Manhattan’s DA and Chicago’s Art Institute Slug It Out

Plus: Climate kooks get two years in the cooler, a trashed Dürer makes big money, and the Frick gets a new director.

L ast week, I raised questions lots of people are asking, most sub rosa, about the Manhattan DA’s art-trafficking division. It has confiscated and returned thousands of antiquities worth hundreds of millions of dollars, almost all from American museums, dealers, and private collectors. In the last couple of weeks alone, a boatload of ancient bronzes was sent back to Turkey. Why, and what’s the legal rationale? It’s not a pretty picture. Turkey, by the way, is among the world’s laggards in restituting anything.

Today, I’ll write about the art-trafficking division’s fight in court with the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC), a heavy hitter. The DA might lose. At stake is a drawing by Egon Schiele, but the lawsuit implicates the return of other Schiele works that together are valued at millions.

In the last few years, American heirs of Fritz Grünbaum, a cabaret star and Jew from Vienna who died at Dachau in 1941, have pressed American museums, collectors, and dealers to return to them a cache of drawings and watercolors by Schiele collected by Grünbaum in the 1920s and ’30s. The heirs say that after Grünbaum’s deportation to the camps in 1938, a Nazi-connected dealer got his art in a soft confiscation, not stolen but acquired under duress. Over time, some of Grünbaum’s Schieles came here. Buyers innocently acquired them.

Until the heirs turned to the Manhattan DA’s office, their pleas for a just restitution were mostly ignored. Last year, the art-trafficking division’s standard threats of civil litigation and criminal prosecution pushed seven American museums to capitulate without a court fight. The Carnegie Museum, Oberlin’s art museum, MoMA, and the Morgan Library surrendered their Schieles. All had acquired them in good faith, unaware of Grünbaum’s story. At the time, I wrote about the restitution. I was happy with it.

Of the museums and private owners targeted by the art-trafficking division, only the AIC balked. It’s got the will, the bucks, and, it says, the facts. It bought Russian War Prisoner, a gem, in 1966, for $5,500. It’s said to be worth $1.8 million today. The AIC says Grünbaum’s art was never in Nazi hands, try as Austrian Nazis did to get it. It insists that after the death of Grünbaum and his wife, she in a Minsk concentration camp in 1942, Russian War Prisoner descended to her sister, who in 1956 sold it and dozens of other Schieles that Grünbaum owned to a Swiss art dealer who, in turn, sold them to collectors and museums in America and Europe. The AIC has the paper trail. Grünbaum’s heirs dispute it. They say the Swiss art dealer forged documents.

My heart’s always with Holocaust victims. I also know and admire the Grünbaum litigants. They’re not enriching themselves. They’re selling the Schieles and putting the money into a foundation to help artists.

The issue of Nazi theft, implicit or explicit, of Grünbaum’s art has been litigated before — and in a New York court. I’m puzzled by why the Manhattan DA is even involved, given the Manhattan federal district court’s decision in 2011 in Bakalar v. Vavra, a case involving a dispute over ownership of a Schiele from the batch sold by Grünbaum’s sister-in-law in 1956. The parties were, on one side, Bakalar, a good faith-buyer who bought the drawing from a New York dealer in 1964, and, on the other, Vavra and another Grünbaum family member. They weren’t from the same branch of the family as the heirs aligned with the Manhattan DA today, but they also claimed that the art was Nazi loot and therefore had to be restituted to them.

After a trial on the facts, the judge found that Grünbaum’s Schieles were never confiscated and never sold under duress but descended to his sister-in-law, who legitimately sold them. Vavra and his cousin officially lost on the common-law doctrine of laches — an unreasonable delay in pursuing a claim — rather than on the issue of Nazi confiscation. But the finding of fact vis-à-vis ownership is there. The decision was affirmed in 2012 by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

Why is the art-trafficking division and the Manhattan DA ignoring a Manhattan federal court’s finding of fact after an exhaustive trial? Shouldn’t this finding direct them? Isn’t it a waste of time and money to litigate fact over and over? It’s like big-city vote-counting. You keep recounting until you get the result you want. Nifty but wrong.

Call it a mulligan, call it chutzpah, or call it willful and reckless, but shouldn’t the DA’s office have shown some circumspection? Is the fate of these Schieles guided by facts and the law or by politics, public relations, and fear? Oberlin’s museum just surrendered a Grünbaum Schiele without a fight. Oberlin also just paid $36.6 million in damages for its evildoing in a case involving false charges of racism against the owners of Gibson Bakery, and it didn’t have the money or will to fight the DA.

Neither did the Morgan Library or even MoMA, who returned Grünbaum Schieles that, accepting the facts the federal district court found in the Bakalar case, they might very well legitimately own. Neither did the poor Santa Barbara Museum of Art, which surrendered both an antiquity and a Schiele, in two separate seizures, also without a fight.

In a restitution claim, the family of Holocaust survivors will always win in the court of public opinion. The AIC is insisting on a close look at the law and the facts. I’ll write about how this new story unfolds. Until then, I have to say again that antiquities restitution is evolving into a woke fever. Very recent restitutions by the Manhattan DA have gone to, of all places, Turkey, whose despotic ruler last week made an ugly, antisemitic speech at the United Nations. Why are we sending art back to Turkey, Iraq, and even Iran?

