Works By Egon Schiele Restituted To The Heirs Of Fritz Grünbaum To Be Auctioned Tonight In NYC

Tonight in New York, Christie’s will hold their 20^th Century Evening Sale at Rockefeller Center.

Among the works being offered for sale are two works on paper by Early 20^th Century Austrian Expressionist artist Egon Schiele, from the collection of Viennese film and cabaret star Fitz Grünbaum. Grünbaum was not unlike Joel Grey in Cabaret, famous for his biting comments as a Master of Ceremonies.

And although this is not really for me to say, I hope the works sell for a tremendous fortune, many times their already generous estimate. And if it were up to me, I hope that the Neue Gallerie becomes home for these two works so the public can enjoy and appreciate them.

The two artworks are Woman in a Black Pinafore from 1911 and Woman Hiding her Face from 1912. They are both works of gouache, watercolor and pencil on paper. But they present two very different aspects and styles of Schiele’s work.

The Woman in a Black Pinafore is a masterwork in terms of the subtlety of the work and how much information Schiele delivers in his use of color and with what appear to be a series of smudges. We see the woman’s hair and the puffy sleeves of her dress, but the black pinafore itself conveys the body underneath as well as the folds of the cloth and a splash of the color at the fringe helps finish the image. There is a child-like delicacy to the work that is quite winning. Strangely, what this work made me think of is David Hockney’s recent Ipad drawings – surely if Schiele were alive today he would be experimenting in this new medium.

The Woman Hiding her face, the later work, is in many ways more sophisticated, experimental, and more significant in terms of those elements for which Schiele is known today. A woman is lying on her side. Her torso is bent forwards, she is resting on her lower arm while her upper arm covers her face. The pose is unnatural and not unlike a Cezanne bowl of fruits, there is something unreal about the way the body is contorted.

At the same time the image makes me think of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, and early proto-Cubist exercises in deconstructing a body to its geometric forms.

Schiele was notorious in his own time for the sexual content of his work, and here the woman is on the floor, her dress ruffled. A black tuft of her armpit hair is exposed and Schiele no doubt wants us to think of her sex. Finally: Why is she hiding her face? We may think that Schiele knew his model intimately (as he did many of his models). Compare her to the matronly woman in the black pinafore, and you can see how in just a year’s time, Schiele’s work was far more controversial in every aspect. So, no surprise, the estimate for this work is two or three times the earlier.

Schiele died in 1918 a victim of the Spanish influenza following World War I. By then Grünbaum whose father had been an art dealer, was already building an impressive art collection that would include works by Albrecht Durer, as well as a collection of Russian Icons and religious art.

However, Grünbaum’s passion for the Viennese avant-garde led to his assembling a large art collection of some 400 works Austrian modernist art including some 80 works by Schiele.

Following the Nazis coming to power in Germany in 1933, Grünbaum who was Jewish could no longer work in Germany and remained in Vienna. In 1938, after the Nazi annexation of Austria, Grünbaum was arrested and sent to Dachau, Buchenwald and back to Dachau where he died in January 1941.

While he was incarcerated, Grünbaum’s art collection disappeared. Portions resurfaced among the collections of Swiss dealers beginning in the 1950s. His heirs sued to recover the art and were unsuccessful in a 2005 case in which the court said too much time had passed.

In 2015 two Schiele works were seized from a London Art dealer at the Salon of Art + Design at the Park Avenue Armory. The heirs sued again, and it was feared that the outcome would be the same as before. However, at the end of 2016 Congress passed the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act (The HEAR Act) which was intended to provide the victims of Holocaust-era persecution and their heirs are not unfairly barred by statute of limitations from recovering their art.

Raymond Dowd of Dunnington Bartholow & Miller LLP, the attorney for the heirs, was able to argue that the HEAR Act should apply in this case. Judge Charles Ramos agreed: “The HEAR ACT compels us to return Nazi-looted art to its heirs.” Judge Ramos rejected the art dealer attorney’s contention that the Schieles were legally acquired. “A signature at gunpoint cannot lead to a valid conveyance,” Judge Ramos wrote. The works were returned to the Grünbaum heirs.

There remain many more works missing from the Grünbaum collection than have been located and fewer still that have been returned. Today, almost 80 years since the end of World War Two, the plunder of Jewish-owned Art remains for so many families an unsolved case and a great personal loss and tragedy. Tonight’s sale hopes to even the balance slightly.

Tonight, the Schiele works will be auctioned off. May their new owners find joy in them even as we recall their sad history.