How Art Gets Stolen: What Happened to Egon Schiele’s Painting Boats Mirrored in the Water After Its Theft by the Nazis
George Clooney may be better regarded as an actor than as a director, but his occasional work in the latter capacity reveals an admirable interest in lesser-dramatized chapters of American history. His films have found their material in everything from the early years of the NFL to the racial strife in Levittown to even The Gong Show creator Chuck Barris’ dubious past as a CIA assassin. A decade ago, he directed The Monuments Men, whose ensemble cast – including Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, and Clooney himself — play Allied soldiers tasked with recovering the many works of art stolen by the Nazis during World War II.
The Monuments Men is based, if loosely, on real events; hence the inclusion of a few of its clips in the new Great Art Explained video above. In it, gallerist-Youtuber James Payne gets into the subject of how the Nazis plundered Europe’s cultural treasures through one painting in particular: one of daring Expressionist Egon Schiele’s Boats Mirrored in the Water series, whose whereabouts remain unknown.
Before the war, it had been in the art collection of the Vienna cabaret star Franz Friedrich “Fritz” Grünbaum. Unlike Schiele’s portraits, none of the Boats Mirrored in the Water were sufficiently offensive to be labeled “degenerate art.” They were nonetheless subject to the organized theft that the regime called “Aryanization.”
In 1956, long after the Nazis had sent Grünbaum and his wife to their deaths, 80 percent of their collection came up for auction in Switzerland. How it got there, we don’t know, though it ended up dispersed far and wide, to both institutions and individuals. The Boats Mirrored in the Water in question was recorded as having been sold again, in 1990, to an unidentified private collector, and it hasn’t been seen since. That may not be a Hollywood ending, but the art-repatriating work of the real Monuments Men continues today; not so long ago, a German court even awarded a once-Aryanized portrait by Schiele’s idol Gustav Klimt to the son of its original owner. It’s not impossible that the missing boat Schiele painted in Trieste over a century ago will see the light of day once again.
Related content:
How Jan van Eyck’s Masterpiece, the Ghent Altarpiece, Became the Most Stolen Work of Art in History
Take a Virtual Reality Tour of the World’s Stolen Art
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.