Grueling Grünbaum Disputes: Manhattan DA Takes on Museums (once again)

I did a doubletake when I saw the recent article about the return of a Schiele drawing (below) to the heirs of Fritz Grünbaum, “a Jewish art collector and Viennese cabaret performer who was killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust” (as described by Tom Mashberg in his July 26 report for the NY Times):

Back when I was a fledgling art journalist and Rita Reif was the NY Times’ ace art-market reporter, she had tried to interest me in exposing the expropriation of the Expressionist collection of Grünbaum, her husband’s uncle, who was a popular entertainer (as Rita told me and as Mashberg noted in his recent article, which described Fritz as “a Viennese cabaret performer”). She would have been gratified by this restitution (albeit belated) to the Grünbaum heirs.

This from the NY Times obit for Rita Reif, who died in 2023:

She made news herself in 1997, when she contested the ownership of “Dead City III,” a 1911 Schiele painting that she said had been stolen by the Nazis from Fritz Grünbaum, an uncle of her husband, Paul Reif, who died in 1978. At the time, the painting was on loan to the Museum of Modern Art in New York from the collection of Dr. Rudolf Leopold, an Austrian ophthalmologist who had acquired hundreds of artworks, for the MoMA exhibition Egon Schiele: The Leopold Collection.

Another family had already questioned the ownership of a different work in that exhibition, “Portrait of Wally”; when she read about that challenge in late 1997, Ms. Reif told People magazine a few months later, she talked it over with other family members and “everybody agreed we had to do something.”

Here’s what I wrote in 2010 (also here and here) about the return of “Portrait of Wally” to the heirs of Lea Bondi Jaray, the Austrian Jew from whom Egon Schiele‘s “Portrait of Wally” was wrongfully expropriated by the Nazis in 1939. That case involved intervention by a previous Manhattan DA, the late Robert Morgenthau, whose 11th-hour subpoena (subsequently quashed), temporarily prevented the painting’s being returned from an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art to its Austrian lender, Rudolf Leopold, buying time for prosecutors to put together a plausible legal case for restitution.

But back to the present: The office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg Jr. orchestrated the recent return of Schiele’s “Seated Nude Woman” (at top) to Grünbaum’s family. It had been seized by the office’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit in 2024. And yes, Assistant DA Matthew Bogdanos is again credited with leading the team that effectuated this restitution.

The DA’s press release quotes Timothy Reif, Rita’s son, announcing “the return of an 11th artwork to the family of Fritz Grünbaum”:

“The recovery of this important artwork—stolen from a prominent Jewish critic of Adolf Hitler—sends a message to the world that crime does not pay and that the law enforcement community in New York has not forgotten the dark lessons of World War II. District Attorney Bragg and his team led by Assistant District Attorney Bogdanos have not forgotten. Agent-In-Charge Arvelo of the Department of homeland Security and his exceptional team have not forgotten. The family of Fritz Grünbaum salutes each and all of you as shining examples of the best ideals of law enforcement.”

The piece is being returned from the estate of Gustav “Gus” Papanek. The Papanek’s were Austrian Jews who fled the Nazis in 1938 and purchased the artwork unaware it had been stolen from Mr. Grünbaum. The Papanek family fully cooperated with the Office’s investigation. The drawing was returned at a ceremony today with D.A. Bragg, Acting Deputy Special Agent in Charge O’Malley and members of both the Grünbaum and Papanek families….

In September 2023, the Office returned seven Schiele artworks from the Museum of Modern Art; The Ronald Lauder Collection; The Morgan Library; The Santa Barbara Museum of Art; and the Vally Sabarsky Trust in Manhattan.

As many CultureGrrl readers know, Lauder, MoMA’s honorary chairman, and the late dealer Serge Sabarsky, who was husband of the above-mentioned Vally Sabarsky, were co-founders of the Neue Galerie, a museum for German and Austrian Expressionism, in New York. Lauder is fond of describing Nazi-expropriated art as “the last prisoners of World War II.”

Also reported in the Times by Mashberg (along with Graham Bowley, his partner-in-investigation of restitutions) was the Manhattan DA’s attempt (as yet unrealized) to seize another Schiele—this from the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC):

In this case, the museum’s officials insist that their institution is the rightful owner. As reported by the Times, the AIC issued this statement:

We have done extensive research on the provenance history of this work and are confident in our lawful ownership of the piece….If we had this work unlawfully, we would return it, but that is not the case here.”

To which Megan Michienzi, the AIC’s Executive Director of Public Affairs, has now appended this:

Our response provides specific details of the extensive evidence, documentation, and research that specifically refutes the allegations made by the Manhattan District Attorney. The evidence clearly demonstrates this work was never looted and was legally acquired, and we will continue to advocate for our lawful ownership of this work.

As can be seen in its listing on the Art Institute’s Collection website (go here, scroll down and click on “PROVENANCE”), this watercolor has a complicated history of ownership:

Also complicated was the history of ownership in another recent Schiele case: His “Portrait of the Artist’s Wife,” 1917, was awarded to the heirs of Nazi victim Karl Mayländer, whose claim to the work, in the opinion of a New York State Supreme Court judge, was superior to the claims of other litigants, including Robert Owen Lehman Jr., whose foundation had long held it.

Yet another work being sought by the Manhattan DA—the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Draped Male Figure, c. 150 BCE–200 CE (Roman or possibly Greek Hellenistic)—had a long history of public exhibitions at numerous venues before it was acquired by the CMA in 1986. As I wrote here, the CMA had noted in a court filing that between 1968 and the date of CMA’s acquisition, had “been the subject of many national and international scholarly articles and studies.”

That case, as in the current dispute over the Schiele watercolor, is being considered by a court that is located at a far remove from the Manhattan DA’s usual territory. In Cleveland’s case, this geographical disparity was explained on the grounds that “the amount in controversy exceeds $75,000 and there is complete diversity of citizenship between the parties.” The Cleveland statue and the Chicago watercolor are listed on their respective museums’ websites as not currently on view. Watercolors (like the AIC’s Schiele) are commonly rotated off view for conservation reasons. In response to my query, William Griswold, the CMA’s director, said the bronze statue is off view because it is “subject to litigation with the District Attorney of New York; it has not been on view at the museum for some months.”

No interests are served by indefinitely enduring “the law’s delay” (to quote Hamlet’s soliloquy) as a rationale for sequestering a monumental masterwork that should be publicly seen, not concealed.

To conclude, I’ll self-servingly quote myself—from Truth in Booty: Coming—and Staying—Clean, my 2006 Wall Street Journal article parsing cultural-property controversies:

Objects properly imported into the U.S. before a specified date, and not “stolen” under universally accepted meanings of that word, should be able to remain here under the legal principle of “repose” (the concept that owners should not be indefinitely subject to stale claims). Otherwise, there is little to prevent attempts to empty our museums of everything that ever arrived under murky circumstances. The effective date of the U.S. Cultural Property Implementation Act, Apr. 12, 1983, is a logical cutoff.