The Academy of Fine Arts is supposed to return 33 graphic sheets from the property of the Jewish Viennese gynecologist Sigmund Stiassny, who died in 1941. These only recently appeared in the bundle of the Adolf Schmidt collection, whose widow had donated to the Academy in 1986. According to his own records, Schmidt had bought Die Blätter between 1940 and 1943 from the art dealer Rudolf Perlberger, who was also persecuted by the Nazis. The Advisory Board also examines Adolf Schmidt’s other acquisitions from Rudolf Perlberger. The return of 287 graphics and 32 drawings, including a study by Gustav Klimt, was recommended for return.

Works of art sold under pressure

The same gilded for 293 objects – photographs, postcards, prints, lithographs and posters as well as books – which the Jewish lawyer Hanns Fischl Fischl, as a persecuted lawyer, had lost and sold his office and thus his income – “pushed into the role of supplicant”, as the advisory board holds on – the objects.

121 minerals, which the Viennese mineralogist Hans Leitmeier had sold to the Natural History Museum Vienna in 1941 under similar circumstances, were also recommended for return. Leitmeier was forced to retire as a Viennese university professor in 1938 through his marriage to a woman living as Jewish.

Art returns in Salzburg are also recommended

At the request of the museum collections, the committee also deals with objects that came into the warehouses’ holdings in the course of the confiscation of the 1,600 objects from the collection of the Jewish industrialist Oscar Bondy. The return of three Salzburg faience jugs and a ceramic flower pot from the 17th century was recommended.

(Source: APA)