Probe shines new light on old claims that Carnegie Museum of Art’s $1M Schiele was plundered by Nazis

Decade after decade, a modest 1917 drawing by Egon Schiele, one of Austria’s most famous artists, graced the collection of the Carnegie Museum of Art, occasionally being displayed with little fanfare.

That changed this month when the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office executed a search warrant on the Oakland museum and persuaded a judge to order the seizure of the million-dollar picture as a possible piece of property stolen by the Nazis during World War II.

The move thrust one of Pittsburgh’s most revered cultural institutions into a web of international intrigue, embroiling it in a sprawling art theft investigation that has raised uncomfortable questions about how the Schiele work got from wartime Vienna to the Steel City.

Was “Portrait of a Man” an above-board bequest to the Carnegie by a donor in 1960, as the museum claims? Or is the truth darker, that it is one of numerous Schiele pieces plundered by the Nazis from Fritz Grunbaum, a Jewish cabaret performer and art collector in Austria, and unethically passed from hand to hand as Holocaust loot with few questions asked?

Warrant issued by a New York court against the Carnegie order the seizure of “Portrait of a Man.”

For years, Grunbaum’s heirs have pressed their claims to Schiele’s art in court, sometimes losing, sometimes winning back pieces of their ancestor’s vast collection.

They celebrated a victory Wednesday when news broke that seven Schiele works would be surrendered by private owners and three museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and repatriated with Grunbaum heirs.

“You have solved crimes perpetrated more than eight decades ago,” one of those heirs, a grateful Timothy Reif, said at a news conference held by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. “Your accomplishments today are historic.”

But judging by recent filings in a pending court case pitting the heirs against the Carnegie, the Pittsburgh museum has remained defiant, unwilling to give up its Schiele drawing without a fight.

The federal complaint against the Carnegie over “Portrait of a Man.”

The ongoing custody battle actually has raged for nearly two decades. As far back as 2005, attorneys representing the Grunbaum heirs issued a subpoena to the Carnegie and were leaning on the museum to relinquish “Portrait of a Man.”

“We are writing to formally demand the return of art works owned by Grunbaum that were taken from him when he was placed in a concentration camp,” the heirs’ lawyer wrote at the time.

This 2006 letter to a Pittsburgh attorney representing the Carnegie demanding the return of “Portrait of a Man.”

For years, nothing happened. But in December, the heirs sued the museum (the defendant is technically the Carnegie Institute) in federal court in New York City.

Now, lawyers are squaring off in lower Manhattan over “Portrait of a Man,” a picture of a man’s disembodied head, left arm and right hand.

In January, William L. Charron, the New York-based lead lawyer for the Carnegie, wrote to the court that both sides had been in contact but were “unable to resolve any disagreements.”

Following that, Jonathan Petropoulos, an expert on Holocaust-era art hired by Grunbaum’s heirs, filed a report with the judge that reached a scathing conclusion about the museum and “Portrait of a Man.”

The expert report by art historian Jonathan Petropoulos.

The Carnegie, wrote Petropoulos, a history professor at Claremont McKenna College in California, “had general and specific knowledge of red flags warranting investigating the Artwork’s provenance before accepting it as a gift in 1960.”

Petropoulos then made a more pointed claim referencing the art dealer who donated “Portrait of a Man” to the Carnegie more than six decades ago — the late Otto Kallir, a New York gallery owner famed for representing the American folk artist Grandma Moses.

“The Carnegie Institute could have asked Otto Kallir where the Artwork came from, collected appropriate documents and interviewed relevant witnesses,” Petropoulos wrote, “but, through its own willful blindness, chose not to do so.”

Charron dismissed the report as a “red herring.”

Letter to the court from the Carnegie’s lawyer laying out his legal theory.

Regardless of who prevails, the Carnegie has been called out publicly by a preeminent scholar. And, in the wake of the actions by the top Manhattan prosecutor, it will face a difficult decision, according to Nicholas O’Donnell, a Boston lawyer who is an expert on art law and has written about Grunbaum for his Art Law Report blog.

