Latest news with #EgonSchiele
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Monumental' NYC ruling on Nazi-looted art tied to inspiration for Joel Grey character in ‘Cabaret'
The Art Institute of Chicago has likely spent more than a million dollars trying to keep its claws on a Nazi-looted drawing in a Manhattan case shaping up to be 'monumental' in the history of stolen works. The school's legal challenge to halt Manhattan prosecutors' pursuit of the swiped art backfired last month, when a judge effectively ruled the district attorney's office could hunt down such looted treasures if they ever pass through New York City — regardless of their current location. Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Althea Drysdale's scathing decision against the art Institute came as the establishment has been fighting to keep a drawing by expressionist Egon Schiele titled 'Russian War Prisoner' — likely spending well more in the legal battle than the work's value. Her decision found that Nazi officials stole the work from the Viennese Jewish cabaret performer and art collector Fritz Grünbaum years before he was murdered in the Holocaust. Grünbaum served as an inspiration for Joel Grey's character in Hollywood's Oscar-winning classic 'Cabaret.' The institute did not do its due diligence in determining the work's history of ownership, the judge said. 'This Court cannot conclude that Respondent's inquiries into the provenance of Russian War Prisoner were reasonable,' Drysdale wrote in her decision. But critically, the ruling also found that Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg has jurisdiction to recover the art from Chicago because the work was purchased and displayed by a Manhattan gallery in 1956. The DA's office has not traditionally had to go this far in the courts to retrieve such a work. Raymond Dowd, a lawyer and stolen-art expert who is working to return the stolen Grünbaum collection to the collector's descendants, called the judge's decision 'extraordinary. '[Drysdale's] decision is monumental for the world because it says if it passes through New York City, the court will retain jurisdiction, no matter where it goes,' Dowd told The Post. 'There's billions [of dollars] in Nazi-looted art hidden away,' Dowd said. 'All those people sitting on that stuff are not going to be sleeping as well since Drysdale's decision.' While most institutions holding Nazi-looted work — including 12 other Schiele pieces once owned by Grünbaum — have willingly returned the art, the Chicago museum brought the biggest legal challenge yet to Manhattan prosecutors' art hunt. Experts say the Windy City art house easily blew more than the value of the Schiele drawing, estimated by the DA's office to be $1.25 million, in its challenge. 'The Art Institute fought tooth and nail for well over two years,' Dowd said. 'That's a massive thing to do, an enormous financial investment. They wanted to cut off their jurisdiction. They wanted the DA to stick to New York.' The work is being seized in place as the museum appeals the decision, the DA's office said, adding it is 'pleased' with the ruling. Drysdale's decision is already 'the talk of the town,' said art lawyer and former prosecutor Georges Lederman to The Post. In addition to expanding the DA's jurisdiction, the court ruled that ownership questions, typically a civil matter, can be brought in criminal court when 'there is evidence of theft,' Lederman said. 'I think this is a warning to museums and to collectors to dig deeper,' said lawyer Leila Amineddoleh, who also teaches art law. But even in cases where 'the ethics could not be more clear,' Amineddoleh said she worries about the practicalities of such rulings. 'We are putting today's standards on prior acquisitions,' Amineddoleh said. 'These involve really complicated factual inquiries for scenarios that took place decades ago with very little paper [record].' But Lederman said, 'If I were an institution, a museum, I'd be very concerned at this point in time.' Bragg's office has recovered 12 out of the 76 Schiele artworks once owned by Grünbaum, an outspoken and unafraid critic of Adolf Hitler. Drysdale's ruling traces the history of 'Russian War Prisoner' from when Grünbaum lent the drawing for exhibits in 1925 and 1928 to his arrest and the seizure of his collection by Nazis in 1938. Grünbaum was then sent to Dachau Concentration Camp, where he was murdered three years later. While the dealer who sold the work to the Institute in the 1960s claimed that Grünbaum's sister-in-law sold the Schiele drawing after the war, Drysdale states in her ruling that no record supports that claim. That dealer, who also claimed Nazi's never seized Grünbaum's collection, was later revealed to be a 'prominent dealer in Nazi-looted art,' Drysdale wrote. 'Despite these vibrant red flags, it appears as though the Art Institute of Chicago did nothing further to corroborate the account of a man whose credibility had directly been called into question on this very issue,' the judge said in her decision. The art institute told The Post it is 'disappointed with the ruling.' 'There is significant evidence that demonstrates this work was not looted, and previous courts have found that evidence to be credible,' a rep said.
