Wally (Schiele)

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Wally by Egon Schiele, oil on panel, 1912

Portrait Walburga Neuzil , usually called Wally for short , is the title of a portrait created in 1912 by the Austrian painter Egon Schiele (1890–1918) in an expressionist style . It is painted in oil on wood, measures 32.7 × 39.8 centimeters and depicts Schiele's lover at the time, Walburga Neuzil .

For many years the painting was incorrectly called Portrait of Valerie Neuziel in the specialist literature . It attracted public attention after it was seized as looted art in 1998 in New York , where it was on loan from the Vienna Leopold Museum in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) , which in turn led to a twelve-year legal battle . An out-of-court settlement was reached in July 2010, and Wally returned to Vienna after paying $ 19 million .

Image description

Egon Schiele: Self-portrait with lantern fruits

The portrait, executed as a half-length portrait, shows a young woman who is bent slightly forward and directs her gaze directly at the viewer. The “simplicity of well-ordered surfaces”, the dark dress, the white collar as well as the light background and the suggested chair back with ornamental pattern expresses a “secessionist melancholy”.

The relatively small painting was created in early 1912 and forms the counterpart to the self-portrait with lantern fruits , also oil on wood and 32.7 × 39.8 centimeters in size, created at the same time . Both pictures come from a particularly fruitful creative period in which the painter dealt with the work of Vincent van Gogh . During these months, after Schiele's move from Krumau to Neulengbach and before his imprisonment from April to May 1912 because of endangering public morality, he created numerous landscape paintings and several figurative compositions, in particular the paintings The Hermits and Cardinal and Nun .

The model Walburga Neuzil (1894–1917) was the artist's lover and muse from 1911 to 1915. She was born on August 19, 1894 in Tattendorf in Lower Austria as the daughter of a day laborer and a primary school teacher. The relationship with Schiele broke up when he married Edith Harms in June 1915, who strictly rejected a three-way relationship. After the separation, Wally trained as a nurse and went to Dalmatia in 1917 , where she died of scarlet fever on December 25 of the same year .

Provenance

After two changes of ownership between 1920 and 1925, the work of art became the private property of Lea Bondi-Jaray (1880–1969), owner of the Würthle Gallery in Vienna . In the course of the so-called Aryanization of the gallery in 1938, the art dealer Friedrich Welz (1903–1980) from Salzburg , who worked closely with the Nazi regime , pressed the painting from the gallery owner. In 1945 the American occupation authorities confiscated it and in 1947 passed it on to the Federal Monuments Office , along with other Schiele works that Welz had obtained from the dentist Heinrich Rieger, who was murdered by the National Socialists . In 1950, the Federal Monuments Office mistakenly gave the portrait of Wally with the bundle to the Rieger heirs living abroad. Since they did not know the full extent of Rieger's collection as it existed in 1938, they assumed that the picture had belonged to their father and sold it to the Austrian Gallery Belvedere in the same year . In 1954 the art collector Rudolf Leopold (1925–2010), who specialized in particular in works by Schiele, acquired the picture in exchange, knowing about the claims of Lea Bondi-Jaray, whom he had visited in London in 1953.

Lea Bondi-Jaray received part of her confiscated collection back in 1949 in restitution proceedings against Friedrich Welz. After learning that the portrait of Wally was in the Belvedere Gallery, she applied for restitution, which ended with her death in 1969. In 1994 the painting was one of more than 5,000 works of art that Leopold brought to the Leopold Museum Private Foundation, which was established jointly with the State of Austria .

Litigation

Immediately after the major exhibition Egon Schiele: The Leopold Collection, Vienna in the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1998, the painting was confiscated as looted art at the request of Lea Bondi-Jaray's heirs . The public prosecutor's office also initially seized the Tote Stadt III work from the former property of Fritz Grünbaum , but after a few months it was returned to the Leopold Museum because the lawsuit had not been brought by lawful heirs. For the portrait of Wally, however, a preliminary criminal investigation was initiated under US law.

In May 1998, the New York Supreme Court overturned the seizure because loans from overseas were protected by law. Still, the painting remained in judicial custody as the heirs alleged violations of the National Stolen Property Act , a law that bans the entry of stolen goods into the United States. Following objections by the foundation, in December 2000 the responsible federal judge allowed the investigation into the USA to be continued, as it was a matter of fundamental questions in connection with the restitution of looted art .

On September 30, 2009, the responsible judge of the United States District Court in New York, Judge Preska, decided that based on the evidence there was no dispute that the painting was looted. Since the question of whether Rudolf Leopold was aware of this fact when he introduced the picture to the USA in 1997 could not be clarified for the court, the parties would have to decide whether they want to conduct a contentious procedure before a jury. After the death of Rudolf Leopold, who died on June 29, 2010, the Leopold Museum decided not to pursue the legal dispute, for which the main hearing in court was scheduled for July 26, 2010. To date, it has cost the Leopold Museum Private Foundation more than five million euros.

