pr:P1683
| - The Swiss dealer, Eberhard Kornfeld, said at the time that he had obtained them from “a refugee,” without elaborating. More than 40 years later, in 1998, when questions about the provenance of the Schieles arose, Mr. Kornfeld identified the refugee as Mrs. Grünbaum-Herzl’s sister, Mathilde Lukacs-Herzl, who had managed to escape the Nazis. He later presented letters, some logs and receipts that, he said, documented the sale from Ms. Lukacs-Herzl. He also said she had never identified herself as a Grünbaum relative or told him how she had come into possession of the works.In 2011, a federal court in Manhattan found Mr. Kornfeld’s account credible in a separate case in which it ruled a different Schiele from the same collection had not been looted.But the Grünbaum heirs contend that Mr. Kornfeld’s account is a fiction and that the documents are forgeries. They say it is suspicious that he did not identify Ms. Lukacs-Herzl as his supplier until nearly two decades after her death, and they contest the validity of the signatures on the records, pointing to places where Ms. Lukacs-Herzl’s name is misspelled or written in pencil. (en)
|