The Artwork Institute of Chicago (AIC) sharply struck again at claims by New York Metropolis’s District Legal professional’s Workplace that the 1916 Egon Schiele portray Russian Battle Prisoner, which the museum acquired in 1966, was “stolen property”, claiming that the work “was not looted throughout [the Second World War] however was, as an alternative, lawfully bought by surviving relations after [the Second World War]” (emphasis theirs).
The museum offered a 126-page temporary to the New York State Supreme Courtroom on Tuesday (23 April) that got here in response to the Manhattan District Legal professional’s 22 February claims that the portray’s theft in 1938 “is among the most flagrant Nazi-era lootings of a Holocaust sufferer’s cultural property but uncovered”.
It was late final summer season that the New York courtroom allowed the Manhattan District Legal professional’s Workplace to take possession of Russian Battle Prisoner, though the portray has remained on the AIC, awaiting a ruling on whether or not or not it ought to now not belong to the museum and be restituted to the heirs of Franz Friedrich “Fritz” Grünbaum (1880-1941), an Austrian Jewish cabaret artist, operetta and common music author whose artwork assortment was looted by Nazis earlier than he was murdered within the Holocaust. These named heirs are Timothy Reif, David Fraenkel and Milos Vavra.
The heirs already had sought by means of a lawsuit in a federal courtroom for the portray’s return to their household, however in late February Decide John G. Koeltl dominated in that case that the statute of limitations for heirs to have introduced the claims had expired and that the museum had not bought the art work in dangerous religion—that’s, understanding that it had been looted. “[T]he defendant is a good-faith possessor”, Koeltl wrote in his choice.
The Manhattan District Legal professional’s declare, nevertheless, was made in prison courtroom. In late February, Matthew Bogdanos, a senior trial counsel within the workplace of the District Legal professional of New York County and chief of the Antiquities Trafficking Unit, laid out a 150-page petition to the New York State Supreme Courtroom claiming that, based mostly on detailed examinations of quite a few Nazi-era information, together with appraisal inventories, export purposes, correspondence and “different proof obtained pursuant to the continued energetic prison investigation right into a smuggling community that trafficked Nazi-looted artwork from Europe by means of New York County”, that the “proof demonstrates that Grünbaum’s artwork assortment, significantly his 80-plus works by Schiele, have been systematically stolen from Grünbaum after he was imprisoned within the Dachau Focus Camp for the crime of being Jewish after which bought for private revenue as a part of a conspiracy” by the Swiss auctioneer Eberhard Kornfeld and New York Metropolis gallery proprietor Otto Kallir.
A spokesperson for the AIC referenced Decide Koeltl’s civil courtroom choice, noting {that a} “federal courtroom has already dominated that the Grünbaum artwork assortment was not looted, and in November 2023, a federal decide dominated that we rightfully possess this work. We can not comply with set the precedent of returning this piece when the proof clearly demonstrates the work was by no means stolen.” In its 23 April response to Bogdanos’s claims, the museum restated that “there is no such thing as a proof in any respect—none—that the work was ever bodily seized by the Nazis”.
The museum’s place is that whereas Grünbaum himself was a sufferer of the Nazis, his artwork assortment was not confiscated however remained within the household and that Russian Battle Prisoner was bought by Grünbaum’s sister-in-law, Mathilde Lukacs, in 1956. Within the AIC’s response, it’s famous that “by no means as soon as, in many years of litigation and investigation squarely centered on the Grünbaums’ artwork assortment, has a single shred of documentary proof emerged to help the speculation that the Nazi regime bodily seized after which bought or in any other case disposed of the Grünbaums’ artwork assortment”, together with the Schiele portray in query.
No date has been set for a courtroom listening to on the competing claims concerning the Schiele portray. A spokesperson for the New York Metropolis District Legal professional’s Workplace solely commented that “we’ll reply in courtroom” to the museum’s claims that it owns the art work legitimately.
