Heinrich Rieger

Heinrich Rieger (25 December 1868 in Sereď, Austria-Hungary – 17 October 1942 in the Theresienstadt ghetto) was an Austrian dentist whose art collection was one of the most important in Austrian modern art. Rieger and his wife were murdered in the Holocaust.

Life

Education and early years

Rieger was the son of Philipp and Eva Rieger, née Schulhof. He was born in Sereď an der Waag in the administrative district of Pressburg (now Bratislava), which at that time belonged to the Hungarian half of the empire. After graduating from the “Reformed Obergymnasium” in Budapest in 1885, Rieger studied medicine in Vienna.[1] On 10 December 1892 he received his doctorate in medicine and began work as a resident dentist in Vienna. At the age of 25, Heinrich Rieger married 23-year-old Bertha Klug, daughter of a café owner, in Sereď on 30 May 1893. The couple had three children. On 28 March 1901, Rieger acquired a villa in Gablitz, in which he also practiced.

The Rieger Collection
The Embrace by Egon Schiele, oil on canvas, formerly part of the Rieger Collection - today owned by the Austrian Gallery Belvedere.

Rieger began collecting contemporary works of art around 1900.[2] He often accepted works of art from penniless artists instead of money as payment for dental treatments.[3] This brought him into contact with young artists such as Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka, who were then living in Vienna, and became their sponsor. This is how the core of his collection came into being.[4] Through further acquisitions, Rieger's collection became one of the most important of Austrian modern art alongside the Oskar Reichert collection. During the First World War, Rieger acquired over 120 works. In the years up to 1921, the inventory grew again by more than 250 works by young painters such as Käthe Kollwitz, Anton Faistauer, Karl Sterrer, Albin Egger-Lienz, Liebermann and Franz Stuck.

Rieger collected many works by Egon Schiele[5] whose first fifty drawings came into Rieger's ownership between 1915 and 1918 - most of the oil paintings, such as the work "Cardinal and Nun" or "The Embrace", in 1918. In 1921, Rieger owned twelve oil paintings by Schiele initially housed in Rieger's private rooms in Vienna, in his practice rooms and in his villa in Gablitz, Linzerstr. 99, open to a limited public only.[6]

Artworks in Rieger's collection are known from a surviving insurance list from 1935 and another list created for the autumn exhibition of the "Cooperative of Visual Artists Vienna" in the Künstlerhaus Vienna, which opened on 9 November 1935. The latter list showed that Rieger had loaned around 200 works of art, including Schiele's oil painting "Cardinal and Nun".

At the World Exhibition in Paris in 1937, four Schiele works from Rieger's collection were shown as part of an exhibition of Austrian art in the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume.[7]

Before March 1938, the collection should have included around 120 to 150 drawings by Schiele.

Anschluss and Nazi persecution

After the 13 March 1938 Anschluss with Nazi Germany, Rieger was persecuted because he was Jewish.[8]

Special anti-Jewish laws forced Austrian Jews like Rieger to declare their assets, in preparation for the seizure of their property. Rieger's art collection was assessed by Bruno Grimschitz, a Nazi who was Deputy Director and Acting Director of the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna. However, the Grimschitz list of estimates of the collection, which was assumed to contain around 800 objects at the time, has been lost to this day.

With the “Fourth Ordinance to the Reich Citizenship Law” of 31 July 1938, Jews were forced out of the medical profession on 31 August 1938. Forbidden to practice medicine because he was Jewish, and impoverished by the confiscation of property and the Nazi's anti-Jewish fees and penalties, Rieger was forced to sell artworks in November 1938.[9]

