US museums and collectors agree to hand back seven artworks owned by Fritz Grünbaum after his family’s 20-year fight for restitution
Egon Schiele
Valued at between $780,000 and $2.75m 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.
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.
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.
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