To read: In Austria, the immense work of restitution of works looted by the Nazis
“Thank you for placing yourself on the right side of history. What you have done is historic,” greeted one of them, Judge Timothy Reif, congratulating the authorities for having “elucidated crimes committed more than 80 years ago.”
Voluntary restitution
Schiele’s drawings, watercolors or pencil on paper, such as “I love Antithesis”, “Standing Woman”, or “Portrait of a Boy”, were in prestigious collections at the Museum of Modern Art in New York ( MoMA), at the Morgan Library in New York, at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (California), in the Ronald Lauder collection and within the Vally Sabarsky trust, named after the art dealer Serge Sabarsky, who died in 1996.
President of the World Jewish Congress, heir to the Estée Lauder cosmetics group and founder with Serge Sabarsky of the Neue Galerie in New York, Ronald Lauder was himself a defender of the restitution of works looted by the Nazis.
According to the Manhattan prosecutor’s office, the drawings, with a total value exceeding $9 million, were “voluntarily” returned by the institutions that held them, “once evidence of their theft by the Nazis had been presented to them “.
A power of attorney signed under duress
Fritz Grünbaum was an Austrian Jewish cabaret artist and great art collector who owned more than 80 drawings by Schiele. This critic of the Nazi regime was arrested and deported to the Dachau concentration camp, where he died in 1941.
Also read: First images of paintings looted by the Nazis
American justice has taken up one of the key arguments of its heirs. 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.
“These priceless works of art contain a story that we cannot ignore and tell the realities suffered by millions of people during the Holocaust,” Ivan J. Arvelo, a special agent in charge of security investigations, said at the ceremony. Interior (HSI) in New York. “Fritz Grünbaum and his wife, Elisabeth, never had the opportunity to recover their precious art objects before their untimely deaths, but their legacy will live on.”
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, ordering the restitution of two works by Schiele, writing in his judgment that “a signature at gunpoint” could not have any value.
A current fight
The subject of restitution remains relevant in other countries. In France, Parliament adopted a framework law in July to facilitate the restitution by public collections of cultural property stolen from Jews under Nazi Germany. According to figures published at an international conference in Terezin in the Czech Republic in 2009, around 100,000 works out of 650,000 stolen had still not been returned at the time.
Read also: Historians are surprised by the “scale of the dispossession” of French Jews
The Grünbaum heirs’ quest is not over. Last week, three other drawings by Egon Schiele for which they claim ownership were seized by the courts, notably at the Art Institute of Chicago.
2023-09-21 03:56:33
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