O’Donnell noted Bragg and his antiquities team have put the Carnegie on notice that they believe “Portrait of a Man” is stolen property and unlawfully possessed.

“That presents the museum with a choice: relinquish the property, and that’s the end of it, or challenge the seizure but quite possibly as a criminal defendant,” O’Donnell said.

The museum referred inquiries to a crisis communications firm in New York, which declined to answer questions in light of the pending litigation.

A radical artist

Born in Austria, Schiele made the most of his abbreviated life, cut short at age 28 during the flu pandemic of 1918 that had taken his pregnant wife three days earlier.

A protege of Gustav Klimt, another towering figure among Austrian painters, Schiele was driven, and his output was prodigious. The Museum of Modern Art referred to him as a “painter and precociously talented draftsman.”

Barbara McCloskey, a University of Pittsburgh professor who teaches Art in the Third Reich and Memorializations of the Holocaust, called Schiele “one of the most significant Austrian artists of the early 20th century.”

Radical and outrageous, Schiele painted and drew abundant nudes, sketching himself unclothed and drawing prostitutes in various exposed poses. His work at times triggered condemnation.

Schiele was briefly jailed in 1912 on a charge of seducing a minor, according to the Museum of Modern Art, which noted that a judge once “publicly burnt” one of his drawings.

He “scandalized the locals with his bohemian, licentious lifestyle,” according to the museum’s online biography.

“Portrait of a Man” — Männliches Bildnis in its original German — is tame compared to other Schiele works, which were mostly made with pencil, crayon, chalk and watercolor. The Carnegie artwork is variously listed as being rendered in pencil, crayon or chalk.

It’s not clear how many times the Carnegie has exhibited “Portrait of a Man.” But Pittsburgh newspaper articles from 1961 covered a Schiele exhibition. And one of the museum’s lawyers told the court that the piece has been publicly exhibited since 2006 as well as made available for viewing on its website since 2008.

The Leopold Museum in Vienna described the Austrian Expressionist as being “the spokesman for a generation of young ambitious artists in the years to come.”

In addition to claiming it houses the largest collection of Schiele’s work, the Leopold is important for another reason.

In 1998, the late Robert Morgenthau, Manhattan’s longtime district attorney, set off an international incident when he tried to block the return to the Leopold of two Schiele works, including one of Grunbaum’s, from the Museum of Modern Art.

Morgenthau’s gambit failed when a judge intervened. But it succeeded in another way, according to O’Donnell: It got the attention of the federal government, which impounded one of the Schiele paintings for 12 years until the case was settled in 2010.

It would be decades before another prosecutor in the U.S. — Bragg — would dare to take such action.

“Today is historic and groundbreaking,” Bragg said Wednesday, surrounded by seven pieces of Schiele’s art and some of the people to whom they would be restored. “We are returning these beautiful works, these drawings, to their rightful home, to their family.”

Bragg recounted the disturbing history of how the Nazis stole Grunbaum’s collection, forcing him and his wife, Elisabeth, to sign over their possessions. In 1941, Grunbaum died in the Dachau concentration camp; Elisabeth was deported to a camp in Minsk and died the next year.

Britain’s Tate Modern noted that, after Hitler rose to power, the Nazi dictator labeled as “degenerate” any art that did not conform to classical ideas of beauty. That included Schiele’s output.

“Some of the degenerate art was sold at auction in Switzerland in 1939 and more was disposed of through private dealers,” according to the Tate. “About 5,000 items of degenerate art were secretly burned in Berlin later that year. Today, more and more countries are signing declarations and laws which commit to returning lost or stolen artworks to their rightful owners.”

‘Portrait of a Man’

In October 2005, a lawyer subpoenaed the Carnegie on behalf of Grunbaum’s heirs and followed up with a demand letter.

“We hope that your institution will have the courage to step forward and do the right thing,” wrote Raymond J. Dowd.

