Seven works by the Austrian Schiele stolen by the Nazis are returned to the descendants of a Jewish couple

The New York authorities have returned this Wednesday seven works by the Austrian painter Egon Schiele stolen by the Nazis from a Jewish couple who were victims of the Holocaust to their living relatives.. The works were located thanks to an investigation that spanned several American collections, including that of Jewish magnate Ronald Lauder.

The works belonged to Fritz Grünbaum, a Jewish-Austrian comedian, radio host and cabaret artist who had a collection of hundreds of works, including more than 80 Schieles, and who was captured by the Nazis after the invasion of his country and sent to the Dachau concentration camp, where he died in 1941.

Grünbaum was forced to grant power of attorney over his property to his wife Elisabeth, and the Nazis forced the latter to hand over her entire art collection before sending it to a camp in Minsk, where she died in 1942, he explained to the media on Wednesday. media Judge Timothy M. Reif, a relative of the Austrian couple, who had no children.

The Manhattan Prosecutor's Office (New York) held a ceremony this Wednesday to hand over Schiele's works to Reif, who is one of Grünbaum's legal heirs.. Reif thanked the authorities and institutions for their cooperation in achieving justice, in some way, eight decades after his murder.

According to prosecutor Alvin Bragg, the investigation was directed by the head of his antiquities trafficking unit, Matthew Bogdanos, who has scored several victories in this type of investigation and who managed to locate the seven pieces in important collections such as Ronald's. Lauder, the MoMA or the Morgan Library.

The expert pointed out that Schiele's art, an expressionist, was described as “degenerate” by Adolf Hitler's regime, which led to its auction or sale abroad to finance the Nazi party.

Trace of these works was lost until 1956, when they reappeared in Switzerland, coming from Eberhard Kornfeld, a dealer associated with Hitler's personal art curator, who that same year sold the pieces to Otto Kallir, owner of a gallery in New York but without making the slightest indication of its origin.

However, Kallir knew that they had belonged to Grünbaum because he saw them in the cabaret artist's own apartment in Vienna, a city where he also had a gallery called Neue Gallery, where he had exhibited those works by Schiele in 1928, according to one note from the Prosecutor's Office.

In total, Schiele's seven paintings and watercolors, which portray the painter and his wife Edith, are valued at 9.5 million dollars (about 8.9 million euros) and the most notable is I love antithesis, which was in the collection of Ronald Lauder, heir to cosmetics entrepreneur Estée Lauder and president of the World Jewish Congress.

Lauder, who is co-founder of the Neue Gallerie in New York, a gallery specializing in Austrian and German art, voluntarily handed over the work to the Prosecutor's Office, like the other institutions, and said through a spokesman that he had acquired it decades ago from through a dealer, according to CNBC.

Reif said this Wednesday that the Nazis killed the “majority of Grünbaum's relatives,” but assured that their “dynasty” lives on in the art that the couple collected and hoped that whoever sees the works – he did not specify their destination – can “imagine Fritz and Elisabeth in their bustling Vienna apartment singing, dancing and telling jokes.”

Likewise, he highlighted the importance of returning the works and considered that the American justice system has given an “example” to follow in this type of case.