Valuable art looted by Nazis is returned at last
A refugee from Vienna left her estate to a UK sight loss charity — and her artworks have fianlly been restituted, 50 years after her death
V FOR DECADES, Irma Austin struggled to regain her family’s cherished art collection that was stolen by the Nazis. She passed away without achieving her goal.
But nearly 50 years after her death, the paintings are back. They are worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. And the British charity for the blind to which she left her estate says their return has been a “lifeline” amid the Covid pandemic.
Ms Austin and her beloved second husband, the newspaper founder Oscar Löwenstein, saw their fine art collection seized from their Vienna apartment in the 1930s. It included valuable works by 19 th century Austrian painter Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller.
The couple fled Nazi persecution in 1938 and emigrated to Britain, where Mr Lowenstein died shortly after their arrival. Before her own death in London in 1975, Mrs Austin made various unsuccessful attempts to reclaim the stolen artworks and appealed to the Foreign Office for help.
Her efforts were frustrated in the mid 1950s when a restitution claim was vetoed by the Soviet Union, according to official Foreign Office correspondence.
In 2019, however, Germany agreed to restitute three paintings which had resurfaced in local galleries to Mrs Austin’s only heir, the sight loss charity Vision Foundation.
The Nazis had intended to display the works by Waldmüller in the Führermuseum, a gallery planned by Adolf Hitler that never saw the light of day.
One of the artworks, seen in a photograph of Mrs Austin’s sumptuous living room in Vienna, is to be auctioned in Vienna in the spring, and is estimated to fetch around £180,600.
The other paintings, entitled Preparing the Celebration of the Wine Harvest and The Grandparents’ Visit, sold for around £346,600 at an auction in November.
Jil Birnbaum, a paralegal at the firm Charles Russell Speechlys, which offered pro bono support to Vision Foundation, said Shoah-era art restitution cases remain an “ongoing issue” with “so many artworks still in circulation.”
A series of complex legal questions remain unanswered today. Establishing the formal ownership history of every artwork can also be challenging, said Ms Birnbaum.
Mrs Austin’s restitution case involved three jurisdictions and decades of case law, but the pandemic presented yet another hurdle.
“This was definitely one of the cases where it was difficult to track down everything,” Ms Birnbaum said. “We have seen quite a lot of documents, but many were in Austria.
“Especially now with the pandemic, it was difficult to obtain these documents. They were also in German and we had to go back to see the chain of ownership.”
The challenges of the pandemic have been felt by the charity to which Mrs Austin, who died without any heirs, left her inheritance.
The sale of the paintings has helped Vision Foundation, which supports various projects for blind and partially sighted people, to fund Covid-19 initiatives such as talking newspapers.
The charity says that over the last 99 years it has distributed more than£30m to sight loss organisations to fund similar innovative projects.
As Covid hits the charity sector, the money made at auction could prove invaluable, and the charity is appealing for anyone who may have known Mrs Austin to get in touch. Her maiden name was Sametz and she was born in Neuhaus in the former Czechoslovakia.
“I would love for Irma to know that albeit it took 50 years, it couldn’t have come at a better time,” said Tamsin Baxter, Director of Development at the Vision Foundation.