A New York decide dominated on Wednesday (23 April) that the Artwork Institute of Chicago (AIC) should return a Nazi-looted Egon Schiele drawing, the newest improvement in a yearslong battle between the museum and the Manhattan District Lawyer’s Workplace.
New York Supreme Courtroom Choose Althea Drysdale’s ruling runs 79 pages, and it took her 25 minutes to learn her order in court docket, based on Graham Bowley and Tom Mashberg in The New York Occasions. Drysdale known as Schiele’s 1916 Russian Battle Prisoner “stolen property for the final 86 years”, ever because it was taken by the Nazis from the Austrian Jewish cabaret performer Fritz Grünbaum. (Grünbaum was murdered at Dachau in 1941.)
The AIC bought the drawing in 1966, displaying it proudly till it was “seized in place” by the Manhattan DA’s Artwork Trafficking Unit in 2023 on a warrant signed by Drysdale. On the time, it was estimated the drawing was value $1.25m. The museum has been combating to retain the work ever since, arguing final 12 months that “by no means as soon as, in a long time of litigation and investigation squarely targeted on the Grünbaums’ artwork assortment, has a single shred of documentary proof emerged to help the speculation that the Nazi regime bodily seized after which offered or in any other case disposed of the Grünbaums’ artwork assortment”.
The AIC has lengthy held that Grünbaum’s sister-in-law, Mathilde Lukacs, offered the drawing voluntarily within the Fifties from a household storage unit. Drysdale begs to vary, noting that the storage firm that held the drawing and different works from Grünbaum’s assortment was Nazi-run.
“It’s extremely unbelievable that Mathilde Lukacs ever obtained correct title to Russian Battle Prisoner,” Drysdale mentioned, including that as an alternative of wanting deeper into the problem, the museum “relied upon the assurances of a discredited artwork supplier with an apparent self-serving agenda”. The late supplier Eberhard Kornfeld had advised the AIC that he acquired the drawing from Lukacs instantly, however investigators have concluded that the invoices he offered had been solid—some even misspelled Lukacs’s identify within the signatures.
The AIC has additionally argued that the case is exterior the jurisdiction of the Manhattan DA’s Workplace. Drysdale discovered that this was not the case, because the drawing had been owned by New York’s Galerie St. Etienne earlier than making its method to Chicago. Greater than 80 different Schiele works from Grünbaum’s assortment had made their method to New York as properly, and plenty of of them have been the topic of restitution claims. Establishments like New York’s Museum of Trendy Artwork and Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Artwork, in addition to a number of non-public collectors, have been greater than prepared to return Schiele’s artwork to Grünbaum’s heirs. Nonetheless, the AIC continues to struggle.
“We’re dissatisfied with the ruling,” an AIC spokesperson advised The New York Occasions in an announcement. “We’re reviewing the court docket’s determination and can have a look at all out there choices for attraction.”