CBS News
25-04-2025
- CBS News
New York judge orders Art Institute of Chicago surrender drawing stolen by Nazis
New York judge rules Art Institute of Chicago must give back art stolen by Nazis New York judge rules Art Institute of Chicago must give back art stolen by Nazis New York judge rules Art Institute of Chicago must give back art stolen by Nazis A New York judge has ruled the Art Institute of Chicago must surrender a 1916 drawing stolen from a Jewish art collector by Nazis in the Holocaust. A pencil and watercolor piece titled "Russian War Prisoner," by Austrian expressionist Egon Schiele, was once owned by Jewish art collector Fritz Grünbaum, who died in the Dachau concentration camp in 1941. The Art Institute purchased the piece in 1966. New York investigators issued warrants two years ago to seize the piece, along with other artworks at other museums, because they said they had been stolen by the Nazis. Other pieces of Schiele's art from Grünbaum's collection were seized from the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburg and the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College in Ohio. The Art Institute disputed their evidence, but the New York Times now reports a judge has agreed the artwork could be considered stolen, so the Art Institute must give it up. contributed to this report.
Atlantic
14-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
How R. Crumb Tapped Into America's Screwy Id
Certain great artists are synonymous with their kinks. Egon Schiele had his thing for gaunt girls and their undergarments. Robert Mapplethorpe was partial to bulging muscles wrapped in leather. And then there is the legendary cartoonist R. Crumb—lover of solid legs, worshipper of meaty thighs, champion of the ample backside. To truly know his art is to know what turns him on. For the man who effectively invented underground comics in the 1960s, rubbing his readers' faces in his sexual proclivities was always the point. If Crumb, now 81, was helpless against his own desires—and there he was on the page, quivering and sweating behind his thick glasses as he beheld one of his zaftig goddesses—he suspected that, somehow, everyone else was also helpless against theirs. His comix, as he renamed them, epitomized the hippie turn of the decade because he dove to the depths not just of his own subconscious, but of something collectively screwy, bringing up all the American muck. He was the anti–Norman Rockwell the culture was craving. But this was also the gamble of his art. Diving down like that, he risked derision—being called a sicko, a misogynist, a racist (all labels he indeed could not escape). In a loving biography, Crumb: A Cartoonist's Life, Dan Nadel begins with a childhood memory that Crumb preserved in a 2002 comic, ' Don't Tempt Fate.' A slouchy young Crumb is standing in a junkyard next to a boy who is hurling pieces of cement over a cinder-block wall. Crumb is appalled by the 'total obliviousness' of the boy, who doesn't care that he might really hurt someone. To demonstrate the danger, Crumb then does 'the crazy thing' and walks to the other side of the wall, where a chunk immediately hits him in the mouth, knocking out a front tooth with a perfect comic-book 'BAM!' The crux of Crumb, Nadel writes, can be found in this anecdote, where 'the compulsions of masochism, sadism, and martyrdom are conjoined.' Crumb's gawky, eccentric persona was first revealed to the wider public in a 1994 documentary made by his friend Terry Zwigoff, which portrays the cartoonist with all of his incongruities. On the one hand, he's a man who seems of another era: dressing in a fedora and suit jacket, obsessively collecting blues and country records from the 1920s and '30s, and using a crow-quill pen to draw in a meticulous crosshatch style reminiscent of Thomas Nast's 19th-century political cartoons. On the other hand, he's flagrantly free of inhibition; unabashed in his sex-craziness; creating preposterous characters, such as an urbane, horny cat named Fritz and a pleasure-loving pseudo-guru with a long beard, Mr. Natural. Crumb is both a recluse in need of frequent monk-like retreats from the world and a man with a fetish for requesting piggyback rides from women he has just met. He made art out of the kinds of insecurities and brutal fantasies that today might live on a subreddit for incels. If the documentary presented him as a sort of accidental artist, with little other than his id propelling him from drawing to drawing, a more intentional drive emerges in the biography. Crumb found his audience in the late '60s after he arrived in San Francisco, escaping the violence and mental illness of his dysfunctional Philadelphia family and the dead-end job drawing greeting cards in