In July 2010 an agreement was reached between the Vienna Foundation and the heirs of Lea Bondy-Jaray and the government of the United States. For a payment of 19 million dollars (14.8 million euros) to the claimants, the portrait of Wally became the property of the Leopold Foundation. The physical handover of the work of art to Rudolf Leopold's widow Elisabeth Leopold and Carl Aigner, board members of the Leopold Museum Private Foundation, took place on July 27, 2010 in New York. Before being transported back to Vienna, the painting was shown from July 29 to August 18, 2010 in the Museum of Jewish Heritage .

Elisabeth Leopold stated on July 21, 2010 that her husband had sought an amicable settlement "from the start", but the representatives of the Republic of Austria on the Foundation Board had long insisted on the dispute being brought to court: "Initially, the federal board members did not want an agreement . They thought you won the process. We were therefore forced to conduct the process. "

Joint statement

Another part of the agreement was that the picture will be exhibited with an accompanying text based on a joint declaration by Lea Bondi-Jaray Erben and the Leopold Foundation. This text describes the provenance of the painting, the litigation and the decision of the court. Among other things, it says:

Based on the evidence presented in the context of this case, the local division of the United States District Court in New York concluded in 2009 that the painting was the personal property of Lea Bondi-Jaray and that Friedrich Welz, the Was a member and collaborator of the Nazi party who illegally appropriated the work in Vienna in the late 1930s. […] In 1954 a deal came between the Belvedere and Dr. Rudolf Leopold, with whom Dr. Rudolf Leopold acquired the painting. In 1994, Dr. Leopold the painting to the Leopold Museum. Following the judicial determination of these issues, the matter was finally settled in 2010 by the US government, the estate and the Leopold Museum. The Leopold Museum agreed to pay the estate a substantial amount; In return, the estate is obliged to give up ownership of the painting in favor of the Leopold Museum. The US government pledged to dismiss the confiscation lawsuit and release the painting to the Leopold Museum.

Effects of the litigation

In autumn 1998, Education Minister Elisabeth Gehrer appointed a commission for provenance research in Austria to systematically clarify the origins of the holdings of the federal museums . The Leopold Museum Private Foundation was not directly affected. Another effect of the legal dispute over the portrait of Wally was the passing of the so-called Art Restitution Act (Federal Law Gazette I No. 181/1998) by the National Council in December 1998, the legal basis for the return of works of art to state property, which in the course of or as a consequence found their way into Austrian federal museums during the Nazi era. As a private institution, the Leopold Museum Foundation is not subject to the Restitution Act. However, due to the high state share in the foundation, regardless of the legal starting position, the same moral demands are made on them as on federal museums.

literature

  • Gabriele Anderl, Alexandra Caruso: Nazi art theft in Austria and the consequences , Studien Verlag 2005, ISBN 3-7065-1956-9 .
  • Hilde Berger: Death and Maiden. Egon Schiele and the women , Boehlau Verlag 2009, ISBN 978-3-205-78378-7
  • Robert Holzbauer, Klaus Pokorny: Blown Traces. The fate of Wally Neuzil (1894–1917) , Im Leopold Museum, Vienna 2010, Ed. 2/2010, pp. 8–11

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Erwin Mitsch: Egon Schiele 1890–1918 , Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 1975, ISBN 3-423-01064-9 , p. 36
  2. ^ Leopold main works collection: Egon Schiele, portrait of Wally Neuzil , accessed on January 22, 2011
  3. ↑ Dossier of the Ministry of Education on Dr. Heinrich Rieger (PDF; 220 kB)
  4. ^ Gunnar Schnabel, Monika Tatzkow: Nazi Looted Art. Handbook of Art Restitution Worldwide . Proprietas-Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-00-019368-2 , p. 395
  5. ^ Gabriele Anderl, Alexandra Caruso: Nazi art theft in Austria and the consequences , StudienVerlag 2014
  6. ^ Gunnar Schnabel, Monika Tatzkow: Nazi Looted Art. Handbook of Art Restitution Worldwide , p. 393
  7. ^ Judgment of the United States District Court, Southern District of New York, September 30, 2009; as a PDF file, Looted Art homepage , accessed on January 21, 2011
  8. ↑ Lawyer Ray Dowd's blog spot , accessed July 21, 2010
  9. ↑ I think Rudolf Leopold was very wrongly done , Elisabeth Leopold in conversation with Thomas Trenkler, in: Der Standard daily newspaper , Vienna, July 22, 2010, p. 3
  10. ^ Quotation of accompanying text in the original ORF website, July 21, 2010
  11. ↑ Online presence of the Standard Art Restitution in Austria January 17th, 2006