Watch and Listen! Powerpoint and Audio of Schiele's Dead City: Nazi Art Looting at Sotheby's Institute/New York State Bar Association

Egon Schiele's Dead City - Stolen from Fritz Grunbaum

You can WATCH and LISTEN to my Powerpoint presentation with audio is now available here  from the presentation I gave at Sotheby's Institute on March 24, 2010 in a program sponsored by the New York State Bar Association's Entertainment, Arts and Sports Law Section, chaired by Prof. Judith Prowda.

More material on artworks stolen from Fritz Grunbaum while he was in the Dachau Concentration Camp can be found at  http://artstolenfromfritzgrunbaum.wordpress.com/.

Egon Schiele's Girl With Black Hair - Experts Agree Stolen From Fritz Grunbaum

Falsified Provenance Published by Oberlin College's Allen Memorial Art Museum

Watch and listen to my Sotheby's Institute presentation and learn about why Oberlin College's provenance of Girl With Black Hair, found here, is false.

A summary of the evidence that Oberlin College has concealed below:

Below:  the cover of the 1956 Gutekunst & Klipstein (aka Galerie Kornfeld) - Eberhard Kornfeld testified that all of the artworks in this catalog belonged to Fritz Grunbaum.  Dead City was the only artwork pictured that listed Fritz Grunbaum as the prior owner.

Oberlin has never put Fritz Grunbaum's ownership of Girl With Black Hair in the provenance even though evidence of experts concluding that Fritz Grunbaum owned Girl With Black Hair was reported by Steven Litt of The Plain Dealer

Prewar catalogs show that Fritz Grunbaum owned Girl With Black Hair - Oberlin refuses to list these catalogs in its provenance of Girl With Black Hair

G.   Girl With Black Hair, according to Eberhard Kornfeld, spent 147 days in Switzerland before being sold to Otto Kallir on September 18, 1956.

Otto Kallir was Fritz Grunbaum's art dealer in Vienna.  Kallir had catalogued Dead City as being in Fritz Grunbaum's collection in 1930 when he wrote a catalogue raisonne of Schiele's oils.   As Otto Kallir's grand-daughter, Jane Kallir, testified at trial:  Fritz Grunbaum owned Girl With Black Hair.

So why does Oberlin's President Marvin Krislov refuse to admit Fritz Grunbaum's ownership?

Nazi Art Looting: Egon Schiele's Dead City Tomorrow Night 3/24 At Sotheby's Institute NYC

Egon Schiele - Dead City III 1911

LAST CHANCE THE EVENT IS SELLING OUT

NYSBASections


Entertainment, Arts & Sports and Law EASL Section
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http://www.nysba.org/

Egon Schiele's Dead City: Current Issues In Nazi Art Looting and Recovery

March 24, 2010
6:00 to 8:00 p.m.
Sotheby's Institute of Art
570 Lexington Ave., NYC

1.5 MCLE credits in Professional Practice
Register online > www.nysba.org/deadcity

SEATING IS LIMITED PLEASE REGISTER EARLY

Speaker:
Raymond Dowd, Esq.
Dunnington, Bartholow & Miller LLP
Sponsored by the Entertainment, Arts & Sports Law Section's Committee on Fine Arts

Program Description:

In 1998, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau seized Egon Schiele's Dead City and Portrait of Wally at the Museum of Modern Art, creating a scandal that changed the legal landscape of Europe and the United States for victims of Nazi persecution and their survivors. Ray Dowd represents the heirs of Fritz Grunbaum, a Jewish cabaret performer murdered in the Dachau Concentration Camp. Fritz's wife Lily died in the Minsk Death Camp. Grunbaum's art collection surfaced in Switzerland in 1956 under disputed circumstances, and in the first Holocaust-era art recovery trial in U.S. history, Bakalar v. Vavra, the District Court found that passing the artwork through Switzerland gave it clean title. The case is now on appeal to the Second Circuit. This presentation will cover the legal and evidentiary obstacles to litigating Holocaust-era expropriation and provide legal practitioners with basic tools to assemble evidence and prove Nazi property looting.

Pricing:

$25.00 for Members

$35.00 for non-members

$15.00 for students

For more information contact: Carolyn Clayton at 518-487-5596 or cclayton@nysba.org

Register online > www.nysba.org/deadcity

Authentication, Artist Foundations and Catalogue Raisonnes

In Thome v. The Alexander & Louisa Calder Foundation, 890 N.Y.S.2d 16 (First Dept. 2009), the Appellate Division, First Department upheld a decision of Justice Charles E. Ramos dismissing a claim against the Calder Foundation.  

The plaintiff owned a work it believed was created by the late Alexander Calder.  Calder was an American sculptor and artist most famous for inventing the mobile.   The plaintiff sued because the Calder Foundation refused to include the work in the artist's catalogue raisonne.  A catalogue raisonne is a publication that purports to include an artist's entire oeuvre (body of work).

The Calder case came up after another case, Simon-Whelan v. The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, 2009 WL 1457177 (S.D.N.Y.) survived dismissal with allegations that the Warhol Foundation attempted to tamper with the market for Warhol works in violation of federal and state antitrust laws, to wit:

- The Board made unsolicited suggestions to Warhol owners that they apply for authentication;
- Foundation policies of authentication inconsistently applied;
- Board reversed prior determinations authenticating works;
- Board refused to authenticate works the Foundation previously tried to purchase;
- unlike other boards, Warhol Board not made up of independent and experienced scholars

(these are allegations only, at the pleading stage).  A visit to the Warhol Foundation website shows that they license Warhol's brand, the Bond No. 9 perfume pictured above is an example.

In Calder, however, the court dismissed the actions for declaratory judgment and product disparagement.  The court found that it did not have the power to declare the purported Calder work authentic nor to order the Calder Foundation to include it in the catalogue raisonne.  The court distinguished the law of France, where a French court has the power to appoint a neutral expert and to make determinations of authenticity.  According to the Calder court, a court may not act as a connoisseur, except to make rulings on authenticity that are related to actual cases or controversies before it.   In essence, the court found that its function is not to tell scholars what is real and what is not.

The court also found that the Calder Foundation had no duty to the plaintiff to authenticate the work and that the individual officers of the charity who were sued enjoyed immunity from suit.   The fact that the Calder Foundation might own Calder works and thus might enhance their value by restricting the market was not enough to survive dismissal.

Foundations vary greatly in practices, market power, and credibility.  There is no disputing that for certain artists, the foundations act in dictatorial and inappropriate ways, leveraging the artist's power far beyond what copyright law contemplates.

So if you own an artwork that you think is a Calder, how would you proceed?  From the Calder Foundation's website, you would fill out the following application:

Examinations



Owners of works attributed to Alexander Calder may apply to the Calder Foundation for the examination of the work. The Calder Foundation does not charge a fee for examinations.


For the Foundation to consider the examination of a work, the owner must have previously submitted an Application for Registration and a 4” x 5” Ektachrome as well as a written request for an examination.


For works which the Foundation has agreed to examine, the owner will be provided with an Examination Agreement. The Examination Agreement must be executed and returned to the Foundation prior to the examination.


The Foundation does not provide certificates of authenticity and does not assist with appraisals or valuations.


To request an examination, please contact the Foundation directly.

Click here to download the Application for Registration in Adobe.pdf format.