After starting out in the lowest of journalism jobs, Rita Leaf spent decades covering the world of antiques and auctions for The New York Times, before challenging art ownership herself in the late 1990s. It’s news. Egon Schiele A painting believed to have been stolen by the Nazis from a relative of her late husband died in Washington on June 16. She was 94 years old.
Her son, Timothy M. Leaf, said he died at home where he had been receiving hospice care since last year for congestive heart failure and dementia.
Mr. Leaf amassed thousands of bylines during his half-century at The Times. She began working part-time at her newspaper company in 1947, laying out her stock charts on her boards in the financial section. In 1950 she was hired full-time as a clerk in the newspaper’s archives, three years later she transferred to the Women’s Press Department as a clerk.
Soon she was writing byline articles. One of her early works is from April 1954, when the temperature was in her mid-60s, and how engineers were skating her rink at Wollman’s Memorial Skate in Central Park. It was observed whether it was frozen to A trivia she pointed out in that article was that flared skirts tend to transfer heat to the ice, causing it to melt.
In 1956, Ms. Leaf became a reporter for the Women’s News Department. Women’s press departments were what women usually worked for in newspapers during the male-dominated era. Timothy Leaf said her mother, who by then had a master’s degree in English literature from Columbia University, wanted to interview her about her religion, but she was told it was a man’s courtesy, she said. Told.
She has written countless articles on home decor and related matters, including trends in children’s room decor, home lighting developments, mattresses, hi-fi systems, and how to buy bathroom fixtures.
In 1962, when a White House curator suggested that the famous Lincoln Bed might actually have been installed by President Abraham Lincoln’s predecessor, James Buchanan, she got to the bottom of the matter and turned to curators. determined that the employee was clearly mistaken. An 1861 bill of sale provided by the office of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy signed the contract.
In 1963, Ms. Leaf reported that the new home appliance, which had been in development for ten years in such secrecy that the project was code-named “P-7,” had finally entered the market. cleaning oven.
After that, I transferred to the real estate department. Many of Ms. Leaf’s first articles in her 15 years touched on antiques, and in 1972 the knowledge she demonstrated gave her a new assignment. She replaced Marvin D. Schwartz, who had been a columnist since the mid-1960s, as the newspaper’s regular column on antiques. She also covered overlapping auction beats.
Over the next 25 years, she documented sales, exhibitions and trends of all kinds, whether it involved paperweights or Picasso. At the time, art was paid for astonishing amounts of money, and Leaf had a formidable reputation, said Constance Rosenblum, the Times’ arts and leisure editor for much of the 1990s. recalls Mr.
Rosenblum said in an email. “When I first came to this section, I was told that she was such an influential figure in the world that the heads of the city’s major auction houses trembled when they heard her name. I remember.” A great power of the Times, which would give her whatever she wanted in terms of access and information instantly. “
Ms. Leaf retired from her full-time job in 1997 when she stopped writing her antiques column, but continued to write for The Times on art and architecture for several more years.
That same year, 1997, she made the news after fighting for ownership of Schiele’s 1911 painting Dead City III, which she claimed had been stolen by the Nazis. fritz grünbaumuncle of late husband Paul Leaf.
At the time, the painting was on loan to the Museum of Modern Art in New York from the collection of Austrian ophthalmologist Dr. Rudolf Leopold, who had amassed hundreds of works of art. MoMA Exhibition “Egon Schiele: Leopold Collection”. Another family had already questioned the ownership of another piece in the exhibition, “Portrait of Wall-E,” and after reading about the challenge in late 1997, Leaf said: told People magazine Months later, she discussed the matter with other family members and “we all agreed that something had to be done.”
She wrote to the Museum of Modern Art in New York asking not to return “Dead City III” to the Leopold Collection, and when the museum refused the request, Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau intervened in early 1998, Both the work and the work were confiscated. “Portrait of Wall-E.” The move caused an uproar, with some museum officials saying it would put a damper on the long-standing practice of loaning works for exhibition.
In 2010, the family, who had claimed the Wall-E portrait, reached a financial settlement with what is now the Leopold Museum. “Dead City III” finally came back But U.S. International Trade Court judge Timothy Leaf said Leopold and others continue to challenge ownership of the work. and other art It is believed to have been looted by the Nazis. Grünbaum was a prominent cabaret performer and librettist who died in 1941 in the Dachau concentration camp. Judge Leaf said her mother knew that “Dead City III” was particularly meaningful to her husband, composer Paul Leaf, who had defected from the Dachau concentration camp. Before the war, he and Mr. Grünbaum had written operettas together, and he defected to Vienna in 1940, where he died in 1978.
“My mother was very careful about her honesty and independence as a journalist, and she knew how much Grünbaum means to my father, which is why she took this step,” Judge Leaf said in an email. “My mother did this for my father because she knew it was right,” he added. “
Rita Ann Murphy was born on June 12, 1929 in Manhattan. Her father, Harry, was a mechanical engineer and her mother, Louise (Becker) Murphy, was a homemaker and later worked in several retail stores.
Rita graduated from Cathedral High School in Manhattan and worked briefly as a copy girl at the New York Journal American Company before joining The Times. She went on to Fordham University, where she received her bachelor’s degree in 1950 and her master’s degree the following year.
In addition to her son, she has five grandchildren. Another son, Leslie, Died in 2004.
