Timothy Reif is one the legal heirs of Fritz Grünbaum, an Austrian cabaret performer and art collector who died in the Dachau concentration camp in 1941. Since the 1990s, Reif and his family have been searching for Grünbaum’s collection—more than 400 pieces that had been scattered after the war, including Egon Schiele’s Russian War Prisoner, a drawing that’s worth $1.25 million. For Chicago Magazine, Kelley Engelbrecht writes an important story about contested ownership and the restitution of Nazi-confiscated art.
The meticulous documentation of forced sales of art by Jewish owners to the Nazis created a confusing veneer of legality after the war. In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws had been established to strip Jewish people of basic rights; by 1937, the Nazis had started requiring Jews to declare and register their property. Ultimately, this led to the confiscation and seizure of art, often masked by forced sales and empty promises: “Give us your art and” — in the case of the Gutmanns — “we’ll give you a train ticket out of Nazi Europe.” But, of course, it never went like that. And all that remained was a record that implied decision-making autonomy by the sellers, when in reality their lives had been at stake. In many cases, the proceeds from a sale were put into a bank account that would, in the end, be frozen.
The question I keep returning to, the one that I can’t shake, is if any of this truly matters. I know the answer is yes. That it matters if the collection was stolen or if it was lawfully sold to Kornfeld by Lukacs or if too much time has passed to do anything about it. But I can’t stop thinking about the simple truth that precedes all this complexity: that a terrible, tragic thing happened to innocent people. And if that terrible, tragic thing hadn’t happened, Grünbaum would have retained the agency to do what he’d like with his art.
The simple truths are often the hardest to acknowledge, and perhaps that’s why we make them complex. But what I know is that this story, as it seeks truth, is itself built on a series of simple truths: Art went missing. The people who know how Russian War Prisoner ended up in Chicago are now all dead. And the man who first loved the portrait, who hung it on his wall, was murdered. We don’t know definitively what happened between 1938 and 1956, and we may never know.
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