The museum’s lawyer responded with boilerplate objections — and something far more interesting: a flurry of letters between Kallir, the art dealer, and Gordon Washburn, then the director of the Department of Fine Arts of the Carnegie Institute. The correspondence recorded the history of how “Portrait of a Man” came to Pittsburgh.

The letter from Reed Smith to the heirs’ attorney with details about the donation to the Carnegie.

Records showed the drawing was a gift from Kallir, who had bought it in 1956 in Switzerland.

Only four years later, Kallir was ready to part with it.

According to a letter dated Jan. 13, 1960, Washburn apparently had noticed Schiele’s works during an earlier trip to Kallir’s Galerie St. Etienne in Midtown Manhattan and became intrigued.

“… (Y)ou also looked at some works by Schiele and mentioned that you would be interested in obtaining a drawing by this artist,” Kallir wrote. “I should like to present to you as my gift to the Carnegie Institute the drawing PORTRAIT OF A MAN, of which a photograph is enclosed. Done in 1917, a year or so before the artist’s death, it is a mature and characteristic work.”

Kallir asked Washburn to get back to him — and to let him know whether he wanted the drawing to be sent framed.

Sixteen days later, Washburn wrote back, telling Kallir he would bring the matter before the museum’s trustees at their next meeting in February.

“It is most kind of you to be donating this work, which seems from the photograph to be a very fine one,” Washburn wrote. “We all look forward with great anticipation to seeing it.”

Soon after, Kallir packed up the drawing and sent it to the Carnegie by Railway Express. That February, the gift was announced in Pittsburgh.

“The Trustees have asked me on their behalf to send you their warmest thanks for this generous donation which will mean so much to the Institute,” Washburn wrote.

He then asked Kallir for the dollar value of “Portrait of a Man” for insurance purposes and the museum’s records.

Kallir’s response: $1,800.

Petropoulos, the historian, pounced on this fact. After declaring in his expert report that Kallir never provided the Carnegie with ownership records for “Portrait of a Man” and that the museum did not try to determine whether the drawing was art looted by the Nazis, he turned to the money.

“The records show that Kallir took a tax break of $1,800, which was a considerable sum in 1960, and that the Carnegie Institute supported him in this regard,” Petropoulos wrote.

“The Carnegie Institute’s 1961 hosting of an Egon Schiele show promoting Otto Kallir and many artworks owned by a private art dealer raises ethical questions and suggests that the 1960 ‘gift’ may be the product of unclean hands or an unethical ‘quid pro quo.’ ”

Petropoulos continued his reasoning.

“Both Kallir and the Carnegie Institute got something out of the gift. The record suggests that Carnegie Institute failed to exercise any diligence in acquiring a donation of Nazi looted art to the detriment of American taxpayers.”

T.J. White, a managing director of the Carnegie’s crisis communications firm Sloane & Co., declined to comment on the Petropoulos report. White also would not comment on the origins of two other Schiele pieces listed in the Carnegie’s online catalog.

But Charron, the museum’s lawyer, addressed it earlier this year in a letter to the court. He called Petropoulos’ opinion “nonsensical and defamatory” that the Carnegie acted in “bad faith” when it accepted the drawing as a gift.

What the Carnegie knew

Like other lawsuits over Schiele’s work, the case involving “Portrait of a Man” is complex and bursting with Hollywood-like intrigue worthy of a spy movie: shadowy art dealers, allegations of forgery and smuggling, and despicable figures from history.

Petropoulos’ 55-page report delves into the history of Schiele’s works, the Nazi’s interactions with the Grunbaums, the diaspora of their collection after the Holocaust and what he believes the Carnegie should have known before it took possession of the drawing.

In Petropoulos’ telling, there’s plenty of blame to go around.

Kallir, the art dealer who donated the drawing, “unquestionably” knew upon buying “Portrait of a Man” that “he was acquiring artwork stolen from a Jewish Holocaust victim,” the historian wrote.

