A watercolor by Egon Schiele, “Boy in a sailor suit”, should be sold next month in London from Christie to Christie after the house of rods has mediated a settlement between the deliveries and heirs of a Viennese cabaret artist who He possessed the work before being before he had killed him in a Nazi concentration camp.
The portrait of 1914, with a low estimate of $ 1.3 million, is one of the approximately 80 works of the Austrian expressionist artist that the executor of Cabaret, Fritz Grünbaum, possessed. A frank critic of the Nazis, Grünbaum was arrested by Gestapo in 1938 and was imprisoned in two concentration camps, including Dachau, where he died in 1941.
After decades of work to trace and claim his collection, his heirs, Timothy Reif and David Frankel, have recovered or achieved the settlements on a series of works by Schiele on paper in recent years. Christie’s auctioned 12 of the recovered works.
The heirs, with the support of the investigators of the Manhattan District Prosecutor’s Office, said that the wife of Grünbaum, Elisabeth, was forced to deliver the art collection to Nazi officials. Elisabeth was deported to a concentration camp in 1942 and assassinated.
But the Art Institute of Chicago, which has a Schiele Watercolor once owned by Grünbaum, has mentioned evidence that the disputes that the collection has ever been taken by the Nazis and went to court to fight the seizure of the work has ever been taken , called “Russian prisoner war”, of investigators. The Institute claims that the work was not sacked, but remained in the Grünbaum family until he was sold to the art trader Eberhard Kornfeld by the sister -in -law of Grünbaum, Mathilde Lukacs, in 1956.
A judge of the Supreme Court of New York, who held several days of auditions during the dispute last autumn, is scheduled to issue a sentence in the coming weeks.
In its materials associated with the sale of the ackal, Christie’s, who has its department of origin who searches for return issues, has embraced the position held by the heirs, who are looking for the return of hundreds of works once held by Grünbaum.
“Fritz Grünbaum’s art collection was confiscated by the Nazis in Post-AnSchluss Austria,” said Richard Aronwitz, head of return at the Auction House in a note.
The efforts to resolve the origin and property of Grünbaum’s works led to more judicial cases.
In 2018, the Supreme Court of New York established that Grünbaum never sold or voluntarily renounced the works before his death and that the heirs were the legitimate owners of two designs of Schiele in the collection of the art trader Richard Nagy. In 2019, that sentence was supported by a New York Court of Appeal.
Manhattan investigators cited those judgments in the seizure of a number of works by Schiele in US museums and private collections. In 2023 and 2024, for example, five museums reported works to the heirs, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Carnegie Museum of Art.
But in two other civil cases – one that directly involves the “prisoner of Russian war” of the Art Institute – the federal courts have decided for procedural reasons that the heirs of Grünbaum have come forward too late to claim the works. One of the federal judges also described Kornfeld’s account of having purchased the works from Lukacs as credible.
Separately, two museums in Vienna – Albertina and the Leopold Museum – are also fighting the affirmations of the heirs for the works of Schiele in their collections on the basis of the fact that the Austrian sovereign immunity protects them from the causes.
The “boy in a sailo” consumer is a German woman who had purchased the watercolor from Sotheby’s in 1992, according to Dirk Boll, CEO of Christie’s in Germany.
Michelle McMullan, Who is running the Christie’s Evening Sale of 20th- and 21st-Century Art in March, at which the Schiele Will Be Featured, Described it as “One of the best watercolors i Have Handled” and said it show the artist- whose The art the Nazis considered “degenerated” – “up to par of his powers “. Sbarly elements, like the missing left hand, “evokes movement and spontaneity,” he said.
The deliveries, informed of the origin of Grünbaum, asked Christie to help mediate an agreement with the heirs of Grünbaum, according to Boll. He said he intends to donate his proceeds from sales to kindergarten in Munich. The sale will also raise funds for the Grünbaum Fischer Foundation for performing artists, according to Christie’s.
“This is another time to celebrate the memory of our family member, who was a courageous artist, an art collector and a fascism opponent,” said Reif in a press declaration.