Drawing Stolen By Nazis Returned to Heirs of Rightful NYC Owner

NEW YORK CITY, NY – Fritz Grünbaum, a prominent Jewish performer, led a bright and creative life in Vienna and Berlin in the early twentieth century.

That life came to an abrupt end when Grünbaum was apprehended by the Nazis and sent to Dachau, an infamous concentration camp, where he was murdered in 1941.

Before his death, Grünbaum was well-known as a performer and master of ceremonies at prominent theaters and cabarets of the era; in fact, he may have even inspired the master of ceremonies character in the hit musical “Cabaret,” currently in revival on Broadway.

During his life, Grünbaum amassed a large art collection, including 80 works by Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele.

One of these works, “Seated Nude Woman,” drawn by Schiele in 1918, is believed to depict Schiele’s wife, Edith.

It’s that drawing – “Seated Nude Woman” – which the Manhattan DA’s office returned to Grünbaum’s heirs on Friday.

Bits and pieces of Grünbaum’s collection have made their way back to his heirs in recent years, but the return of “Seated Nude Woman” to the Grünbaum family is a novel unto itself.

After he was taken to Dachau, Fritz Grünbaum was compelled to sign a power of attorney, which put his wife, Elisabeth, in charge of the collection. Shortly thereafter, the Nazis forced Elisabeth to hand over the art, before sending her to a concentration camp, where she too was murdered.

The Schieles didn’t reappear until 1956, when they turned up in Bern, Switzerland, in the warehouse of one Eberhard Kornfeld. It’s possible Kornfeld may have obtained the Schieles directly from Adolf Hitler’s personal art curator, Hildebrand Gurlitt.

Kornfeld sold most of the Grünbaum Schieles to Otto Kallir, the owner of the Galerie St. Etienne, which still exists today in some form on 57th Street in Manhattan.

According to the district attorney’s office, “Kallir knew the artworks had belonged to Fritz Grünbaum…because Kallir had seen the drawings in the Grünbaums’ Vienna apartment in 1928 when Kallir borrowed them for an exhibition.”

Nevertheless, at Galerie St. Etienne the Schieles were offered to collectors, museums, and others, with, “no provenance or ownership history.”

In a remarkable twist of fate, the eventual buyers of “Seated Nude Woman” were Ernst and Helene Papanek, themselves European Jews who escaped the Nazis in the same year Fritz and Elisabeth Grünbaum were captured — 1938.

It’s important to note that the Papaneks were entirely unaware the Schiele they’d purchased was actually stolen Nazi loot. Ernst and Helene gave the drawing to their son Gus, a noted economist, in 1969, and with Gus Papanek it remained until his death in 2022.

After the Manhattan DA’s office approached the Papanek family in 2024 with evidence of the drawing’s theft, the Papanek fully cooperated and consented to the return of the Schiele.

The DA's Antiquities Trafficking Unit, created in 2017 by then DA Cy Vance, has convicted 16 defendants for “cultural-property-trafficking offenses” and recovered more than 5,700 antiquities with a value of over $450 million. The office has returned 4,600 items to more than 25 countries, with another 1,000 set to be repatriated over the next few months.

The Nazis may have stolen as many as 650,000 works of art from Jewish families in the 1930s and 1940s. Most of these items have not been returned, and their whereabouts remain unknown.