But critics, including a lawyer for Mr. Schloss’s heirs in France, say the law is itself the problem. In countries like Britain and France, if a once-looted work appears at auction, the rightful owners or their heirs can intervene to try to block the sale, but not in Austria.

Austria’s handling of Nazi-stolen art has come under scrutiny before. One high-profile case involved works stolen from the Czech art collector Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer. One of them, Gustav Klimt’s portrait of the collector’s wife, Adele, ended up in an Austrian museum after the war.

Maria Altmann, one of the Bloch-Bauer heirs, sought to sue the Austrian government for its return and was prevented from doing so because she could not afford the cost of the filing fee. She had to take the case out of Austria, to the United States Supreme Court, to get the work back, a story that was made into the film “Woman in Gold.” (The painting is now at the Neue Museum in Manhattan.)

In an interview on Wednesday after the work was pulled, Antoine Comte, the lawyer for the Schloss heirs in France, said that if public pressure was the motivating factor, then it was “a quite positive result.”

Mr. Comte said the heirs believed that the Austrian system was flawed.

“Maybe it’s not a legal problem in Austria, but it’s becoming a real moral problem for them,” Mr. Comte said. It’s time that Austria understand that these things cannot be admitted as being possible anymore today. It’s appalling.”