Watch and Listen! Powerpoint and Audio of Schiele's Dead City: Nazi Art Looting at Sotheby's Institute/New York State Bar Association

Egon Schiele's Dead City - Stolen from Fritz Grunbaum

You can WATCH and LISTEN to my Powerpoint presentation with audio is now available here  from the presentation I gave at Sotheby's Institute on March 24, 2010 in a program sponsored by the New York State Bar Association's Entertainment, Arts and Sports Law Section, chaired by Prof. Judith Prowda.

More material on artworks stolen from Fritz Grunbaum while he was in the Dachau Concentration Camp can be found at  http://artstolenfromfritzgrunbaum.wordpress.com/.

Egon Schiele's Girl With Black Hair - Experts Agree Stolen From Fritz Grunbaum

Falsified Provenance Published by Oberlin College's Allen Memorial Art Museum

Watch and listen to my Sotheby's Institute presentation and learn about why Oberlin College's provenance of Girl With Black Hair, found here, is false.

A summary of the evidence that Oberlin College has concealed below:

Below:  the cover of the 1956 Gutekunst & Klipstein (aka Galerie Kornfeld) - Eberhard Kornfeld testified that all of the artworks in this catalog belonged to Fritz Grunbaum.  Dead City was the only artwork pictured that listed Fritz Grunbaum as the prior owner.

Oberlin has never put Fritz Grunbaum's ownership of Girl With Black Hair in the provenance even though evidence of experts concluding that Fritz Grunbaum owned Girl With Black Hair was reported by Steven Litt of The Plain Dealer

Prewar catalogs show that Fritz Grunbaum owned Girl With Black Hair - Oberlin refuses to list these catalogs in its provenance of Girl With Black Hair

G.   Girl With Black Hair, according to Eberhard Kornfeld, spent 147 days in Switzerland before being sold to Otto Kallir on September 18, 1956.

Otto Kallir was Fritz Grunbaum's art dealer in Vienna.  Kallir had catalogued Dead City as being in Fritz Grunbaum's collection in 1930 when he wrote a catalogue raisonne of Schiele's oils.   As Otto Kallir's grand-daughter, Jane Kallir, testified at trial:  Fritz Grunbaum owned Girl With Black Hair.

So why does Oberlin's President Marvin Krislov refuse to admit Fritz Grunbaum's ownership?

Looting and Exploitation in Nazi-Occupied Europe by Dr. Jonathan Petropoulos

Dr. Jonathan Petropoulos delivered a lecture on Nazi art looting in Vienna last fall, focusing on the case studies of art dealers Curt Valentin and Otto Kallir, both of whom moved large quantities of artworks from Nazi Germany into the United States during and after World War II.   A link to Dr. Petropoulos' lecture on video is here at the Art Stolen from Fritz Grunbaum blog.

Dr. Petropoulos' studies on Curt Valentin and Otto Kallir are extremely important for those trying to track artworks looted by the Nazis that are now in museums and private collections in the United States and abroad.

According to a newly-released study prepared for the Swiss government by Laurie Stein, former founding director of the Pulitzer Foundation, the Museum of Modern Art in New York was the largest recipient of artworks from Curt Valentin.   Other than Dr. Petropoulos, art historians have completely ignored Curt Valentin, whose clients included a Who's Who of American art museums, colleges and wealthy collectors who snapped up modern artworks as the Nazi terror forced Jews to sell the works at fire-sale prices.   Alfred Barr, the MoMA's first director, was said to be in Curt Valentin's gallery on 57th Street on a weekly basis.

Above is an image of Egon Schiele's Girl with Black Hair, you can see her image at Oberlin College's website here.  In 1998, Oberlin College's then-President Nancy Dye promised the Cleveland Plain Dealer that she would investigate Schiele expert Rudolph Leopold's claim that Girl with Black Hair, along with sixteen other Schieles in American museums, belonged to Fritz Grunbaum.  Dye never published any results from her research.  In 2009, the Cleveland Jewish News reported evidence of Grunbaum's prior ownership, the article is here. 

Art catalogues show that this artwork was in the collection of Fritz Grunbaum before he died at the Dachau Concentration Camp.  The work is at the Allen Museum at Oberlin College, which refuses to document or share its research into the work's provenance prior to its acquisition in Switzerland in 1956 by Otto Kallir.  Kallir purchased it from Gutekunst & Klipstein, a clearinghouse for Nazi-looted art in Berne, Switzerland.  Oberlin's President Marvin Krislov has refused to permit me to meet with Oberlin's art historians to discuss the matter on campus.

Oberlin College has both music and Jewish studies programs.  It is shameful that they do not study the life, career, and art collection of Fritz Grunbaum, considered Austria's greatest cabaret performer and comedian of all time, celebrated by the Viennese with Karl Farkas as inventors of the "Doppelconference" a sort of Abbot & Costello routine.

As one account of Fritz's death at Dachau has it:

It was on New Year’s Eve, 1940, that Grünbaum gave his last performance. Gravely ill with tuberculosis, he decided to put on a show for the entertainment of prisoners in the camp infirmary. Despite his sickly appearance, one of the prisoners recognised him from his glory days in Vienna. Grünbaum pleaded:


I beg of you, Fritz Grünbaum is not performing for you, but instead it is the number [and recited his camp number], who just wants to spread a little happiness on the last day of the year.

Soon after this final show he attempted suicide, but was 'saved' by the SS officers. Just two weeks later, on 14 January 1941, a death certificate was made up for him. He had succumbed, according to the Nazis, to a weak heart.