A 1917 drawing by Egon Schiele is on the heart of a restitution case that can quickly head to courtroom in New York.
The work in query, Portrait of the Artist’s Spouse (1917), depicts Edith Schiele together with her fingers folded in her lap. The drawing was made a 12 months earlier than each Edith and the artist, each at 28 years previous, through the 1918 influenza epidemic. Portrait of the Artist’s Spouse is estimated to be price a number of million {dollars}.
The heirs of two Jewish collectors, Karl Mayländer and Heinrich Rieger, have each claimed possession of the work. Mayländer was a textile service provider; Schiele made a minimum of two portraits of him. Rieger was Schiele’s dentist. Each have been killed by the Nazis throughout World Battle II, and their respective heirs each declare their family misplaced the work through the Holocaust.
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Philanthropist and artwork collector Robert Owen Lehman Sr., identified for heading the Lehman Brothers funding agency by the Nice Despair, purchased Portrait of the Artist’s Spouse from the London gallery Marlborough Nice Artwork, Ltd. for £2,000 ($5,600) in 1964. He then gifted the piece to his son, the award-winning documentary filmmaker Robert Owen “Robin” Lehman Jr., as a Christmas current. It remained with him till 1972, when Lehman Jr. briefly misplaced the work throughout his divorce; when his ex-wife died in 2013, the work was recovered from underneath her mattress. In 2016, Lehman Jr. gifted the work to the Robert Owen Lehman Jr. Basis.
The trial over the work’s possession started in Rochester, New York, on Tuesday, with testimony anticipated to final till the tip of Might. In his ruling, State Supreme Court docket choose Daniel J. Doyle will contemplate circumstantial proof, decades-old information, and a spotty provenance. Skilled witnesses are anticipated to weigh in, with every occasion presenting proof on their behalf.
Lehman Jr. testified not solely to his frustration over the eight-year-long battle but additionally claimed that he had been open to resolving the possession declare initially with the Mayländers. Nevertheless, when a second declare emerged, Lehman mentioned in courtroom, “I got here to the conclusion that presumably two claims can’t be right.”
The work’s whereabouts between 1930 by 1964 are disputed among the many heirs. Lehman Jr. has mentioned there are not any surviving information, and his basis claims that the drawing was not thought-about misplaced as a result of it was not listed in a stolen or looted works database. The heirs, nevertheless, declare to have paperwork demonstrating their family’ possession. They imagine the muse didn’t adequately examine the provenance.
It wasn’t till the muse had deliberate to promote the work that these questions of possession got here to the forefront. After the muse consigned the work with Christie’s, the public sale home reviewed its database, the place it discovered potential connections to Mayländer and Rieger. Christie’s subsequently contacted the heirs’ representatives; the public sale home continues to carry the work.
Mayländer was deported to the Lodz ghetto in Poland in 1941 and was later killed. An acquaintance, Etelka Hofmann, took possession of Mayländer’s artworks after the battle and later offered a few of the items to a collector in 1960, together with a Schiele work recognized in a signed contract by the collector and Hofmann as “Edith Schiele, seated, watercolored drawing, signed and dated 1917.”
Rieger died in a Nazi focus camp in 1942. Previous to his dying, Rieger collected 120 to 150 of Schiele’s watercolors.
The Lehman basis argues that neither Mayländer nor Rieger owned the portrait of Edith Schiele that was bought by Lehman Sr.