Numerous questions have been raised about the credibility of the man who sold the drawing to Kallir, a Swiss art dealer, and how he obtained it.

And Petropoulos maintains that the Carnegie Institute was hardly ignorant of Nazi-looted art making the rounds in the international art community after the war.

Petropoulos wrote that the Carnegie knew Grunbaum had owned “Portrait of a Man” and other Schiele works and that “should have prompted an inquiry into the Artwork’s relationship to a prominent Holocaust victim.”

The Carnegie Institute, like other museums, was aware of U.S. government warnings to make sure artwork it acquired had not been stolen by the Nazis, according to Petropoulos. The Pittsburgh museum, he added, “was particularly aware of the dangers because of its deep involvement in the German art scene during the Nazi era.”

Petropoulos pointed to Homer Saint-Gaudens, the son of America’s most famous sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and the Carnegie’s director from 1922 to 1950.

Saint-Gaudens “had first-hand knowledge” of the persecution of Jewish artists and art collectors,” Petropoulos wrote.

Saint-Gaudens’ successor, Washburn, the man who brought the Schiele to Pittsburgh, also would have been familiar with the issues surrounding Nazi looting, according to Petropoulos.

In the historian’s opinion, “the overwhelming direct and circumstantial evidence in the historical record demonstrates that Carnegie leadership in 1960 would have known about Nazi art looting both directly and institutionally.”

Opposite decisions

Two earlier cases involving the same lawyers and some of the same heirs wrestling over Schiele artwork make the outcome of the Carnegie case a crapshoot.

In one, a federal judge ruled against the heirs and found that the Nazis had not looted the artwork from Grunbaum. Instead, the court found that the Schiele collection had made its way into the hands of Grunbaum’s sister-in-law and then to Switzerland. The owner of the Schiele was allowed to keep his drawing.

But in a later case, a different judge in New York state court reached the opposite conclusion, finding that the Nazis had stolen Grunbaum’s collection.

The Carnegie’s attorney bristled at the latter decision and complained that the heirs were trying to make the exact same argument they had lost years earlier — a legal no-no.

“What the museums who are defending the works have said is the Grunbaum estate lost this issue once, they can’t try again. And that’s the legal question that will be the first thing that gets addressed,” said O’Donnell, the Boston lawyer.

Last week, prosecutors with the Manhattan DA’s office laid out the evidence they presented to the museums that returned the Schiele pieces to the heirs.

The Nazis, the museums were told, forced Grunbaum to sign a power of attorney to his wife, who was then “compelled to hand over his entire art collection to Nazi officials.”

In 1938, the Nazis inventoried and impounded the collection, which disappeared until after the war, prosecutors said. The collection didn’t resurface until the 1950s at a Swiss auction house run by a man named Eberhard Kornfeld.

“In 1956 Kornfeld sold most of Grünbaum’s Schieles to Otto Kallir, the owner of the NYC-based Gallery Galerie St. Etienne, with no provenance whatsoever,” Bragg’s office said.

“Kallir himself knew the artworks had belonged to Fritz Grunbaum because Kallir had seen the artworks in Fritz Grünbaum’s Vienna apartment when Kallir had them displayed for an exhibition at Kallir’s Neue Gallery in Vienna in 1928.”

What role Grunbaum’s long-dead sister-in-law played in this saga remains debated. The Carnegie’s attorney has argued that the Grunbaum’s collection ended up with her in Belgium and that she lawfully owned and sold “Portrait of a Man” to Kornfeld in 1956. But some experts like Petropoulos have cast doubt on that scenario. It’s uncertain whether she really did possess Grunbaum’s artwork. And even if she did, it is not clear whether she owned the collection legally and was entitled to sell it.

As the lawsuit plays out and prosecutors in New York plan their next move under the watchful eyes of the international arts community, observers cannot predict how this dispute will end.

Said O’Donnell:

“I have no idea which way this is going to go.”

Jonathan D. Silver is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Jonathan at jsilver@triblive.com.