New York family of Holocaust victim reclaims Nazi-looted art

US authorities announced Friday the return of another artwork stolen by Nazis to the family of Fritz Grunbaum, the Austiran-Jewish cabaret performer and collector who originally owned it.

The return of “Seated Nude Woman,” an expressionist drawing, is the latest such work to be handed back to the family of Grunbaum, who along with his wife Lilly was killed in the Holocaust, with their artworks sold off by the German regime and scattered, with some even going on to be displayed in museums.

The drawing, by Austrian expressionist Egon Schiele, was returned at a ceremony Friday by another Austrian-Jewish family, who purchased the piece without knowing that it had been stolen.

Both Grunbaum and his wife died in concentration camps during World War II.

Works by Schiele had been declared “degenerate” by the Nazis, with many of them confiscated and auctioned or sold abroad to finance the Nazi war machine.

“Seated Nude Woman” turned up in the hands of a New York art dealer decades later, who then sold it to Ernst and Helen Papanek, two Austrians who had fled the Nazis in 1938.

“The experience of the two families serves as yet another reminder of the evil and brutality of the Nazi regime,” the Papanek family said in a statement. “We believe that returning the drawing is the right thing to do.”

Arrested by the Nazis in 1938, Grunbaum, a critic of the regime, was forced to sign over his power of attorney to his spouse, who was then made to hand over the family’s collection of hundreds of artworks before she was forcibly sent to a concentration camp.

This drawing is the 11th piece to be returned to the Grunbaum family’s collection.

“The recovery of this important artwork — stolen from a prominent Jewish critic of Adolf Hitler — sends a message to the world that crime does not pay and that the law enforcement community in New York has not forgotten the dark lessons of World War II,” Timothy Reif, a relative of Grunbaum said.

Since his election in 2021, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has overseen the recovery of almost 2,100 antiquities stolen from more than 30 countries, valued at around $250 million.