Before being murdered by the Nazis, Rieger sold a total of twenty-six works, including Schiele's “Embrace” and “Cardinal and Nun” as well as Josef Dobrowsky's “Arms in the Spirit”, to the Nazi art dealer Friedrich Welz[10] in 1939 and 1940, respectively.[11] Another large part of the Rieger collection was acquired in March 1941 by the Austrian graphic artist Luigi Kasimir, who, together with Ernst Edhoffer, ran an art shop in Vienna that had emerged from the aryanized art dealership Gall and Goldmann owned by Elsa Gall. Kasimir sold around twenty works from the Rieger Collection during the war years. Further works were found in Kasimir's private apartment in 1947. Both Welz and Kasimir paid amounts for the pictures that were well below the market value of the works of art. The sale to Kasimir was apparently based on the values estimated by Grimschitz. After the end of the war, both had to answer for the acquisition of the Rieger Collection due to § 6 KVG, “improper enrichment” (“Aryanization”). However, the proceedings against Welz ended with an out-of-court settlement, while Kasimir was acquitted because he had recognized all restitution claims. At least some of the works were returned to Robert Rieger, who lived in the USA as his father's legal successor, after the proceedings.

The Rieger Collection was thus dismantled. However, some of Egon Schiele's drawings from the Rieger Collection are still lost.

Deportation

On 24 September 1942, the Nazis deported Rieger and his wife to the Theresienstadt ghetto on the 42nd transport. After initiating a death declaration procedure, it was established on 7 March 1947 that Heinrich Rieger had been murdered there on 17 October 1942, although specifics remained unclear. Berta Rieger was deported from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz in 1944, where she was murdered immediately upon arrival.[12] The Nazi Riech seized the Riegers' assets in accordance with the “Ordinance on the Confiscation of Assets Hostile to the People and the State in Austria” of 18 November 1938.[13]

Family

Rieger's son Ludwig (1894–1913) and the third-born daughter Antonia (1897–1933) died through suicide. Their son Robert (1894–1985) became a doctor, emigrated to the USA in 1938 and was the legal successor to his father's art collection.

Claims for Nazi-looted art

The Rieger family have successfully filed restitution claims for artworks by Egon Schiele that were seized by the Nazis; many of the claims involved long and difficult court battles and commissions.[14][15][16][17][18]

In 2002 the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wein requested that the Austrian police seize Wayside Shrine (1907) by Egon Schiele, asserting that it had been looted from the Rieger collection.[19]

In 2016 Rieger's heirs filed suit against Robert “Robin” Owen Lehman for Schiele's Portrait of the Artist’s Wife (1917). The heirs of Karl Maylaender also filed suit against Lehman. Lehman then sued both families.[20]

In 2021 Schiele’s Kauernder weiblicher Akt (Crouching Female Nude) was restituted to the Rieger family. Its fate after 1938 was unknown until, in 1965, it appeared in a sale by the Brazilian collector Walter Geyerhahn to the Swiss art dealer Marianne Feilchenfeldt. The latter helped the city of Cologne to acquire it through the Freunde des Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in April 1966. The Schield had been in the collection of the Museum Ludwig since 1976.[21]

Literature
  • Michael Wladika: Dossier Dr. Heinrich Rieger. Provenienzforschung im Auftrag des Leopold Museums. Dezember 2009. Seiten 17f. (online)

