A probably Nazi-looted drawing by famed Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele is on the centre of an possession dispute involving members of the Lehman Brothers US banking dynasty.
Schiele’s Portrait of the Artist’s Spouse (1917) was bought in 1964 by Robert Owen Lehman Sr—an artwork collector and banker who steered the Lehman Brothers funding agency by means of the Nice Melancholy—as a vacation present for his son, Robert Owen Lehman Jr. Now, the heirs of two Jewish artwork collectors—Karl Mayländer and Heinrich Rieger—have alleged that their family members have been dispossessed of the work throughout the Holocaust. Mayländer, a textile service provider who seems in two Schiele portraits, and Rieger, Schiele’s dentist, have been each killed by the Nazis throughout the Second World Warfare.
A trial over the contested possession of the drawing started on 7 Could in Rochester, New York, with heirs of three Jewish households making their claims to the Schiele work. Court docket papers filed upfront of the trial define proof of rightful possession from every social gathering.
Representatives for the Robert Owen Lehman Jr. Basis, which has owned the drawing since 2016, have claimed that there aren’t any surviving data of the drawing’s provenance from 1930 to 1964, including that the piece had not been listed in “any database of stolen or looted works” for many years after the top of the Second World Warfare, based on The New York Occasions. The heirs insist that the muse didn’t completely examine the piece’s provenance, citing paperwork that proves possession.
Robert Owen Lehman Sr. paid round $5,600 for the gouache and black crayon illustration when he initially bought it from Marlborough Advantageous Artwork in London. The 17 inch by 18 inch art work depicts Schiele’s spouse Edith, who like Egon died of the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918.
Portrait of the Artist’s Spouse is notable not just for its artistry, but additionally its historical past with the Lehmans, a household whose storied monetary empire dates again to 1850 when three brothers based Lehman Brothers. Upon Robert Owen Lehman Sr’s demise in 1969, practically 3,000 works from the devoted artwork patron’s assortment—together with items by Goya and Rodin—have been donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, which named a wing after him.
Robert Owen Lehman Jr didn’t be part of the household enterprise—which filed for chapter in September 2008, accelerating the worldwide monetary disaster that got here to be often known as the Nice Recession—as an alternative selecting to grow to be a documentary filmmaker. After he and his first spouse, Aki Lehman, divorced, she claimed that the drawing had been destroyed or misplaced. Following her demise in 2013, he discovered below her mattress.
Lehman Jr gave the drawing to his basis in 2016 with the intention to promote the work and use the proceeds to “promote the appreciation and public consciousness of classical music and encourage the creation of latest creative work together with musical composition”.
After the muse consigned the work on the market with Christie’s, the public sale home reviewed its database of details about looted artwork, the place potential connections to Mayländer and Rieger have been noticed. The heirs have been then contacted by Christie’s, precipitating the possession dispute and subsequent trial.
The Susan Zirkl Memorial Basis Belief and its trustee, Michael D. Lissner, declare that the drawing had been owned by a relative of Zirkl, Mayländer, who was deported to the Polish Lodz ghetto the place he was killed in 1941. After the conflict, the art work got here into the possession of an acquaintance, Etelka Hofmann, who might have bought it to a collector in 1960.
Schiele’s iterative material and prolific manufacturing make the provenance identification of his probably Nazi-looted works uniquely troublesome. Lehman Jr testified that whereas he had sympathy for heirs whose family members suffered below the Nazi regime, he had “spent a very good yr attempting to get these two events and myself collectively to make some form of equitable, truthful division of the art work”.
Avi Bar, one of many Rieger heirs, advised the Occasions that the dispute underscores “the justice of returning what was stolen throughout the Holocaust to the rightful heirs have to be performed”.
