Seven artworks by Egon Schiele held in the US are to be handed back to the heirs of a Jewish cabaret star who owned them before being killed in Dachau concentration camp, Manhattan prosecutors have announced, marking a turning point in one of the art world’s longest-running restitution cases of Nazi-era looted art.
The works by the Austrian expressionist, including a self-portrait, are scheduled to be voluntarily returned to the heirs of Fritz Grünbaum at a ceremony at the Manhattan district attorney’s office on Wednesday, the New York Times reported.
Valued at between $780,000 and $2.75m (£630,000 and £2.2m) apiece, the works were previously held by the Museum of Modern Art and the Morgan Library & Museum, both in New York, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California and two private collectors, Serge Sabarsky and Ronald S. Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress.
They include the watercolour and pencil work Prostitute (1912), the pencil-on-paper drawing Portrait of the Artist’s Wife, Edith (1915), and Self-Portrait (1910) in black chalk and watercolour on brown paper.
Grünbaum, a well-known Austrian comic and songwriter, had amassed almost 450 works in the years before the start of the second world war. Among the collection, which consisted mostly of works from Austria’s flourishing prewar modernist movement, were 81 artworks by Schiele, a protege of Gustav Klimt.
Arrested by the Nazis in his home city of Vienna in May 1938, Grünbaum died at Dachau concentration camp in January 1941. The exact whereabouts of his art collection during the Nazi era is unclear, though about a quarter of his works entered the international market via a Swiss art dealer in the 1950s.
For more than 20 years Grünbaum’s heirs have tried to reclaim the works in his collection. In 1998, the Schiele paintings Portrait of Wally and Dead City were the subject of a diplomatic row between Austria and the US, after they were loaned to the Museum of Modern Art and then held in New York as a result of a subpoena. The works were later returned.
Grünbaum’s heirs tried to legally force the return of 12 Schieles held by Austria’s Albertina and Leopold museums, but a government commission rejected the restitution claims in 2010 and 2015, arguing the works were never seized by the Nazi regime but sold by his own relatives.
A legal challenge in the US proved more successful, with a Manhattan judge in 2015 ruling in favour of the heirs, who said they had proof that Grünbaum had been forced to sign a document giving up his precious collection. An appeal against the ruling was rejected last May.
Last week New York investigators seized three Schiele works from the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Museums in Pittsburgh and Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College in Ohio.
In a statement, Oberlin said it was cooperating with investigators and was confident that the college “legally acquired” the work Girl with Black Hair in 1958, and that “we lawfully possess it”.
The Manhattan ruling is not expected to have direct consequences for the heirs’ legal challenge against the two Austrian museums.
The US 1976 Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act generally bars foreign states and their agencies from being sued in US courts, though it has an “expropriation exception” for lawsuits concerning the taking of property “in violation of international law”.
