MoMA and Santa Barbara Museum of Art hit with Nazi loot lawsuits

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California allegedly possess two artworks looted by the Nazis which descendants of their original Jewish owner now want to be returned.

The museums face two lawsuits filed last week by Timothy Reif, a judge on the United States Court of International Trade. Reif is an heir of Fritz Grünbaum, an Austrian Jewish cabaret singer murdered by Nazis at Dachau in 1941. Grünbaum is Reif’s paternal grandfather’s first cousin.

In the suits, Reif and another heir, David Fraenkel, are acting to reclaim a pencil-on-paper drawing called Portrait of the Artist’s Wife by Egon Schiele, which the suit says is located in the Santa Barbara museum, and the painting Prostitute, also by Egon Schiele, which the other suit says is located in the Museum of Modern Art.

The plaintiffs claim the artwork were stolen from Fritz Grünbaum by the Nazis via an unlawful power of attorney while he was imprisoned and tortured at Dachau.

“On July 16, 1938, Nazis forced Grünbaum to sign a power of attorney in the Dachau Concentration Camp permitting his wife Elisabeth to liquidate his assets and hand the assets over to the Nazi regime,” the MoMA suit states. Reif’s attorneys at Dunnington Bartholow & Miller LLP were unavailable for comment.

Elizabeth was subsequently deported to the Maly Trostinec death camp in Minsk, where she was murdered in 1942, the suit continues.

“Part of what makes these cases so difficult is that the Nazis, diabolically, rarely just went in and said ‘Put your hands up and give us all the artwork,’” Nicholas O'Donnell, an attorney with Sullivan & Worcester and an expert in Nazi-looted art disputes, told The Daily Beast. “They went through this pretense of ‘buying’ the artwork because they liked to think of themselves as collectors, and not thieves. Sometimes, people looking back at these situations reach different conclusions, and those are the cases that usually end up in court.”