2 artworks returned to heirs of Holocaust victim. Another is tied up in court
ABC News
New York prosecutors say they have returned two more pieces of art to the heirs of a Jewish Holocaust victim
NEW YORK -- New York prosecutors on Friday returned two pieces of art they say were stolen by Nazis from a Jewish performer and collector murdered in the Holocaust.
The artworks were surrendered by museums in Pittsburgh and Ohio, but prosecutors are still fighting in court to recover third artwork by the same artist, Austrian expressionist Egon Schiele, that was seized from a Chicago museum at the same time.
On Friday in Manhattan, the estate of Holocaust victim Fritz Grünbaum accepted "Portrait of a Man,” which was surrendered by the Carnegie Museum of Art and "Girl with Black Hair,” surrendered by the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College. Prosecutors have collectively valued the two pieces at around $2.5 million.
Ten of Schiele's works have now been returned to the family, but “Russian War Prisoner” remains at the Art Institute of Chicago, which maintains that it was legally acquired.
Grünbaum was the son of a Jewish art dealer and law school student who began performing in cabarets in Vienna in 1906. As the Nazis rose to power, he mocked them, once saying on a darkened stage, “I can’t see a thing, not a single thing; I must have stumbled into National Socialist culture.”