See also

References
  1. Fischer, Lisa (2008). Irgendwo : Wien, Theresienstadt und die Welt : die Sammlung Heinrich Rieger. Czernin. ISBN 978-3-7076-0255-5. OCLC 228041935.
  2. Lillie, Sophie (2003). Was einmal war : Handbuch der enteigneten Kunstsammlungen Wiens. Wien: Czernin. p. 969. ISBN 3-7076-0049-1. OCLC 53902915.
  3. "Egon Schiele Work Restituted by Museum Ludwig to Sell at Sotheby's". lootedart.com. ARTnews. Retrieved 9 May 2021. 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.
  4. Lillie, Sophie (2003). Was einmal war : Handbuch der enteigneten Kunstsammlungen Wiens. Wien: Czernin. ISBN 3-7076-0049-1. OCLC 53902915.
  5. "Advisory Commission on the return of cultural property seized as a result of Nazi persecution, especially Jewish property Office: Seydelstr. 18, 10117 Berlin Recommendation of the Advisory Commission in the case of the heirs of Heinrich Rieger v. The City of Cologne" (PDF). For Dr. Heinrich Rieger, the artist Egon Schiele (1890–1918) was the "main focus of the collection" (Austrian Art Restitution Advisory Board, Resolution of November 25, 2004); his works constituted the core of the collection. Rieger had a special room reserved for these pieces, "where the largest collection of Egon Schiele's drawings […] anywhere is being kept" (Ludwig W. Abels, Wiener Sammlungen moderner Kunst, in: Neues Wiener Journal 34 [1926], No. 11,874, p. 17). Articles about the collection highlight in particular the quality of the invaluable 2Schiele drawings (see for instance Anonymous, Sammlungen des Ober-Medizinalrates Dr. Heinrich Rieger und Dr. Alfred Spitzer. From the exhibit at the Künstlerhaus, Vienna, in: Österreichische Kunst. Monatshefte für bildende Kunst, Year 6, Vol. 12, Vienna, December 1935, p. 12 f.). Today, even the Schiele works in the collection alone would undoubtedly be worth a fortune.
  6. "Dr. Heinrich Rieger und seine Kunstsammlung in Gablitz" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 5 November 2020.
  7. Exposition d'art autrichien : mai-juin, 1937. Paris. 1937. OCLC 10692071.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  8. "Advisory Commission on the return of cultural property seized as a result of Nazi persecution, especially Jewish property Office: Seydelstr. 18, 10117 Berlin Recommendation of the Advisory Commission in the case of the heirs of Heinrich Rieger v. The City of Cologne" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 9 May 2021. From the time of Austria's annexation to the German Reich on March 13, 1938, at the latest, Dr. Rieger was persecuted as a Jew, dispossessed, and finally murdered in Theresienstadt concentration camp. His entire family was persecuted. His wife Berta was deported from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz on May 16, 1944, and probably murdered in the gas chambers upon arrival; she was declared dead in 1948. Their son Dr. Robert Rieger was able to escape to New York via Paris with his family in August 1938. Dr. Heinrich Rieger lost the important art collection as a consequence of Nazi persecution – through forced sales and acts of "Aryanization".
  9. "German Nazi loot panel urges return of Schiele work at Museum Ludwig to Jewish dentist's heirs". www.theartnewspaper.com. 8 February 2021. Archived from the original on 22 February 2021. Retrieved 9 May 2021. After the Nazis annexed Austria, Rieger's son Robert managed to escape via Paris to New York. Rieger and his wife had many possessions confiscated and were forced to sell others, including their art. Berta Rieger wrote to her son in 1939 saying: "Just one thing is terrible, we have to sell almost all our possessions at fire-sale prices." They were deported to Theresienstadt, where Rieger died in 1942; Berta was transferred again to Auschwitz in 1944 and was probably gassed on arrival there.
  10. Dobrzynski, Judith H. (24 December 1997). "THE ZEALOUS COLLECTOR -- A special report.; A Singular Passion For Amassing Art, One Way or Another". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 9 May 2021. One day in August 1966, Lea Bondi Jaray, a Jewish Viennese art dealer who had fled to London in 1937 with nothing more than she could carry, wrote a letter to Otto Kallir, the owner of the Galerie St. Etienne in Manhattan, beseeching him for help. She was still trying to reclaim a 1912 painting by Egon Schiele of his mistress, Wally, that she had left behind in Vienna. The letter, written in German, recounts how a Nazi art dealer named Friedrich Welz had come to her home, where the painting hung, and pressed her to give it to him. It refers to the Belvedere, part of Austria's National Gallery: 'He didn't stop urging me in a very unpleasant way until my husband told me: 'Why don't you give in? We may want to leave already tomorrow, and don't make any difficulties. You know what he can do.' So it first came into the property of Welz.
