Six drawings by Austrian artist Egon Schiele, recently returned to the heirs of the Jewish collector killed by the Nazis Fritz Grünbaum, will be sold at auction in New York in November, Christie’s announced in a press release.
On September 20, the Manhattan prosecutor’s office in New York announced that several prestigious cultural institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), the Morgan Library in New York, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art ( California), or the Ronald Lauder collection had agreed to return seven works by the artist, a figure of Austrian expressionism.
Three of them, watercolors on paper, one of which is estimated at up to $2.5 million, will be auctioned on November 9, while three other works on paper will be sold two days later, in the part of the fall auctions in New York, announced Christie’s.
The seventh work, “Girl Putting on a Shoe” (1910), returned by MoMA, was the subject of a private sale to “an important collector who demonstrated his support for the victims of the Holocaust,” told AFP the New York lawyer for the heirs of Fritz Grünbaum, Raymond Dowd. The heirs of Fritz Grünbaum, Austrian cabaret artist and great art collector, who died in Dachau in 1941, have been fighting for several decades in court to regain possession of his works, mainly drawings by Egon Schiele (1890-1918).
Arrested in Austria in 1938 then deported to the Dachau camp, the artist was forced to sign a power of attorney for the benefit 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.
The heirs had failed several times in court in the United States, but after the adoption of the “Hear” law by the American Congress in 2016, they won their case over two works in 2018, a New York judge writing in his judgment that a “signature at gunpoint” had no value.
Since then, the collector’s descendants have relaunched their procedures and the Manhattan prosecutor’s office announced Wednesday that two other works by Schiele, recently seized from the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania, northeast) and the Allen Memorial Art Museum in Oberlin University (northeast, Ohio), had been returned to them.