The heirs of a collector persecuted during the Nazi regime are seeking to recover works by Egon Schiele from the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California.
Timothy Reeve and David Frenkel, relatives of the Austrian-Jewish art collector Fritz Grunbaum, who was murdered in 1941 at the Dachau concentration camp, have filed lawsuits against New York and California museums over the 1912 painting and 1915 pencil drawings.And the The two women’s portraits, respectively.
Lawsuits filed last week allege that Grünbaum was forced to liquidate his assets while he was detained in Dachau. According to the filing against MoMA, Jewish Ownership Declaration documents show evidence that 81 artworks from Grünbaum’s collection passed through Nazi ownership.
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1912 painting Prostitute It was registered in the 1956 Swiss Auction House catalog, according to a MMA filing. However, the museum has no record of acquisition dates after the 1956 sale, the suit alleges, accusing the museum of failing to perform “appropriate diligence” before acquiring the work.
The second lawsuit, targeting the Santa Barbara Museum, claims Schiele’s 1915 drawing Portrait of the artist’s wife It was held by a dealer in New York between the mid-1950s and 1960s, before being illegally transported elsewhere.
A museum spokesperson told The Daily Beast, which first broke the news, that the museum was unaware of the painting’s historical record prior to acquiring it as a gift from a private donor.
The heirs have taken legal action against four other museums seeking to regain legal title to the artworks from Grunbaum. In 2019, two works by Schell were returned to Reeve and Frenkel from London dealer Richard Nagy after a New York judge ruled in favor of the heirs. the two works, woman in black apron (1911) and Woman hiding her face (1912) was sold at Christie’s in November of 2022 for prices of approximately $500,000 and $2.6 million, respectively.
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