High price for looted Schiele work

Egon Schiele’s painting of wilted sunflowers, stolen by the Nazis from a Viennese textile manufacturer and sold in 1942 to raise cash, fetched $13.23 million Tuesday at a Christie’s International auction in London.

“Sonnenblumen,” or “Wilted Sunflowers (Autumn Sun II),” was part of a collection owned by Austrian art collector Karl Gruenwald that was confiscated by Nazi authorities in occupied France and sold in 1942.

For decades, it was thought to have been destroyed. It was only when the painting’s most recent owner requested a valuation that the 1914 work was identified as an original Schiele. The owner returned the painting to Gruenwald’s heirs in February.

The sale price was almost double the top presale estimate. The buyer was the New York art advisory firm Eykyn Maclean.