US returns Egon Schiele art stolen by Nazis to heirs

The US has returned seven artworks by Austrian painter Egon Schiele to the heirs of a Jewish cabaret star who owned them before he was killed by the Nazis in 1941.

Fritz Grünbaum’s family had sought the return of his Schiele pieces for more than two decades.

Valued at between $780,000 (£633,000) and $2.75m apiece, some had been on display at prominent museums in the US.

The claims prompted lawsuits in several courts.

In 2018, a New York civil court ruled the pieces were never sold or surrendered by Mr Grünbaum.

In a ceremony on Monday, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg called the return of the artwork “historic”.

The museums where the pieces were held – the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Morgan Library & Museum, both in New York, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California – agreed to give the pieces voluntarily to prosecutors after learning that they had been stolen.

A few of the pieces were also in the possession of Ronald Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress, and the estate of Serge Sabarsky, a well-known art collector, both of whom agreed to return them.

Mr Grünbaum, who died in a concentration camp at Dachau in Germany, owned 81 pieces by Schiele.

His wife, Elisabeth, was forced to hand over his art collection to the Nazis after he was arrested in 1938. She later died in a concentration camp in 1942.

Schiele’s pieces had been declared “degenerate art” by Adolf Hitler, and were sold to finance the Nazi Party.

Some had ended up in the possession of a New York dealer by the name of Otto Kallir, who sold them to different buyers.

The heirs of Mr Grünbaum went to court in New York State in 2018 to fight for the return of two Schiele pieces from a London-based collector named Richard Nagy.

The judge overseeing the case, Charles V Ramos, ruled in their favour, stating that it is unlikely Mr Grünbaum voluntarily gave the artworks away when he was detained at Dachau.

This led his heirs to elevate their case to the Manhattan district attorney to see if other Schiele pieces that once belonged to Mr Grünbaum would count as stolen property under New York law, prosecutors said.

By doing so, prosecutors were able to track how the seven pieces made their way through New York and into various collections.

Timothy Reif, a relative of Mr Grünbaum, praised New York prosecutors for their role in returning the pieces of art to their legal owners.

Mr Reif said on Monday the recovery had “achieved a measure of justice for the victims of murder and robbery”.

“When viewing these artworks, imagine Fritz and Elisabeth in their lively Vienna apartment singing and dancing and cracking jokes,” he added.

Among the artworks returned is a piece titled I Love Antithesis, valued at $2.75m, and Standing Woman that was previously on display at the MoMA, valued at $1.5m.

The return of these pieces follows notification by Manhattan prosecutors last week of their intent to seize three other artworks from galleries in Chicago, Pittsburgh and Ohio.

The New York state Supreme Court says that “there is reasonable cause to believe” that the artworks constitute stolen property.

The pieces remain for now at the museums, whose officials have said they are confident in the legal ownership of the art. A federal case is in progress to resolve the matter.