Dispute Over Nazi Victim’s Art

Christie’s and Sotheby’s Differ on Handling of 2 Schieles

Featured on nytimes.com

The similarities between two art works being auctioned next month by Christie’s and Sotheby’s in New York are striking. Both were created by the Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele. And both once belonged to Fritz Grünbaum, a Viennese cabaret performer whose large art collection was inventoried by Nazi agents after he was sent to the Dachau concentration camp, where he died.

But there is also a notable difference in the way the houses are handling the sales.

Christie’s is selling Schiele’s 1910 watercolor “Town on the Blue River,” on Nov. 5 in conjunction with a restitution agreement that treats the work as looted art and provides compensation to Grünbaum’s heirs.

Sotheby’s is selling a 1917 gouache and crayon work, “Seated Woman With Bent Left Leg,” on Nov. 4 under an arrangement that will not compensate the family. The auction house is relying on rulings by United States federal courts that found the family waited too long to file its claim and that there was insufficient evidence to conclude “Seated Woman” had been stolen.

“The court was very clear in finding that the works were not looted,” said Jonathan A. Olsoff, Sotheby’s lawyer and an expert on restitution cases.

The tale of these two works with a shared history illustrates how, even 70 years after the war, experts in the international art market can disagree substantively about how to handle the sale of works once owned by Jews in Europe during the Nazi era.

“The lack of standards is one of the biggest problems that we have,” said Thomas Kline, a lawyer in Washington who specializes in recovering stolen art and cultural property. The result, he added, is often “restitution roulette.”

The difficulties become particularly acute in cases like Grünbaum’s, where there are conflicting accounts, large gaps in the records and differing notions of what constitutes a just resolution.

Like Sotheby’s, several museums that own Schieles once in Grünbaum’s collection, including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art, say they have investigated the provenance and that they too are satisfied that their works were not looted. At the same time, the family has won support from experts in art restitution, and has listed the collection with the Lost Art Internet Database, which is run by the German government.

“These issues are extraordinarily complicated because there are no set rules and we don’t know definitely what happened in many cases,” said Monica Dugot, international director of restitution at Christie’s. “We have to be in a position where we can be sure we can convey good title to works in our sales.”

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