Austria denies claims of Grünbaum's heirs, owner of Egon Schiele's works, of "Nazi robbery"
Kyiv • UNN
Austrian museums deny claims that Egon Schiele's paintings, which belonged to a Jewish collector, were looted by the Nazis.
The decision to return works of art by Austrian artist Egon Schiele to the American heirs of the former owner of the artworks, who was Jewish, has affected some of Austria's leading museums. According to AFP , cultural institutions have even denied allegations that some of their collections are Nazi loot, UNN reports.
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Twelve works by the master of expressionism Egon Schiele, which belonged to the vast art collection of Fritz Grünbaum, an Austrian Jewish cabaret artist and outspoken critic of the Nazis who perished during the Holocaust, are currently on display in two Vienna museums. The Leopold Museum houses 10 paintings and drawings, including Dead City III (1911), and the remaining two are in the Albertina.
Grünbaum's descendants have been demanding their return for more than two decades. They claim that the collector was robbed by the Nazis, but the Austrian government insists that the state allegedly received them in good faith.
Despite thorough research over the years, no evidence has been found that the Fritz Grünbaum collection was confiscated
In 2010, a special commission in Austria recommended that the artworks not be returned because Grünbaum's daughter-in-law Matilda Lukacs sold dozens of works to a Swiss art dealer in the 1950s. It should be noted that a number of lawsuits in the United States have also come to the same conclusion.
Later, the American Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery (HEAR) Act of 2016 extended the statute of limitations for the return of art stolen by the Nazis, allowing Grünbaum's heirs to go to court again.
According to the collector's relatives, Grünbaum's belongings were stolen by the Nazis and mostly auctioned or sold abroad to finance the Nazi party. In 2018, a New York judge ruled in their favor.
Subsequently, the violated property rights were restored - some museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, returned them voluntarily. Others were waiting for a court decision.
Recently, the US authorities announced that they had managed to return 10 works of art "looted by the Nazis" worth at least 11 million euros to Grünbaum's descendants.
Grunbaum's heirs filed a complaint against Austria in New York, accusing the country of having "unjustly and illegally enriched itself" "at the expense" of their descendants.
The Austrian government's position is that there is no evidence that the paintings were stolen. In Austria, the Ministry of Culture in its statement reports on artworks that "have recently been voluntarily restored to the United States." So far, it is known that the Alpine country has returned about 15,800 works of art to the heirs of their former Jewish owners.
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Currently, the Leopold Museum, which houses the world's largest collection of Schiele's works, is the one with the highest claims.
The museum is the brainchild of the visionary collector Rudolf Leopold, who began buying up paintings by Schiele and the Austrian symbolist master Gustav Klimt after World War II, when they were almost forgotten.
In 2016, the museum returned two of Schiele's drawings to the descendants of the Jewish collector Karl Meilender, who was deported from Austria in 1941.
As for another cultural venue, the Albertina, the gallery also returned five drawings from the same collection in 2011.
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