 is valued at $2.75m (£2.23m). The US has returned seven artworks by Austrian painter Egon Schiele to the heirs of a Jewish cabaret star who owned them before he was killed by the Nazis in 1941. Fritz Grünbaum's family has sought the return of his Schiele pieces for more than two decades. Valued at between $780,000 (£633,000) and $2.75m apiece, some had been on display at prominent museums in the US. The claims prompted lawsuits in several courts. In 2018, a New York civil court ruled the pieces were never sold or surrendered by Mr Grünbaum. In a ceremony on Monday, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg called the return of the artwork "historic". The museums where the pieces were held - the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Morgan Library & Museum, both in New York, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California - agreed to give the pieces voluntarily to prosecutors after learning that they had been stolen. A few of the pieces were also in the possession of Ronald Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress, and the estate of Serge Sabarsky, a well-known art collector, both of whom agreed to return them. Mr Grünbaum, who died in a concentration camp at Dachau in Germany, owned 81 pieces by Schiele. His wife, Elisabeth, was forced to hand over his art collection to the Nazis after he was arrested in 1938. She later died in a concentration camp in 1942. Scheile's pieces had been declared "degenerate art" by Adolf Hitler, and were sold to finance the Nazi Party. Some had ended up in the possession of a New York dealer by the name of Otto Kallir, who sold them to different buyers. The heirs of Mr Grünbaum went to court in New York State in 2018 to fight for the return of two Schiele pieces from a London-based collector named Richard Nagy. The judge overseeing the case, Charles V Ramos, ruled in their favour, stating that it is unlikely Mr Grünbaum voluntarily gave the artworks away when he was){kind=link}
The US has returned seven artworks by Austrian painter Egon Schiele to the heirs of a Jewish cabaret star who owned them before he was killed by the Nazis in 1941.
Fritz Grünbaum’s family had sought the return of his Schiele pieces for more than two decades.
Valued at between $780,000 (£633,000) and $2.75m apiece, some had been on display at prominent museums in the US.
The claims prompted lawsuits in several courts.
In 2018, a New York civil court ruled the pieces were never sold or surrendered by Mr Grünbaum.