A full 75 years after World War II ended, the destruction wrought by the Nazis is still being felt in ways great and small.
Case in point: the pathetic tug of war still being waged over ownership of a looted $8 million masterpiece.
A pair of heirs of Holocaust victims, one of whom is 98-year-old Eva Zirkl, continue to wrestle with the wealthy Lehman banking family over artwork.
The prize: a 1917 watercolor by Austrian painter Egon Schiele titled “Portrait of the Artist’s Wife.”
By: Emil Paprovksy
“The work is currently owned by the Robert Lehman Foundation — part of a fine art collection amassed by the late founder of Lehman Brothers — and was purchased in 1964 by the banker’s son Robert “Robin” Owen Lehman in London, according to court papers. It was to be put on the auction block in 2017 at Christie’s,” reported The New York Post. “But, as part of its due diligence, the auction house had alerted Jewish authorities in Vienna, seeking more information about the provenance.”
The painting “came to the attention of the rival claimants in 2016 after Lehman transferred ownership to his foundation with the intent of selling it at auction to raise funds,” according to theartnewspaper.com. “The Robert Owen Lehman Foundation consigned the watercolour to Christie’s in New York in 2016 and that April the auction house alerted the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde (IKG)—Vienna’s official Jewish orthodox community—to the work. That organization responded that the picture had belonged to Karl Maylaender, a Jewish businessman in Vienna who gave his art collection to a companion, Etelka Hofmann, before he was deported to Lodz, Poland in 1941, and was killed in Auschwitz.”
The family of another Holocaust victim, Heinrich Rieger, “who was Egon Schiele’s dentist, believe the watercolor belonged to Mr Reiger before he was killed,” noted The Daily Telegraph in London. “The Lehman Foundation now faces two separate claims from the Rieger and Zirkl families’ respective trusts in New York. Lawyers representing Mr Lehman tried to settle the dispute in “good faith” outside of the courts, but claim that neither parties were willing to meet in person to discuss their positions.”
Thaddeus Stauber, a Nixon Peabody lawyer in Los Angeles who is representing Mr Lehman in the case, told the Daily Telegraph: “We are trying to establish whether either of these claimants have a legitimate claim. Based on what they have submitted at the moment, we don’t believe either of them do. I reached out to all the parties individually and invited everyone to New York to try and reach an agreement in good faith. But for the past three years they have refused to talk to each other.”