Cleveland that followed. With LSD fueling his visions, he began drawing bizarre, big-footed figures in absurd comics, many of them disjointed, grotesque, as if Samuel Beckett were expressing himself with a Sharpie on the wall of a bathroom stall. Here's Nadel on one of Crumb's first breakout strips, 'Har Har Page,' from 1966: It begins with a rotund male wiping snot on a nude woman, then chasing her with a bus, which multiplies to infinite buses. He attempts to assault the woman, who in turn throws a toilet at him; he finally manages to capture her, only to be swept away by a janitor. Reappearing, the man drags the woman and eats her foot. Crumb desecrated sleek American surfaces in a way that felt disturbing and profound, especially to the many young people also dropping acid. The title of another strip from this era neatly captured his critique of a society that he felt still needed to shake off its '50s conformity: 'Life Among the Constipated.' By 1969, he had drawn the cover for the album Cheap Thrills, at the request of the band's lead singer, Janis Joplin; started one of the first underground comic books, Zap Comix; and signed a deal with a major publisher for a collection of his strips. Though Crumb and his many fans have always called his creations sharp social satire, he made art out of the kinds of insecurities and brutal fantasies that today might claim a niche porn category or live on a subreddit for incels. In his 1969 strip 'Joe Blow,' a standard-issue 1950s nuclear family joyfully descends into depraved acts of incest, father and daughter, mother and son. In an early-'90s strip, 'A Bitchin' Bod,' Crumb presents a woman, 'Devil Girl,' whose body has all of his favorite features, but no head—available for sex and incapable of speech or thought. Is Crumb here revealing the culture's violent misogyny, or his own? It's honestly hard to tell. In a 1994 issue of his comic book Weirdo, Crumb drew a pair of visions that were meant to illustrate the fears that he imagined lived within white Americans: 'When the Niggers Take Over America!,' which featured Black men killing white men and raping white women, and 'When the Goddamn Jews Take Over America!' in which shady cabals use psychoanalysis to subvert the Christian population. Even Art Spiegelman, the most famous of Crumb's subversive-cartoonist progeny, admitted that it didn't really work as satire, and a white-power newsletter soon reprinted a bootlegged copy of both in its pages, very much proving Spiegelman's point. Crumb became aware early in his career of a dynamic that any online shitposter today is all too familiar with: The darker he got, as he noted in a long entry in one of his 1975 sketchbooks, the more positive reinforcement he received. The moment was right for an artist so willing to reveal his 'own subconscious yearnings,' as he put it. But a spiral followed: 'Then when they love you for it, make a hero out of you and interview you to death, you (me) over-react and start drawing socially irresponsible and hostile work which you (I) then feel guilty about.' Crumb mellowed his approach over the decades, perhaps having stretched nearly to its breaking point the kinetic power of comics to illustrate transgressive thought, emotion, and fantasy. His work grew more introspective and psychological. In a less constipated America, he was free to explore his own neuroses. And he took on subjects for the sheer technical challenge. Who would have predicted 40 years earlier that his last great work, published in 2009, would be a faithful illustration of the entire Book of Genesis, the decadent Mr. Natural replaced by the moral force of the Old Testament God? Aline Kominsky-Crumb, his partner of half a century and a comics artist in her own right who died in 2022, was also clearly a stabilizing force. Robert and Aline often drew together and had the rare open marriage that seemed to have been relatively serene—they knew that they needed each other, and that being a couple was never going to be enough. They also knew that they needed escape, much as they both appreciated provocation. They ended up in Sauve, a village in the south of France, where Crumb still lives, surrounded by his daughter, Sophie, and three grandchildren. Despite his stature now as a founding father of the graphic novel, there is a strong case for placing Crumb's signature work in the groaning file labeled 'problematic.' We live in a moment awash in just the sort of winking sarcasm that could be read as genuine hate or a joke or both—the Pepe the Frog meme that's maybe racist, the wave that's maybe a Hitler salute. But what saves Crumb is the shakiness of his hand—in being creepy or dark or dangerous, he was also making himself terribly vulnerable, and he knew it.
