Schieles seized at MOMA

Art in America, Feb, 1998 by Raphael Rubenstein

As the crowds poured in during the final weeks of the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition "Egon Schiele: The Leopold Collection, Vienna" [Oct. 12, '97-Jan. 4, '98], claims surfaced that two of the works on view had been stolen from Austrian Jewish collections during the Nazi period and never returned to their rightful owners. In late December, the families and heirs of these owners sent letters to MOMA director Glenn D. Lowry requesting that the museum retain two Schiele paintings, Portrait of Wally (1912) and Dead City (1911), rather than send them on to the show's next venue, the Picasso Museum in Barcelona. Citing its "contractual obligation" to the Leopold Foundation, MOMA turned down these requests, but on Jan. 7 shortly before the paintings were due to leave, the Manhattan District Attorney issued a subpeona to keep them in New York as evidence for a grand jury criminal investigation. Many believed that a guarantee by the U.S. government protected the paintings from seizure, but because MOMA had applied for indemnification from New York State rather than from the Federal Government, the D.A. was able to act. Due to insurance costs, such government guarantees have become common practice for international loan exhibitions. The fallout from the D.A.'s seizure raised concern in the museum community and protests from Austria. At the center of the controversy, however, were the activities of Rudolf Leopold, the Austrian ophthalmologist who assembled the Leopold Collection before selling it to the Austrian government.

The better known of the two paintings, Portrait of Wally, which depicts Schiele's model and mistress Wally Neuzil, belonged to Lea Bondi Jaray, a Vienna art-gallery owner. According to a Dec. 24 New York Times article, Bondi, who died in 1969, claimed that prior to fleeing to London in 1937 she was intimidated into turning over the painting to a Nazi art dealer named Friedrich Weiz. When Bondi briefly returned to Vienna in 1946 to reclaim her gallery, she also sought to recover the Schiele. She discovered, however. that the painting had been confiscated from Welz, who was detained by U.S. authorities until 1947 as a suspected war criminal. The work had been deposited in the Belvedere, part of Austria's National Gallery. Back in London, Bondi met Leopold and, according to her account, asked him to pick up her painting from the Belvedere. Instead, Bondi charged in a 1966 letter quoted by the Times, Leopold acquired Portrait of Wally for his own collection. This is one of two known cases in which the Austrian National Gallery either sold or traded works it held to Leopold.

According to the provenance Leopold gives for the painting in the catalogue of the MOMA show, Portrait of Wally supposedly passed from Bondi to Viennese collector Heinrich Rieger, then to his son Heinrich Rieger. Jr., of London, who sold it to the Austrian National Gallery, whence it made its way into Leopold's own collection. This account is at odds with a 1966 Schiele catalogue raisonne, which has no mention of any Rieger having owned the painting. It is further challenged by the testimony of Rieger's son Robert, who, before his death, denied that his father had ever owned Portrait of Wally. Questioning another detail of the provenance given by Leopold, the Riegers' cousin Phillip Rieger told the Times that there was never any such person as Heinrich Rieger, Jr., and that Rieger's son Robert never lived in London.

(There seems to be no dispute that Heinrich Rieger, who died in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, did own two other Schiele paintings. When his son emigrated to the U.S. after the war, he sold them to the Austrian government with the stipulation that they remain in the national collection and be labeled as a memorial to his father. One of these works, Cardinal and Nun [1912], subsequently passed to the collection of Rudolf Leopold and was included in the MOMA show)

Although Bondi never sued for return of her picture, citing financial difficulties, she continued to press for its return in private. The recent requests to MOMA were made by Bondi's 76-year-old nephew. Henry S. Bondi of Princeton, N.J. His appeal was joined by the Holocaust Art Restitution Project, a group recently founded by the B'nai B'rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum in Washington. Underlining the dilemma for MOMA, its chairman, Ronald S. Lauder, is also chairman of the World Jewish Congress's newly formed commission to recover art stolen from Jews by the Nazis.

The second painting in question. Dead City, a tightly constructed urban landscape, belonged to Fritz Grunbaum, an Austrian collector who died in Dachau in 1940. Grunbaum's heirs, Kathleen E. Reif and Rita Reif, both of the U.S., say that the painting was confiscated from him following the 1938 German annexation of Austria. The provenance for Dead City given in the MOMA catalogue says only that the painting passed from Grunbaum's collection to a gallery in Bern, Switzerland, and then to Galerie St. Etienne in New York. which sold d to Leopold.