The Bronx heir of an art collector killed in the Holocaust was awarded a multi-million dollar painting looted by the Nazis — in a ruling that capped a long-running legal battle in upstate New York court.
Viennese artist Egon Schiele’s 1917 watercolor “Portrait of the Artist’s Wife” was awarded to Eva Zirkl, who until recently was the only surviving heir of Karl Maylander, an Austrian art collector said to have owned the painting before he was deported to Poland and murdered by the Nazis.
Because Zirkl died earlier this year, the painting will go to the Susan Zirkl Memorial Foundation Trust, a charity dedicated to Autism research, according to the terms of a Thursday ruling by State Supreme Court Justice Daniel J. Doyle.
Zirkl’s family was one of three parties to argue that they were the rightful owners of the painting – which has an estimated value of several million dollars – at a bench trial earlier this year in Rochester, NY.
The heirs of another Jewish man, Schiele’s dentist and Viennese art collector Dr. Heinrich Rieger, argued that Rieger owned the painting before it was seized by the Nazis, who considered Schiele’s work “degenerate” art because it depicted nude women, court papers say.
The painting was purchased in 1964 in London by Robert “Robin” Owen Lehman, of the famed family that founded the collapsed investment bank Lehman Brothers.
It was gifted to the Lehman family foundation in 2016. The foundation argued that it should be able to auction off the painting, and said it planned to use the proceeds “to further music education and support the appreciation and dissemination of classical music at large,” according to court papers.
The work – which depicts the artist’s rosy-cheeked wife Edith in a patterned dress and brownish-orange jacket – was insured for $10 million when the foundation took it to Christie’s in 2017 to auction it.
But the auction house alerted Jewish authorities in Vienna, setting into motion a series of complicated events that led to the trial.
The legal saga was the first case about Nazi-looted art to go to trial in the US, according to Zirkl’s lawyers.
In his 87-page ruling, Doyle wrote that the evidence seen at trial mostly strongly favored the Maylander heirs, while acknowledging that the court was partly relying on limited information from several decades ago.
“We are thrilled that the court’s disciplined and detailed review of the evidence resulted in the right decision,” said Oren Warshavsky, a partner with law firm BakerHostetler, who represented Eva Zirkl, in a statement.
“The recovery of artwork looted during the Holocaust is an important way to restore dignity and justice to Holocaust victims and their families,” he added.
Representatives for the Robert Owen Lehman Foundation and the Rieger family could not be reached Friday to comment on the ruling and on whether they planned to appeal it.