Heirs get back ‘Nazi loot’ art

A New York judge awarded two Nazi-looted paintings to the heirs of an Austrian-Jewish Holocaust victim whose collection of hundreds of pieces of art was stolen by Hitler’s army in 1938.

A UK art dealer had claimed that two paintings in his possession — Egon Schiele’s “Woman in a Black Pinafore” and “Woman Hiding her Face” (above) — couldn’t be seized under the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery (HEAR) Act, signed into law by Barack Obama in 2016.

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Charles E. Ramos rejected that argument on Thursday.

“Although defendants argue that the HEAR Act is inapplicable, this argument is absurd, as the act is intended to apply to cases precisely like this one, where Nazi-looted art is at issue,” Ramos said.

The judge ordered the works be transferred to the heirs of Fritz Grunbaum, an artist, playwright and director who openly mocked Hitler and performed musicals and plays for fellow prisoners in the Dachau concentration camp.

Grunbaum died in captivity in 1941.

His 450-piece collection, 80 of which were works by Schiele, a protege of Gustav Klimt, was looted by Nazis in 1938, after officers forced him to sign the rights over to his wife, who was also later put to death.

That act undermined any claim of ownership, as “a signature at gunpoint cannot lead to a valid conveyance,” Ramos said.

The art dealer, Richard Nagy, argued Grunbaum never owned the paintings, claiming they were owned by Grunbaum’s sister-inlaw, who sold the works and more than 50 others to a Swiss gallery that advertised them in 1956, according to the ruling. Ramos rejected that argument.

Grunbaum’s collection caught international attention in 1998, when then Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau seized a Schiele work from the Museum of Modern Art. The seizure encouraged Austria and other European nations to process claims involving art looted from Holocaust victims.