022 that his kinfolk started their analysis into the drawing’s provenance.
Egon Schiele’s Seated Nude Girl (1918) Picture: Courtesy the Manhattan District Lawyer’s Workplace
Talking on behalf of the Papaneks, Gustav’s son-in-law Rocco Orlando referred to as the entire ordeal a “bittersweet irony of two households with a historical past of nice hurt and struggling due to the Holocaust. Helene and Ernst Papanek, who acquired this drawing, did so to attach themselves to their Viennese roots, to the roots of Austrian Expressionism.” He added that Ernst had been a “distinguished socialist reformer”, who throughout the Second World Warfare helped Jewish youngsters flee Austria and Germany.
Seated Nude Girl is one in every of greater than 80 Schiele works taken from Grünbaum and his household by the Nazis. As a result of Schiele’s artwork was deemed “degenerate” by the regime, the items have been offered overseas and the proceeds used to fund the conflict. Most of Grünbaum’s Schieles finally discovered their strategy to Galerie St. Etienne in New York Metropolis. The gallery’s founder, Otto Kallir, personally offered Seated Nude Girl to the Papaneks for $4,000 in 1961, in keeping with Tom Mashberg in The New York Instances.
The drawing will now head to Christie’s. The Grünbaum inheritor Paul Reif famous on the ceremony that, like with different works returned to the household, proceeds from the sale would go to the Grünbaum Fischer Basis “to assist younger, splendidly proficient and underprivileged performing artists”.
Marc Porter, chairman and head of restitution at Christie’s, mentioned in a press release: “Christie’s is thrilled to play its half within the rising legacy of Fritz Grünbaum and his heirs. Right this moment, one other murals that belonged to Fritz is rightfully restituted to his household, and because the public sale home with the most important restitution division on the earth, Christie’s appears to be like ahead to providing this piece within the close to future.” (Christie’s has offered various different Schieles restituted to the Grünbaum heirs through the years.)
This marks the Manhattan DA’s third restitution ceremony and eleventh work returned to the Grünbaum household. Since September 2023 alone, 5 US museums and 4 non-public collections have returned works to the household. Grünbaum’s is now the largest Holocaust art-restitution case within the US. A spat between the Manhattan DA’s Workplace and the Artwork Institute of Chicago over the rightful possession of a Schiele drawing of a conflict prisoner as soon as belonging to Grünbaum is slowly making its strategy to court docket.
Since its inception in 2017, the Antiquities Trafficking Unit has held 93 repatriation and restitution ceremonies and recovered greater than 5,500 works value greater than $450m to 35 international locations and people. The unit has additionally convicted 16 folks of cultural-property trafficking and filed extraditions for six others.
