Duane Michals photo / DC Moore Gallery, New York City.

WASHINGTON DC — Rita Reif, who covered antiques and auctions for The New York Times for 50 years, died in her son Timothy M. Reif’s home on June 16 at the age of 94. She had been in hospice care for congestive heart failure and dementia.

Rita Anne Murphy was born in Manhattan on June 12, 1929, to Harry, a mechanical engineer, and Louise Becker, a homemaker. She attended Cathedral High School in Manhattan and put herself through Fordham University, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1950, followed by a master’s degree in English from Columbia University in 1951.

Reif first began working as a copy girl at the New York Journal-American. She started working for The New York Times, part time, in 1947, going full time in 1950 when she was hired as a clerk in the newspaper’s archive. In three years, she had become a clerk in the women’s news department. In 1956, after she received a master’s degree in English from Columbia University, she became a reporter for that department. Her beat included home décor and, in 1963, she reported on General Electric’s first self-cleaning oven. She eventually moved into covering real estate, the first 15 years of which touched on antiques. In 1972, she took over the regular antiques column from Marvin D. Schwartz. She also followed auctions, a topic she covered for the next 25 years during the 1980s-90s when large sums of money began to trade hands regularly for blue chip works of art. She retired from her full time job and stopped writing the antiques column in 1997 but continued to cover architecture and art for several more years.

In 1997, she also contested the ownership of a 1911 Egon Schiele painting that she claimed the Nazis had stolen from the uncle of her late husband, Paul Reif. “Dead City III,” was at the time on loan to MoMA from the collection of Dr Rudolf Leopold, an Austrian ophthalmologist who had acquired hundreds of artworks for the exhibition. Reif wrote to MoMA asking them not to return the painting but when the museum refused her request, Manhattan district attorney Robert M. Morgenthau stepped in and seized the work, as well as another Schiele work, “Portrait of Wally,” which also had questionable ownership.

Reif was predeceased by her husband, Paul Reif, in 1978, and son Leslie, who died in 2004. She is survived by her son, Timothy Reif and five grandchildren.