Egon Schiele: the heirs of a Jewish collector sue the MoMA

The heirs of a collector persecuted during the Nazi regime are trying to recover the works of the Austrian painter Egon Schiele (1890-1918) from the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California. Timothy Reif and David Fraenkel, relatives of the Austrian Jewish collector Fritz Grünbaum, who was killed in 1941 in the Dachau concentration camp, have filed a lawsuit against the New York and California museums respectively over a 1912 painting and a 1915 pencil drawing , both portraits of a woman. The lawsuits, filed last week, allege that Grünbaum was forced to liquidate his assets during his internment at Dachau.

According to the complaint against MoMA, Jewish ownership declaration documents show that eighty-one works of art from Grünbaum’s collection passed into Nazi ownership.

According to MoMa reports, the 1912 painting «Prostitute» was registered in the catalog of a Swiss auction house in 1956. However, the museum does not have any documents relating to acquisition dates subsequent to that 1956 sale, it reads in the writ of summons, and therefore the museum is accused of not having carried out an “adequate investigation” before acquiring the work.

The second lawsuit, which targets the Santa Barbara museum, alleges that Schiele’s 1915 drawing, “Portrait of the Artist’s Wife,” was in the possession of a New York dealer between the mid-1950s and the 1950s. Sixty, before being illegally transferred to another place. A museum spokesman told the Daily Beast, which first reported the news, that the museum was unaware of the drawing’s history before it was purchased as a gift from a private donor. The heirs have taken legal action against four other museums to reclaim legal title to Grünbaum’s artwork. In 2019, two Schiele works were returned to Reif and Fraenkel by London dealer Richard Nagy after a New York judge ruled in favor of the heirs. The two works, “Woman in a Black Apron” (1911) and “Woman Hiding Her Face” (1912), were sold at Christie’s in November 2022 for approximately $500,000 and $2.6 million, respectively.