“Portrait of Wally” Settlement: What’s Wrong With This Picture?

Egon Schiele, “Portrait of Wally,” 1912

At the commemorative ceremony celebrating the settlement of the Nazi loot-related dispute over Egon Schiele‘s “Portrait of Wally,” David Marwell, the director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage (which hosted the event), highlighted a lesson to be learned from “Wally”:

She can teach us about justice, even justice that comes after more than seven decades: how fidelity to basic values…and no small measure of hard work can help to get some things right.

But the some things about the resolution still don’t seem quite right: While bestowing $19 million on the heirs of Lea Bondi Jaray, the Nazi-era Jewish owner of the portrait, the settlement sends the painting back to reside permanently in Austria, the country that Bondi Jaray had fled and the one from which she had vainly attempted to have her cherished painting returned. It remains in the collection of the Leopold Museum, established by Rudolf Leopold, the megacollector from whom Bondi Jaray had sought her painting.

The person who best expressed appropriate ambivalence about this ironic twist of justice is Edith Southwell, Lea’s grandniece. Southwell, who lives in England, is the official representative of Lea’s estate (along with Andre Bondi, who spoke at the ceremony).

Southwell sent a statement to be read at the celebratory gathering in New York last Thursday, in which she expressed these regrets:

Despite the great accomplishment this ceremony celebrates, for me this event is tinged with some sadness that my dear great aunt will never know that her struggles to claim what rightfully belong to her…were finally vindicated….

While I personally cannot rejoice that the painting will return to Austria, where [Lea] was so wrongfully deprived of it, it is satisfying to know that her story and that of the attempts to recover it made in the United States will be displayed alongside it, wherever it is exhibited. During this long, drawn-out legal battle, I have found no small satisfaction in the fact that for as long as the Leopold Museum procrastinated [a characterization with which that museum would probably disagree], they remained without the painting, much to their chagrin.

Another problematic aspect of the settlement is the statement issued by the Leopold Museum Private Foundation, acknowledging “moral responsibility to do justice to the history of Austria and of its Jewish citizens,” but also expressing confidence that, had it persevered in the 12-year-old case, it “would have eventually won the lawsuit” to retain “Wally.” Austrian newspapers report [in German] that the Leopold Museum is financing the $19-million settlement through a bank loan, which it may repay through sales of art from its collection.

The foundation says that collector Leopold, who died before the settlement was announced, “was aware that his strength and health were failing. He desired to see the painting returned to Vienna during his own lifetime, and therefore initiated settlement negotiations of his own accord.” But the foundation’s statement, posted on the museum’s website, reasserts Leopold’s contention that he was blameless in acquiring the work:

Dr. Leopold always believed himself to be in the right regarding this case, and up to his final moment, he remained optimistic that justice would
ultimately prevail. Those who give close study to the relevant history, documentation and witness testimony will thoroughly understand the way
in which the collector acted, arriving at the conclusion that he had acquired the work in justifiably good faith.

But as the press release from the office of the U.S. Attorney of the Southern District of New York states, the sole focus of the case in U.S. District Court, which was on the brink of trial, was the question of whether Leopold had indeed acted in good faith.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office:

In 1953, Dr. Rudolf Leopold…visited [Lea] Bondi during a trip to London. During this visit, Bondi told Leopold  that the painting belonged to her and asked him to go to the Belvedere and recover it on her behalf. Leopold agreed to help her. Instead of helping Bondi recover her painting, however, Leopold entered into an agreement with the Belvedere [Austria’s national museum] whereby he exchanged a Schiele painting from his own collection for “Wally.”

When Bondi later discovered that Leopold had acquired “Wally” for himself, she retained lawyers to attempt to convince Leopold to return the painting to her, to no avail. Bondi continued to fight to recover her beloved painting until her death in 1969….

The Court…ruled that the Government had made a probable cause showing that Leopold knew “Wally” was stolen property when it was imported into the United States. Thus, the only issue to be resolved at trial was whether the Leopold Museum could overcome the Government’s evidence and prove that Leopold did not know that Wally was stolen property when it was imported into the United States. The Court scheduled a trial for July 26, 2010, to decide this single issue.

The museum foundation’s statement, signed by the late collector’s son, Diethard Leopold, directs some harsh criticism at the Austrian government for its role in this affair:

In 1998…a settlement would have cost around two million dollars—as signalled to him [Leopold] at the time by Ronald Lauder [the American collector of Austrian and German Expressionists]. But the Austrian Federal Government’s representation on the board of the [museum’s foundation] urged Leopold to grant his permission to engage in the legal battle that ensued—a battle during which court and legal fees were to consume over twice the original compensation sum. The other side had an easier time of it: Their role in the proceedings was assumed for them by the U.S. Government.

Yet another problematic aspect of the settlement was highlighted by Tom Freudenheim in his July 27 article for the Wall Street Journal—What Is Lost When Works Are Trophies. Rather than being viewed primarily as an entrancing portrait of Schiele’s mistress, “Wally” will (in Freudenheim’s words) forever exist in an “alternate, extra-artistic perceptual universe,” because of “the clause in the legal
settlement” stipulating that “Portrait of Wally” must perpetually be accompanied by a wall label that goes into great detail about its complicated, contentious history.

The entire text (agreed to by both sides) of that five-paragraph label can be seen here, The final sentence will be deleted after Aug. 18, when the
“trophy” is whisked away to Austria from its current display at the Museum of Jewish
Heritage. This lengthy verbiage will likely divert many viewers’ attention from this small, exquisite jewel of a painting, which is much more textured and vibrant in person than in flat reproduction (as partially demonstrated by the raking light in the upper left corner of my photo, above). It’s the face that launched a hundred lawyers’ briefs.