The Bronx heirs of an art collector murdered during the Holocaust have inherited millions of dollars’ worth of paintings looted by the Nazis, a ruling in an upstate New York court ended a long-running legal battle.
Viennese artist Egon Schiele’s 1917 watercolor, “Portrait of the Artist’s Wife,” was presented to Eva Zirkle, the sole surviving heir of Austrian art collector Karl Mailander, who is said to have owned the painting before he was deported to Poland and murdered by the Nazis.
Zirkle died earlier this year, and the painting will be donated to the Susan Zirkle Memorial Foundation Trust, a charity dedicated to autism research, according to a ruling Thursday by state Supreme Court Justice Daniel J. Doyle.
Zirkle’s family was one of three parties who claimed at a court hearing in Rochester, New York, earlier this year to be the rightful owners of the painting, which is estimated to be worth millions of dollars.
According to court documents, the heirs of another Jew, Dr. Heinrich Rieger, Schiele’s dentist and a Viennese art collector, claimed that Rieger owned the work before it was seized by the Nazis, who considered it “degenerate” art depicting nude women.
The painting was purchased in London in 1964 by Robert “Robin” Owen Lehman, a member of the famous family that founded the failed investment bank Lehman Brothers.
The painting was donated to the Lehman Family Foundation in 2016. In court documents, the foundation claims it has the right to auction the painting and says it plans to use the proceeds “to further music education and to support the appreciation and promotion of classical music in general.”
The work, which depicts the artist’s rosy-cheeked wife, Edith, wearing a patterned dress and brownish-orange jacket, was insured for $10 million when the estate auctioned it to Christie’s in 2017.
However, the auction house notified the Jewish authorities in Vienna, setting in motion a complicated chain of events that led to a trial.
Zirkle’s lawyers say the legal battle marks the first time a case involving Nazi-looted art has been tried in the United States.
In his 87-page judgment, Judge Doyle said the evidence presented at trial was largely strong in favor of the Mailander heirs, but acknowledged that the court relied in part on limited information that was decades old.
“We are pleased that the court reached the right verdict after a rigorous and detailed review of the evidence,” Oren Warshavsky, a partner at the law firm Baker Hostetler, which represents Eva Zirkle, said in a statement.
“The recovery of art looted during the Holocaust is an important step in restoring dignity and justice to Holocaust victims and their families,” he added.
Representatives for the Robert Owen Lehman Foundation and the Rieger family were not available Friday to comment on the ruling or whether they plan to appeal.
