Kin of an Austrian-Jewish cabaret performer who had his vast entire art collection swiped by the Nazis have welcomed home two more million-dollar works with the help of Manhattan prosecutors.
Fritz Grünbaum’s relative Timothy Reif, 64, was joined by his son, Paul, 20, on Friday as they were presented with two more Egon Schiele works — “Girl with Black Hair” and “Portrait of a Man” — by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and the federal Department of Homeland Security Investigations.
Both authorities had already seized and returned to the New York City relatives seven other Schiele works belonging to Grünbaum and valued at $1 million apiece. Those works came from several art institutions including MoMa and The Morgan Library.
“We can never forget the horror experienced by Mr. Grünbaum and the millions of other Jewish victims in the Holocaust,” Bragg said at a press conference. “And these pieces provide an important lens in which to tell their stories.”
The latest recovered artwork was tracked down by the DA’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit and voluntarily returned from the Allen Museum of Art at Oberlin College in Ohio and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. The works are worth at least $1 million each.
Timothy Reif, a judge on the US Court of International Trade, said it was “extraordinary” to welcome back the artwork that had been stolen from his relative’s home during the Nazi regime. The victim’s collection included more than 100 pieces.
“Our attachment [to these drawings] have many different dimensions and levels,” said Reif, who pledged to auction off the drawings, with the proceeds heading to underrepresented artists.
Grünbaum, a performer and writer, had more than 80 works by Schiele among his estimated 100 pieces before he was captured by the Nazis in 1938. He was sent to the Dachau Concentration Camp, where he was murdered in 1941.
When the Nazis seized Grünbaum’s Schiele collection, it remained hidden for more than a decade – until it popped up and was sold to Eberhard Kornfeld, the owner of an auction house, in Bern, Switzerland in 1956.
The Schiele collection then changed hands and found its way into the US, where its pieces were sold to private collectors and institutions.
“Girl With Black Hair” — valued at $1.5 million — is a 1911 watercolor and pencil drawing on paper and believed to be a drawing of a sex worker.
“Portrait of a Man” is a pencil drawing of Robert Wagner in 1917 — before Wagner joined the Nazi ranks and was executed by French authorities in 1946. It is worth $1 million.
Prosecutors are working on recovering Schiele’s “Russian War Prisoner” from the Art Institute of Chicago, which are battling the move in court.
Paul Reif said that seeing some of his family-owned Schiele artwork for the first time in 2022 was emotional.
“It’s a feeling that almost brought me to tears,” he said.