A 1917 watercolor by Egon Schiele, Kauernder weiblicher Akt (Crouching Female Nude), that was recently restituted by Colonge’s Museum Ludwig will be sold during Sotheby’s Impressionist and modern art evening sale on May 12 in New York. The painting is expected to fetch a price of $2.5 million–$3.5 million and is being offered with a guarantee.
Schiele’s depicts a kneeling nude woman, and had been in the collection of the Museum Ludwig since 1976. It was returned to the heirs of Heinrich Rieger, the work’s original owner, last month. After Rieger’s heirs made a claim for it, a German commission issued a formal recommendation for the work’s restitution. But the museum didnt respond to a request for comment.
Rieger, a Jewish-Austrian dentist and art collector active in the early 20th century, was one of Schiele’s top patrons. He treated Schiele as a patient and was known to have accepted works of art as payment for medical treatments. By the late 1930s, Reiger’s collection included some 800 works by Austrian modernists. According to the German advisory commission, Rieger may have owned as many as 150 pieces by Schiele.
Over the past decade, other works by Schiele from the Rieger collection have also been subject to restitution claims. In November, the artist’s painting Wayside Shrine (1907) was confiscated by Austrian authorities ahead of its scheduled sale at the Viennese auction house Dorotheum, where it was estimated at $45,000. During the war, the painting went directly to Welz, who sold off most of the Rieger collection.
And in 2019, the Robert Owen Lehmann Foundation attempted to sell a drawing by Schiele’s wife Edith, prompting an ongoing three-way ongoing ownership dispute between the organization, the Rieger heirs, and the late Eva Zirkl, who claimed her uncle owned the work.
Part of the proceeds from the sale of Kauernder weiblicher Akt will go to to the Post Graduate Mental Health Center of Manhattan, a main beneficiary of the estate of Dr. Robert Rieger.
