The Leopold Museum Private Foundation of Vienna has been accused of knowingly purchasing works that could have been stolen by the Nazis, The San Francisco Chronicle reported. A law professor commissioned by Austrian Jews found that at least 11 of the foundation’s works, including some by Egon Schiele (whose “Liegende Frau” is above), Anton Romako and Albin Egger-Lienz, belonged to people persecuted by the Nazis and that the collector Rudolf Leopold certainly knew that they might have been looted. “He knew, or he must have known, that these paintings belonged to people who were persecuted by the Nazis,” said Georg Graf, the professor. “Because of that knowledge, he must have been aware of the possibility that these were stolen goods.” Mr. Leopold, in an interview with Die Presse, disputed the allegation. “In my eyes, the pictures were acquired lawfully,” he said. The Austrian culture minister, Claudia Schmied, said at a news conference this week that she expected the foundation to approve an independent examination of its collection. ... The National Gallery in London said its painting “Cupid Complaining to Venus,” by the German artist Lucas Cranach the Elder, was once part of Hitler’s private collection and may have been looted during World War II, The Washington Post reported. A researcher, Birgit Schwartz, spotted the painting — showing Cupid complaining to Venus that he has been stung by bees after stealing honey — in a photograph of Hitler’s private gallery contained in an album at the Library of Congress in Washington and brought it to the attention of the National Gallery. The museum has been unable to account for the painting’s ownership or whereabouts from 1909, when it was sold at auction in Berlin, to 1945, when an American war correspondent took it from a warehouse of art guarded by American troops in southern Germany, a National Gallery spokesman said. The gallery bought the painting in 1963 from E & A Silbermann, a New York art dealer; that company, no longer in business, said the work had been purchased from “family descendants” of the 1909 buyer. But in December 2004, the National Gallery spokesman said, the museum received an e-mail message from Jay Hartwell of Hawaii, who said that his mother, Patricia Lochridge Hartwell, had owned the painting from 1945 until she sold it to E & A Silbermann in 1963. Ms. Hartwell, who died in 1998 at 82, had been a reporter during the war, and she took the painting from the warehouse and returned with it to New York, where it hung, her son recalled, in their home.
