The International Institute for Holocaust Research-Yad Vashem

cordially invites you to attend the lecture

Egon Schiele’s Dead City

Current Issues In Nazi Art Looting and Recovery

Raymond Dowd, Esq.

Partner – Dunnington, Bartholow & Miller LLP New York

Wednesday, 24 February 2010

10:00-12:00

Lecture Hall, Room 223, Administration and Research Building

Yad Vashem, Mount of Remembrance

In 1998, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau seized Egon Schiele’s Dead City and Portrait of Wally at New York’s 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 on appeal. Many of Fritz’s artworks are in the Leopold Museum and the Albertina Museum in Austria. In over ten years, Austria has not even bothered to respond to the heirs’ claim.

Listen to the speech

Lecture at Yad Vashem by Raymond Dowd, 24.2.10

You can view the Powerpoint presentation that illustrates the audio here