Schiele's Portrait of Wally: a Vienna claim settled in 2010

Lea Bondi Jaray was getting ready to leave Vienna when a visitor came to her apartment. The US Attorney’s office in New York says it was 1939 and the visitor was Friedrich Welz, a Salzburg dealer and Nazi Party member who had taken over her art gallery. Bondi Jaray was a Jewish dealer who had run the Galerie Würthle. In the government’s account, Welz saw a small Schiele portrait in her home and demanded it. She said it was private, not part of the gallery. She gave way when her husband reminded her that Welz could stop their escape. Welz paid nothing.

The painting is Portrait of Wally, made by Egon Schiele in 1912, oil on wood, 32.7 by 39.8 centimetres. It shows Valerie Neuzil, called Wally, his model and partner until 1915. Bondi Jaray owned it before 1925. A 1930 catalogue of Schiele’s work lists her as the last owner.

The date of the taking is not settled. The New York Times says a Nazi agent seized it in 1938. The Leopold Museum in Vienna says the gallery changed hands in April 1938. The US Attorney says 1939, and the court records that Welz had permission to take over the gallery on 15 March 1939. The court found that Welz took the painting against her will. The museum said she sold it with the gallery in 1938 for 200 Reichsmarks. The court said the evidence did not support this.

After the war, US forces arrested Welz and seized his art. On 4 December 1947 they gave 14 paintings, Wally among them, to the Austrian Federal Monuments Office to hold for their owners. Bondi Jaray won back her gallery in Austrian proceedings in 1948 and 1949, but not the painting. In 1950 the office handed it by mistake to the heirs of Heinrich Rieger, a Jewish dentist and Schiele collector who died in the Theresienstadt camp about 1942. The heirs sold works to the Belvedere museum, and Wally went with them.

In 1953 Rudolf Leopold, a young Vienna doctor and Schiele collector, met Bondi Jaray in London. The US Attorney and the court say she told him the painting was hers. The museum disputes this. In 1954 Leopold swapped another Schiele with the Belvedere to get Wally. Bondi Jaray tried through lawyers to recover it and failed. She died in 1969. In 1997 the Leopold Museum, founded from his collection, lent Wally to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In January 1998 the Manhattan District Attorney had a grand jury subpoena it. On 21 September 1999 the New York Court of Appeals quashed the subpoena. Hours later a federal magistrate issued a seizure warrant, and US Customs took the painting.

On 30 September 2009 Judge Loretta Preska found that Wally belonged to Bondi Jaray and had stayed stolen when it entered the US. She ordered a trial on one point: whether Leopold knew. The government said he did. The museum said it always acted in good faith. Leopold was never charged, because the case was civil. He died on 29 June 2010, aged 85, before the trial.

On 19 July 2010, six days before the trial, the museum agreed to pay the Bondi Jaray estate $19 million. This was a settlement, not an auction price. The heirs said justice had been served. The painting must carry a label that gives its true provenance. It is in the Leopold Museum, Vienna.