New York Times
02-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Egon Schiele's Art Draws New Audiences
The explosion of modern art and scientific thought in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century holds an enduring fascination. And perhaps no painter better captures the sense of liberation and latent crisis of that era — the era of Freud and Mahler — than Egon Schiele. While his self-portraits may be the first works that come to mind, more than half of Schiele's output on paper are depictions of women. Drawings and paintings by Schiele have been subject to bitter legal disputes following theft and confiscation from Jewish owners during World War II. But that has not affected interest from collectors and museums, which remains robust, if not on the upswing, as Viennese modernists find an audience in Asia. Earlier this year, the National Museum of Korea in Seoul presented 'Vienna 1900, The Dreaming Artists — From Gustav Klimt to Egon Schiele.' The show, in collaboration with the Leopold Museum in Vienna, drew some 80,000 visitors during its first month. Back at home in Vienna, from March 28 to July 13, the Leopold will present 'Changing Times. Egon Schiele's Last Years: 1914-1918.' And at this year's edition of TEFAF Maastricht in the Netherlands, the Vienna gallery Wienerroither & Kohlbacher will include in its booth a drawing of Schiele's muse and girlfriend, Wally Neuzil, and a watercolor of the artist's youngest sister, Gertrude. Jane Kallir, the art historian and founder of the Kallir Research Institute, will co-curate the upcoming show at the Leopold with Kerstin Jesse, one of the museum's senior curators. In a video interview from New York, Kallir said that although the artist 'doesn't fit into any predetermined movement, every generation seems to discover him anew and project onto him their emergent concerns as they enter adulthood.' The fascination of young viewers with Schiele is not a coincidence, as his best-known work was created at an early age. 'People often forget that he wasn't yet 20 in the beginning of 1910 when he began doing these really radical red nudes,' she said. His work emerged in the wake of Freud's theories about sexuality and revolutionary movements not just in visual art but also design and music. Born in 1890 in the state of Lower Austria, Schiele was admitted to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts at age 16. In 1918, having established himself as a leading artist, he died of the Spanish flu. His penchant for depicting adolescent figures led to friction with the Austrian establishment. In 1912, Schiele was held in prison for almost a month on accusations of having abducted and sexually assaulted the teenage daughter of a retired naval officer who spent the night at his house outside Vienna. While those charges were dropped at trial, he was ultimately sentenced briefly for an offense against public morality for exposing young visitors in his studio to his sexually explicit drawings. For Kallir, the artist faced a 'double standard' in a society that 'on the one hand pretends sex doesn't exist and on the other has a teeming underworld of prostitution.' By 1914, although Schiele has since been faulted for becoming more bourgeois and conventional, Kallir said that the artist had learned 'the rules' that Klimt had more closely respected and was compensated financially 'in the manner to which he was always entitled.' 'Suddenly, like Klimt, he has a studio full of models and is dashing off these sheets very quickly,' she said, adding that 'there are drawings which are absolutely breathtaking in their perfection.' The 1912 drawing of a standing, seminude Wally Neuzil that will be on sale in Maastricht most likely emerged after the artist's imprisonment. 'There is a definite stylistic change in Schiele's approach between the first months of that year and the second part,' Kallir said. 'He becomes more aggressive; he's using a softer pencil; and the lines become much firmer and stronger.' Lui Wienerroither, who together with his business partner Ebi Kohlbacher, has made their gallery a foremost destination for acquiring works by Schiele, Klimt and Oskar Kokoschka, said that the drawing of Wally 'reveals a human being as she is, also in her seductive qualities.' Wienerroither said he saw a connection between the position of her head and her direct gaze in the drawing to the famous oil painting 'Portrait of Wally Neuzil' that hangs in the Leopold Museum and was the subject of a protracted legal battle. The painting's original owner, the art dealer Lea Bondi Jaray, had corresponded extensively with Otto Kallir, Jane Kallir's grandfather, who introduced the Viennese modernists to New Yorkers. Otto Kallir's first show of Schiele at the Gallery St. Etienne in 1941 sold not a single work. He wasn't able to sell a Schiele painting until a decade later, when the Minneapolis Institute of Art bought a portrait of Albert Paris von Gütersloh it still owns today. Last year, Wienerroither & Kohlbacher collaborated with Jane Kallir on a tribute to her grandfather with a show that traveled from Vienna to their partner gallery in New York, Shepherd W&K Galleries. Otto Kallir's original gallery in Vienna, now the 'Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder,' was simultaneously the site of an exhibit that explored the space's history from 1923 to 1954. Schiele's work was declared degenerate by the Nazis, who singled out Expressionist art, and did not reassume his place in Europe until after the war. Rudolf Leopold played a central role, gathering Schiele works for a 1955 show at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and eventually consolidating his collection at the Leopold. For Mr. Wienerroither, Schiele's 'confrontation with the self' paved the way for contemporary Austrian artists such as Arnulf Rainer and Elke Silvia Krystufek, (both of whom he represents). As the world becomes 'increasingly conservative and restrictive,' he said, 'Schiele has as much to say today as he did back then.'
