From a conscript in the Army of the Tireless:
There’s a cropped picture of Egon Schiele’s 1912 “Portrait of Wally” on the cover of the new cultural-property anthology “Who Owns the Past?” edited by Kate Fitz Gibbon in collaboration with former Metropolitan Museum counsel and power lawyer Ashton Hawkins. The book, subtitled “Cultural Policy, Cultural Property, and the Law,” is to be launched tonight at the Rubin Museum of Art in Chelsea and tomorrow at the Century Club.
Since 1997, when the painting was spotted at the Museum of Modern Art by heirs of Lea Bondi (the Jewish art dealer in Vienna from whom the Nazis seized it in 1939), MoMA has fought the Bondi family’s efforts to get “Wally” back, arguing that the picture should be returned to its lender in Vienna, where claims by Jews for the return of Nazi-looted property are, to put it mildly, not welcomed. MoMA also commissioned a memorandum to discredit potential claims that the family might eventually make under Austrian law. The case is now in U.S. District Court.
The anthology (from Rutgers University Press) includes a MoMA-friendly article on the dispute, but insiders say the case is now spreading uneasy scrutiny to the Holocaust-era history of Schiele paintings in the collection of MoMA benefactor Ronald Lauder that are now on view at Lauder’s Neue Galerie uptown. (Since MoMA first rebuffed the Bondi family in 1997, by the way, the value of “Wally” has risen from $1 million to about $10 million.)
You may recall that MoMA has beaten back reporters who’ve tried to cover the “Wally” story. If not, ask Morley Safer, whose crew was blocked from entering MoMA’s 1998 Jackson Pollock retrospective in retaliation for Safer’s efforts to crack the Schiele scandal. Ask the New York Observer, whose reporter Andrew Goldman drew the ire of MoMA director Glenn Lowry for daring to note that Lowry had “reptilian eyes.” (Ah, vanity.) Or ask David D’Arcy, the arts reporter ousted by NPR after MoMA attacked his coverage of the Schiele case on “All Things Considered” last Dec. 27.
Some background: D’Arcy was dumped for failing to do “fair and balanced reporting” when NPR management reversed its own editors, who had praised the story (listen to the broadcast), after a MoMA exec directly contacted NPR CEO Kevin Klose. NPR then issued a “correction” at MoMA’s behest, stating that the museum, which had been in court over “Portrait of Wally” for more than seven years, never took “a position on the painting’s ownership.”
Amid claims that NPR had failed to stand up to MoMA, Holocaust specialists, lawyers and journalists condemned the “correction” as false and misleading, and — what has not been reported — NPR (through hardball lawyers at Williams & Connolly) subsequently offered to take D’Arcy back, but he refused to sign a letter that NPR’s enforcers at the law firm demanded, stating that NPR “had not caved” to pressure from the museum.
We’ve already written a lot about the D’Arcy affair: See (in chronological order) DAVID D’ARCY, NPR, AND MoMA, RUNNING COVER FOR NPR IN D’ARCY CASE, DAVID D’ARCY REDUX, WHOSE KLOSE CALL GOT NPR REPORTER FIRED?, BATTLE OF THE NPR CORRECTIONS and ‘I’M NOT EVEN ROAD KILL.’ Maybe one day we’ll get over it.
— Tireless Staff of Thousands
