The watercolor auction of Egon Schiele sacked by the Nazis

The portrait of 1914, with an estimate of 1.3 million dollars, is one of the about 80 works by the expressionist artist who were owned by the Cabaretist Fritz Grünbaum. Declared critic of Nazism, Grünbaum was arrested by Gestapo in 1938 and imprisoned in two concentration camps, including Dachau, where he died in 1941. A Christie’s spokesman said that the proceeds from the sale will be shared with the heirs of the art collector killed in the Nazi concentration camp.

After decades of investigations to trace and recover his collection, his heirs, Timothy Reif and David Fraenkel, have recovered or reached an agreement on various works on Schiele Carta in recent years. Christie’s has already set up 12 of the recovered works. The heirs, with the support of the investigators of the New York District Prosecutor’s Office, said that the wife of Grünbaum, Elisabeth, was forced to deliver the art collection to the Nazi officers. Elisabeth was deported to a concentration camp in 1942 and killed.

According to Dirk Boll, general manager of Christie’s in Germany, the sender of “Boy in sailor dress” is a German woman who had purchased the watercolor from Sotheby’s in 1992. Michelle Mcmullan, who manages the sale of Christie’s on March 5th, In which Schiele will be offered, he described it as “one of the best watercolors I have ever treated” and said he shows the artist – the whose art was considered “degenerated” by the Nazis – “at the height of his powers. The unfinished elements, like the missing left hand, evoke movement and spontaneity.

According to Boll, the sender, informed of the origin of Grünbaum, asked Christie’s to help him mediate an agreement with the heirs of Grünbaum. He said he intends to donate the proceeds of the sale to an asylum of Munich. According to Christie’s, the sale will also serve to raise funds for the Grünbaum Fischer Foundation of the heirs for show artists.

“This is another time to celebrate the memory of a member of our family, who was a courageous artist, an art collector and an opponent of Nazism,” said the heir Timothy Reif in a press release.

The story of the Fritz Grünbaum collection is also a complex legal intrigue. The Art Institute of Chicago, which owns a watercolor of Schiele once owned by Grünbaum, mentioned evidence that, according to him, contest the fact that the collection of Viennese cabarest has ever been taken by the Nazis and turned to the court To combat the seizure of the work, entitled “Prisoner of Russian war”, by investigators. The institute claims that the work was not sacked, but remained in the Grünbaum family until it was sold to the art merchant Eberhard Kornfeld by the sister -in -law of Grünbaum, Mathilde Lukacs, in 1956.

A judge of the Supreme Court of New York, who held several days of hearings on the dispute last autumn, should issue a sentence on the case in the coming weeks. “Fritz Grünbaum’s art collection was confiscated by the Nazis in Post-AnSchluss Austria,” Richard Aronowitz, responsible for the return at the Auction House Christie’s, said in a press release.

In 2018, the Supreme Court of New York established that Grünbaum never sold or sold voluntarily any work before his death and that the heirs were the legitimate owners of two designs of Schiele in the collection of the art merchant Richard Nagy. In 2019 the sentence was confirmed by a New York Court of Appeal. Manhattan investigators mentioned these sentences for the seizure of several works by Schiele in US museums and private collections. In 2023 and 2024, for example, five museums returned the works to the heirs, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Carnegie Museum of Art in New York. But in two other civil causes – one of which directly concerned the “prisoner of Russian war” of the Art Institute of Chicago – the federal courts established, for procedural reasons, that the Grünbaum heirs have come forward too late to claim the works . One of the federal judges also called Kornfeld’s declaration of having purchased the works from Lukacs. Separatedly, two museums of Vienna – Albertina and Leopold Museum – are also fighting with the claims of the heirs for the works of Schiele present in their collections, claiming that the sovereign immunity of Austria protects them from the legal actions of the United States .