  11. "Josef Dobrowsky (1889-1964)". www.christies.com. Retrieved 9 May 2021. Provenance. Dr Heinrich Rieger, Vienna. Confiscated by the Nazi authorities circa 1938. Luigi Kasimir, Vienna. Dr Robert Rieger, New York, to whom restituted on 10 August 1949. Historisches Museum der Stadt, Vienna (inv. no. 93.398), acquired from the above on 16 August 1949. Restituted to the heirs of Dr Heinrich Rieger on 15 October 2005.
  12. "German Nazi loot panel urges return of Schiele work at Museum Ludwig to Jewish dentist's heirs". www.lootedart.com. Retrieved 9 May 2021. Berta Rieger wrote to her son in 1939 saying: "Just one thing is terrible, we have to sell almost all our possessions at fire-sale prices." They were deported to Theresienstadt, where Rieger died in 1942; Berta was transferred again to Auschwitz in 1944 and was probably gassed on arrival there.
  13. "The Expropriation and Economic Destruction of the Jews in Germany and Western Europe | ehri online course in holocaust studies". training.ehri-project.eu. Retrieved 9 May 2021.
  14. Green, Peter S. (16 November 2002). "Austrian Police Seize Art Said to Be Stolen by Nazis". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on 1 January 2014. Retrieved 9 May 2021. PRAGUE, Nov. 15— Austrian police seized a painting by Egon Schiele today, responding to complaints that it had once belonged to a Jewish collector who was forced to relinquish it in 1938 to a gallery owner connected to the Nazis. A court in Vienna ordered the confiscation on Thursday. Art experts said it was the first time authorities in Austria had seized an art object on the grounds that it might have been illegally taken by the Nazi regime. They hailed the move as a potential landmark in the battle for restitution of artwork and other property that was taken in Austria by the Nazis before and during World War II as part of a widespread practice called Aryanization. The painting, Wayside Shrine, a pocket-size oil that Schiele painted in 1907, was to have gone on sale on Nov. 27 at the Dorotheum, Vienna's leading auction house
  15. "Egon Schiele Work Restituted by Museum Ludwig to Sell at Sotheby's". lootedart.com. Artnews. Archived from the original on 9 May 2021. Retrieved 9 May 2021. According to the German advisory commission, Rieger may have owned as many as 150 pieces by Schiele. In 1938, when Austria was annexed to Germany, Rieger faced persecution and was forced to sell his collection, a portion of which ended up in the hands of Nazi-era art dealer Friedrich Welz. After being deported, Rieger died in 1942 in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. In 1944, his wife Berta died in Auschwitz. Their son Robert, who died in 1985, survived persecution and fled to France and then New York in 1939 with his wife and daughter. The work's provenance does not contain information about its whereabouts between 1938 and 1965. It resurfaced on the market in 1965, when Brazilian collector Walter Geyerhahn sold it to the Swiss art dealer Marianne Feilchenfeldt. Records indicate that Feilchenfeldt facilitated its sale and subsequent gift to the city of Cologne through the Freunde des Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in April 1966 for 18,000 Deutsche Marks. 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.
  16. Henry, Marilyn (21 April 2006). "Stolen Paintings Fueling Family Conflict". The Forward. Retrieved 9 May 2021.
  17. "Who really owns this Schiele watercolour Portrait of the Artist's Wife?". www.theartnewspaper.com. 29 October 2019. Retrieved 9 May 2021. On 3 October, the lawyer Raymond Dowd, acting on behalf of Rieger's heirs, requested that the case be moved to New York City, where the picture is currently being held at Christie's. Dowd alleges that Lehman failed to conduct proper due diligence before consigning the picture to auction.
  18. "Cologne : une œuvre spoliée d'Egon Schiele bientôt restituée". www.artnewspaper.fr. 10 February 2021. Retrieved 9 May 2021.
  19. Green, Peter S. (16 November 2002). "Austrian Police Seize Art Said to Be Stolen by Nazis". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on 1 January 2014. Retrieved 15 November 2021.
  20. "Who really owns this Schiele watercolour Portrait of the Artist's Wife?". The Art Newspaper - International art news and events. 29 October 2019. Archived from the original on 15 November 2021. Retrieved 15 November 2021.
  21. Villa, Angelica. "Egon Schiele Work Restituted by Museum Ludwig to Sell at Sotheby's". lootedart.com. Artnet News. Retrieved 15 November 2021.
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