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:

New Dig­i­tal Archive Will Fea­ture the Com­plete Works of Egon Schiele: Start with 419 Paint­ings, Draw­ings & Sculp­tures

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

The 16,000 Art­works the Nazis Cen­sored and Labeled “Degen­er­ate Art”: The Com­plete His­toric Inven­to­ry Is Now Online

Great Art Explained: Watch 15 Minute Intro­duc­tions to Great Works by Warhol, Rothko, Kahlo, Picas­so & More

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.