For three weeks in May a judge in Rochester, N.Y., heard evidence meant to solve the mystery of who really owns a drawing of a smiling woman by the Austrian artist Egon Schiele.
For years, the drawing has been in the possession of a foundation named after Robert Owen Lehman Jr., who said he had received the work, “Portrait of the Artist’s Wife,” in the 1960s from his father, a financier who steered the Lehman Brothers investment firm through the Great Depression.
But the heirs of two men, Heinrich Rieger and Karl Mayländer, both art collectors who knew Schiele and were killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust, had pursued competing claims to the work as well.
During a bench trial at State Supreme Court, the heirs of Rieger, who had been Schiele’s dentist, and the heirs of Mayländer, a textile merchant who is the subject of two Schiele portraits, presented evidence to suggest their relatives had owned the work before chaos and Nazi looting caused countless gaps in the ownership histories of important art.
On Thursday, Justice Daniel J. Doyle ruled in favor of the organization founded by the Mayländer heirs, who are now represented by a foundation that pursues the family’s interests.
“The evidence presented at trial establishes by a preponderance of the evidence that the Mayländer Heirs have superior title to the drawing,” Justice Doyle wrote in an 86-page decision.
His decision relied in part on a contract from 1960 that governed the sale of works from Mayländer’s collection and listed a Schiele portrait of his wife that the judge wrote seemed clearly to be the one at the center of the dispute.
Restitution disputes have increasingly ended up in court as families fight to track work lost during the Second World War. But few cases have included competing claims as murky and complicated as those Justice Doyle had to sift through as lawyers for three families, all with Jewish roots, drew testimony from multiple witnesses, including art historians and Schiele experts.
The drawing at issue, created in 1917, was one of several portraits Schiele made of his wife, Edith, and it is estimated to be worth several million dollars.
Schiele, an Expressionist who died at the age of 28 during the influenza epidemic of 1918, had been a protégé of Gustav Klimt. The Nazis called Schiele’s work “decadent,” but it soared in popularity after the war and is owned today by institutions like the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Leopold Museum in Vienna.
The Lehman foundation’s lawyers had argued that the whereabouts of the drawing were unclear between the time Schiele created it and the 1960s. Robert Owen Lehman Sr., bought it from a London gallery in 1964 for 2,000 pounds, or about $5,600. The foundation’s lawyers said there was no evidence to suggest the work had actually been stolen.
The case was noteworthy in part because of the Lehman family’s prominence. Robert Owen Lehman Jr. is an Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker known as Robin and a great-grandson of Emanuel Lehman, one of three brothers from Bavaria who founded Lehman Brothers in 1850.
Mr. Lehman testified at trial that he had received the drawing as a Christmas gift in 1964 and donated it to his foundation in 2016. The Robert Owen Lehman Foundation then consigned the drawing for sale to Christie’s, which reviewed its database of information about looted artworks, identified potential connections to Mayländer and Rieger, and contacted representatives of their heirs. The 17-by-11-inch gouache and black crayon illustration has remained with the auction house.
Thaddeus J. Stauber, a lawyer for the Lehman foundation, told the court during his summation in late May that his client had the strongest ownership claim in part because the elder Mr. Lehman had bought the drawing in good faith and the son had been publicly identified for decades as its owner.
The Rieger heirs countered that a Nazi-era gallery owner named Friedrich Welz had taken the Schiele from Rieger and brought it to the art market. Raymond Dowd, the Rieger heirs’ lawyer, said his clients had spent decades searching for the drawing.
“That was the mission of their life, to find this artwork,” Mr. Dowd said while summarizing testimony from a Rieger heir, Michael Bar, adding: “The family did everything that it could have.”
But Justice Doyle found that Rieger’s claim to the work was undercut by evidence that the Schiele portrait he had owned was likely a different work.
He instead sided with the Mayländer heirs, whose lawyer, Oren J. Warshavsky, had argued that the evidence led to the “irresistible inference” that the drawing had belonged to Mayländer.
The Mayländer heirs assert that, in the midst of Nazi persecution, their relative’s art collection was transferred to an acquaintance, Etelka Hofmann. He was deported in 1941 to a Nazi death camp, where he was killed. She later sold a group of the Mayländer works in 1960 to a collector, including one described in a contract from that sale as “Edith Schiele, Seated, Watercolor Drawing, Signed and Dated 1917.”
Justice Doyle cited the testimony of Professor Tobias Natter, an art historian and expert in provenance research, who said his analysis had indicated that only one of Schiele’s portraits of his wife fully fit with the work described in the 1960 contract.
The judge also found that Mayländer would have been under duress when he transferred his collection to Hofmann, because even if their relationship had been congenial, it occurred “in the context of his persecution by the Nazis” and could not be seen as voluntary.
Michael Lissner, a trustee of the Susan Zirkl Memorial Foundation Trust, which focuses on autism, said the disposition of the work would be decided in consultation with the Austrian Jewish community. “My wife and I are also children of Holocaust survivors,” he said. “This decision means a lot to us, too.”
