Mathilde Lukacs, (30 August 1883 Vienna – 1979 Vienna) née Mathilde Herzl was a an Austrian Jewish refugee whose name is at the center of numerous major Nazi-looted art restitution cases and concerns about integrity in provenance research.
Life
editBorn into a Jewish family in Vienna in 1883, Lukacs' father was Bernhard Herzl (1842–1915) and her mother was ; her sister Elisabeth married Fritz Grünbaum, a Jewish cabaret performer and art collector, making Lukacs Grünbaum's sister-in-law.
She married jeweller Sigmund Lukacs (1877–1971) from Bátaszék, Hungary, and was involved in the business.[1]
Nazi era
editWhen Austria merged with Nazi Germany in the Anschluss of 1938, the Lukacs, the Grünbaums and the Herzl families were all persecuted under Nazi anti-Jewish laws.
The controversial "Lukacs" story
editThe Lukacs story first appeared in 1998. In the context of a lawsuit, Swiss dealer Eberhard Kornfeld asserted that he had purchased artworks from Mathilde Lukacs in 1956, who had died in 1979. The Grünbaum heirs alleged that this story was a fabrication invented by Kornfeld.[2]
In February 2024, the Manhattan district attorney filed a 160 page lawsuit against the Art Institute of Chicago which according to the New York Times accused the museum of "blatantly ignoring evidence of an elaborate fraud undertaken to conceal that the artwork had been looted by the Nazis on the eve of World War II." The alleged "willful blindness" concerned the invention of the Lukacs story by Eberhard Kornfeld, a Swiss art dealer, and its diffusion through other parties. [3]
The provenance research community was not unanimous in its approach.[4]
In 2019 Pia Schölnberger published in the Lexicon of Austrian Provenance Research an account of the sale of Schiele artworks that replicated the Lukacs story.[5] The Leopold Museum, the Albertina Museum and the Art Insitute of Chicago are among the museums that have based their refusal to restitute works from the Grünbaum collection on the Lukacs story.
The Monuments Men and Women Foundation stated publicly that the Lukacs story had been disproven.[6] In 2024, after seizing several Schieles as Nazi looted art, the Manhattan District Attorney filed a 160 motion detailing the evidence that the Lukacs story was a false narrative invented by Eberhard Kornfeld with the help of forged documents.[3]
References
edit- ^ "Lukacs, Mathilde | Lexikon Provenienzforschung". www.lexikon-provenienzforschung.org. Retrieved 2024-02-26.
- ^ "GERMAN FOUNDATION CRITICIZED FOR REMOVING WORKS FROM NAZI-LOOTED ART DATABASE". Artforum. 2018-08-28. Retrieved 2024-02-28.
The heirs believe Kornfeld's account is fabricated. They found it suspicious that Kornfeld waited until 1998, forty-two years after he revealed that he had the works, to divulge that he had purchased the collection from Lukacs-Herzl, by which point she had been dead for over two decades. They also questioned the dealer's sales records, which featured Lukacs-Herzl's signature. Her name was written in pencil and was also misspelled.
- ^ a b "Investigators Say Chicago's Art Institute Is Holding onto 'Looted Art'". New York Times.
- ^ Kinsella, Eileen (2014-10-27). "Sotheby's and Christie's Split on Response to Nazi Victim's Art". Artnet News. Retrieved 2024-02-26.
- ^ "Lukacs, Mathilde | Lexikon Provenienzforschung". www.lexikon-provenienzforschung.org. Retrieved 2024-02-26.
- ^ "Monuments Men and Women Foundation I WWII Most Wanted Art | Egon Schiele". MonumentsMenWomenFnd. Retrieved 2024-02-26.
The exact details of the war-time fate of Fritz's collection after it was confiscated from Lilly by the Nazis are unknown. It is believed that it was mostly kept intact as almost eighty percent of it was sold by Swiss art dealer Eberhard Kornfeld in the 1950s. Controversy and mystery remain as to how Kornfeld acquired so many Grünbaum works—his claim that he acquired them from Fritz's sister-in-law and Lilly's sister, Mathilde Lukacs, has been disproven.