I’ve thought about sophrosyne, the ancient Greek concept of restraint and self-control. Prosecutors, with awesome power, should live by it. It’s the opposite of hubris.

I’m writing this piece from London, where I’m covering the 200th anniversary of the National Gallery. Fueling Britain’s cultural institutions are woke grudges and conceit, whether the place is a National Trust house or the vast British Museum. I’ll get a good sense of whether or not this is true.

Speaking of hubris, two climate kooks who slopped soup on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London got a two-year prison sentence on September 27.

It was an English court, so all might not be lost. The two young women represent Just Stop Oil, an extremist group that might as well be called Just Stop Prosperity. They are among a cohort vandalizing art in European and American museums, all in the cause of fake climate science. They say they’re on “the right side of history,” a term that’s instructive in that it means, in reality, the most destructive, dumbass, and delusional side of history.

Sunflowers is glazed, so the painting wasn’t damaged, but the canned soup dissolved the gilding on its 17th-century frame. Restoring it is estimated to cost $13,000. The women also glued their hands to the gallery wall.

Remind me not to eat Heinz’s cream of tomato, will you? And can I strip furniture with it?

An open letter sponsored by Greenpeace and signed by a hundred no-name artists, art bureaucrats, and academics — I didn’t know any of them — called their protest a work of art, describing it as “a Pollock-like splatter across the yellow, drooping blooms.” Obviously, they and the two soon-to-be jailbirds lace their marmite with hallucinogens.

I write about James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) whenever I can. He was the most written-about artist of the 19th century, a committed confrontationalist, and the artist whose inspiration runs through so much of 20th-century art. Last week, Whistler’s first portrait commission, depicting Lucas Alexander Ionides, was on the block at Bonham’s in London. It hadn’t been on the market since 1968, when it left the Ionides family, or shown in public since 1960. I thought the estimate — £80,000–£120,000 ($105,000–$157,000) — was too low. It’s a Whistler, after all. Painted in 1859, though, it’s early and far from his famous tonal mirages named for arrangements, nocturnes, and symphonies. The portrait is more in the spirit of Courbet, whom Whistler emulated in the 1850s while he lived in Paris.

Ionides was in a young generation of an Anglo-Greek merchant family. He was also among the few tolerant and possibly hard-of-hearing people who became Whistler’s lifelong friends. Ionides wasn’t a looker. In the portrait market, beauty and the subject’s fame drive prices, as does, of course, the artist’s renown. These might help explain the low estimate. Still, Ionides’s portrait is strong and bracing and sold for £406,000 ($533,000). It’s good to know that Whistler still brings in the bucks.

“Via the eyes of babes oft times come Dürer engravings” isn’t lyrical and not memorized in school, but locals in Cranbrook in Kent know it’s true, or that it happened once. An impression of Dürer’s Knight, Death and the Devil, the engraving from 1513 or 1514, salvaged from trash by an inquisitive eleven-year-old, sold at a Staffordshire auction house on September 5 for £33,390 ($44,000). Some years ago, the young Mat Winter spotted the print, which would have struck most preteen boys as delectably Grand Guignol.

Winter said he kept it “tucked away in a cupboard” until a few months ago, by which time he’d learned what the term “Old Master” meant. Taking it to a rare-book appraiser, he was astonished to learn that it was one of Dürer’s three Meisterstiche, or Master Engravings, along with Melencolia I and St. Jerome in His Study. These three, often considered a group, concern virtue, obsession, and the way of all flesh. They were famous images in Dürer’s lifetime and, consequently, forged. A tiny nick in Dürer’s engraved plate created a fugitive line on the knight’s head. It’s one way to know the print’s the real thing.

A lady in wee Cranbrook in Kent apparently lived by the mantra “When in doubt, throw it out,” to her disadvantage. Winter is enriched and renowned for enterprise and a good eye. A German collector bought the Dürer, so it’s heading home.

Speaking of Whistler, Symphony in Green and Gray: The Ocean, from the late 1860s, is one of the many great paintings at the Frick Collection.

In both British and American museum news, Axel Rüger, the director of the Royal Academy in London for the past five years, will be the new director of the Frick Collection. Ian Wardropper, the Frick’s director since 2011, is retiring after shepherding the Frick’s renovation and expansion, a project much debated and often stalled until he managed to get it done. Rüger was the director of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and, before that, a curator of Dutch art at the National Gallery in London.

My spies didn’t penetrate the search-committee sanctum, so I have no knowledge of the candidates or the discussion. Rüger and I were curators at the same time, and I follow what’s happening at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Royal Academy. He’s a fine curator, and donors will like him. Never underestimate the glamour and smarts that Manhattan’s Upper East Siders attach to an accent.

That said, the exhibitions at both museums during Rüger’s rule were intellectually weak, aimed at visitor numbers, and heavy on what used to be called underrepresented themes — colonialism, slavery, and racism, among them — but are now both redundant and tiresome. The Hockney/Van Gogh exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum in 2019 was one of the worst exhibitions in my memory. It was pure, empty, big-name glitz. I hope these aren’t where the Frick’s board wants to go with its spanking new, big exhibition spaces.