I attended today’s press conference at District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Jr.’s office in Manhattan at which a drawing by Egon Schiele, Seated Nude Woman, Front View, was transferred to the heirs of Fritz Grünbaum. I represent the family of Gustav (“Gus”) Papanek, who relinquished the drawing to the District Attorney earlier this year. This case spotlights, once again, the breadth of Nazi crimes more than 80 years later. The Grünbaum story has rightly received considerable coverage (including a chapter in my book A Tragic Fate—Law and Ethics in the Battle Over Nazi Looted Art), my clients’ story is not widely known. I was honored to represent them today and throughout the process.

(Today's ceremony)

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(Egon Schiele, Seated Nude Woman, Front View)

Gus was a renowned development economist who devoted 60 years of work to the field. As President of the Boston Institute for Developing Economies and Chairman of Economics Emeritus at Boston University, his life’s work was focusing on income distribution, employment and poverty in poor and developing countries.

Gus was also a Holocaust survivor. Like Fritz Grünbaum, Gus lived in Vienna when the Nazis took over. Gus was born there in 1926. With the help of the International Rescue Committee, Gus, his younger brother, and his parents escaped first to France and then to New York. Gus’s father Ernst Papanek, a distinguished educator, was a hero of resistance to the Holocaust and ran children’s homes in France for Jewish and Socialist children fleeing Germany and Austria and ultimately France when it fell to the Nazis. 

Gus’s wife Hanna and her mother also fled Germany and they met as teenagers at one of the children’s homes. Gus’s mother Helene was a psychiatrist in Vienna. The entire family was displaced and lost all of their possessions including a private hospital. Coming to the United States as a youth, Gus attended Cornell before volunteering for the U.S. Army in the war. As a native German speaker Gus was trained in intelligence at Ft. Ritchie and was assigned to a special team in Germany seeking Nazi war criminals during the immediate post-war period.

The Schiele drawing was a gift to Gus from his parents Ernst and Helene Papanek in 1969. Helene purchased the drawing from the Galerie St. Etienne in 1961, who had purchased it from Galerie Gutekunst & Klipstein and Eberhard Kornfeld in Bern, Switzerland in 1955. Helene purchased it as a connection to her deep Austrian roots, having come of age during the period of Austrian Expressionism.

After Gus died, his family first became aware of the common provenance with the Grünbaum works obtained by Kornfeld from Mathilde Lukcas, Fritz’s sister-in-law. We then reached out to the Grünbaum heirs. As the family said in today’s press release by the District Attorney, “We believe that returning the drawing is the right thing to do. We are fortunate that our family, including Helene, Ernst, Gus and Hanna Papanek were able to enjoy viewing this work of art on a daily basis. The experience of the two families serves as yet another reminder of the evil and brutality of the Nazi regime.”

Additional details about the ceremony can be found in the District Attorney’s press release, The New York Times, and Artnet. I was honored to be there.