Displaying items by tag: Schiele

Vienna’s Leopold Museum agreed to pay $5 million to the granddaughter of Jenny Steiner, a Jewish silk- factory owner, to keep in its collection a painting by Egon Schiele that was stolen by the Nazis.

The 1914 painting, “Houses by the Sea,” belonged to Steiner until she fled Austria in 1938, shortly after the Nazis marched into Vienna. She escaped to Paris and later emigrated to the U.S. with her two daughters. The painting was seized and sold by the Nazis, then later auctioned. Rudolf Leopold, the founder of the Leopold Museum, acquired it in 1955, the museum said in a statement published today on its website.

“After long negotiations, we succeeded in finding a fair and just solution,” the museum said. “Both sides went to great lengths to find a definitive settlement.”

The Leopold Museum owns 44 Schiele paintings and 180 works on paper, the biggest collection of the artist worldwide. During Rudolf Leopold’s lifetime -- he died on June 29 last year at the age of 85 -- the museum argued that as a private foundation, it was not subject to Austria’s restitution law, which only applies to federal government museums.

After Leopold’s death, his son Diethard Leopold pledged to settle all outstanding claims for Nazi-looted art in the museum’s collection as quickly as possible.

A cityscape by Egon Schiele valued at a record $50 million will be auctioned to pay for the settlement of one of the world’s longest-running art restitution cases.

The Leopold Museum, Vienna, is selling the 1914 work in London with a top estimate of about 30 million pounds on June 22 after agreeing to end an ownership dispute over another of the Austrian Expressionist’s paintings, the U.S.-based auction house Sotheby’s (BID) said in an e-mailed statement today.

Schiele’s “Hauser mit bunter Waesche, ‘Vorstadt’ II,” showing houses with washing lines, has a low estimate of 22 million pounds and is guaranteed a minimum price by a third- party “irrevocable bid,” Sotheby’s said. The valuation exceeds the $22.4 million paid in 2006 for a cityscape at Christie’s International. Sales of museum-quality oils by the short-lived artist (1890-1918) are becoming increasingly rare.

“This is a great opportunity,” said Eberhard Kohlbacher, partner in the Vienna dealership Wienerroither & Kohlbacher. “You have a few restitution cases, then it will be finished.”

The museum was founded in 1994 by the Viennese ophthalmologist and collector Rudolf Leopold, who died in 2010. It owns more than 220 works by Schiele, including another eight cityscapes.