Wild Weekend with Wally-Part Two

Close-up view of "Portrait of Wally"
Source: Google Images

Andrew Shea, Director
Source: Google Images

The making of a documentary film on the fate of the “Portrait of Wally” is a heady exercise. Its subject matter is a loving, dreamy and complicit portrait by Egon Schiele of his mistress, Walburga Neuzil. This was no art historical exercise here, though, especially coming from a legally-trained filmmaker, Andrew Shea, a veteran journalist, David D'Arcy, who straddles the fence between art and politics, and a well-seasoned film festival organizer, Barbara Morgan. “Wally” is all about the forensics of a racially-motivated theft in Nazi-absorbed Austria and the postwar attempts to recover title to an illegally acquired painting, “Portrait of Wally”, from an iconic figure of the Austrian art world, Rudolf Leopold, more interested in protecting ill-gotten treasures which were ripped from the bosoms of persecuted Jews in a nation that forgot to mete out justice against the culprits of Nazi collaboration.

Howard Spiegler, attorney for the Bondi Estate
Source: Google Images

The fight over Wally echoes the deep-seeded schisms that underlie the frail ties that bind Jews with non-Jews in nations implicated in different aspects of the Final Solution through intense, widespread collaboration at all levels of the society. By extension, it is about those who did nothing to help those who suffered for the fact that the others did nothing. An uneasy situation with which most European societies have yet to fully come to grips, albeit clumsily and unevenly, some countries behave better than others, although nowadays, anything is possible in the face of a massive rightward and chauvinistic shift in European politics.

David D'Arcy
Source: Google Images

False notions of venality have plagued the claimants of “Wally”—in this case, the Bondi heirs—through press reports (New York Times being no exception), statements made by museum and art world figures who are apparently more concerned with the value of an object and the inviolability of collections than with human justice.

The Wally case encapsulates all that is wrong with the way in which we relate to culture. Our ability to so eagerly disconnect an object from its history is disconcerting, much like when grave robbers violate the sanctity of a tomb and rip out from its matrix funerary objects meant to accompany their owners into the afterlife. De-contextualization makes it all the more easier to ignore the fact that an object has a human history, a social history, one that is organically connected to its previous owners, its jealous rivals, its covetous admirers, and its oglers. That is not to say that we should all weep and moan at the vagaries of history and the incessant and continual tragedies that sever ties between objects and owners—no, we are not comparing art objects to our favorite pets.

Andre Bondi, son of the late Henri Bondi
Source: Google Images

Left to Right.: Sharon Levin, Willi Korte, and Andrew Shea
Source: Google Images

In the case of Wally, we now have 20-20 hindsight—how convenient! Those who steadfastly opposed the Bondis’ claim to “Wally” and railed against Robert Morgenthau’s seizure of the painting are now gloating about their early involvement in the “Wally” case. The silent ones are those who produced the most damage—MoMA, and by extension, the New York art world, writ large; the Leopold Museum and, by extension, many in the Viennese cultural world, as well as members of select organizations traditionally devoted to the protection of the rights of Holocaust survivors and their heirs and to the greater good of the Jewish community at large.

 Is it so naïve to think that, if in late 1997 and early 1998--the crucial time frame for the Wally "Case"—MoMA, the Leopold Museum, the Federal Government, Jewish organizations, had reacted differently to the plight of the Bondi family, the Wally “case” might not have been a “case” at all? I am one of those who is that naïve to believe so. Woe on me! The seizure could have been so easily avoided. A dialogue between the parties, such as had been offered by HARP in late December 1997, might have spared all the parties thirteen long and tedious years which involved attorneys, judges, experts, researchers, historians, family members, government officials, on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. An enormous waste of time, energy, and priceless resources, if you ask me.

But such as it is, human nature can be vile in its inability to produce empathy, understanding as it steadfastly adheres as if life itself depended on it to confining, self-serving, self-satisfying legal and fiduciary frameworks and principles—who owns what when? Under what circumstances? I work in a museum, you don’t. Who are you anyway? I am a collector, you are not, etc., etc., etc. Should one even dare cross the Rubicon and wonder whether the underpinnings of those legalistic and defensive questions do not belie more sinister thought processes such as: why do those Jews always fret about what is theirs and what is not theirs? Haven’t they received enough? Is it because “Wally” is worth two million dollars (in 1997) that the Bondi family has asserted its rights of ownership? Is it greed disguised as justice that creates these complications? So many ugly thoughts and questions which pervaded the press and trade debate over Wally, ugly as could be, thus rendering any adult and civilized conversation about the ownership history of this painting by Egon Schiele nigh impossible, resulting in what we have come to know as the “Wally Case.”



End of Part Two

'Human Rights and Cultural Heritage: from the Holocaust to the Haitian Earthquake'

Brookdale Center, Cardozo Law School
Source: Wikipedia

This one-day symposium took place on March 31, 2011, at Cardozo Law School in downtown Manhattan.

It featured, among other things, a panel on "Nazi-Era Looted Art: Research and Restitution."  The speakers included one person from the art trade, Lucian Simmons, a vice president at Sotheby's; Larry Kaye, of the law firm of Herrick Feinstein who co-chairs its art law group; Inge van der Vlies, who is a senior official of the Dutch Restitution Committee in Amsterdam; Lucille Roussin, co-organizer of the conference and head of the Holocaust Restitution Claims Practicum at Cardozo Law School.... and myself, as co-founder of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project and the only non-lawyer and historian in the assembly.

Lucian Simmons
Source: Sotheby's

Larry Kaye spoke about the events surrounding the seizure of the 'Portrait of Walli' by Egon Schiele and the involvement of his firm in the settlement of the case with the Leopold Foundation in Vienna, Austria.  He also addressed some sensitive issues governing the plunder of the Goudstikker collection in Amsterdam and the postwar role of the Dutch government in not facilitating the restitution of many items in that collection.

Howard Speigler, left, and Lawrence Kaye
Source: The New York Times via Fred R. Conrad

Lucian Simmons described how Sotheby's is leading the charge on art restitutions, careful, though, not to intrude on the rights of the consignors and the good faith purchasers, and reminding all of us that there are two victims in this game--the historical victim who lost the work or object and the good faith purchaser who--god forbid!--was caught with it, thinking it was perfectly fine. He did address an early incident involving a painting by Jakob van Ruysdael which had been withdrawn from a sale at Sotheby's London, in October 1997 on account of its shady provenance--which indicated that it had been acquired for Hitler's Linz Museum project.

Inge van der Vlies
Source: Raad Voor Cultuur

Inge van der Vlies gave us a painstaking description of the processes involved in assessing art claims in Holland through her restitution committee, reminding us all that, had the Dutch government adhered strictly to the rule of law, no returns would have been possible to claimants because of statutory and other considerations governing ownership of works of art.  Hence, its munificence in 'doing the right thing' governs the debate on restitution.  Larry Kaye took exception to the Dutch government's interpretation of what constitutes legally binding decisions in art restitution cases.  Nothing further needs to be said here about this.

Being the historian of the group, my task was to give context to the issue of restitution. I opened up the subject writ large, going back to the Hague conventions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries which sought to define protections for civilians and their property while armies duked it out near their fields.  My point, which is not popular, is that plunder of works and objects of art motivated by ideological, political, racial, and ethnic considerations are characteristic of the first half of the 20th century, starting with Armenia, going through the muddle of the First World War, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, the Anschluss, the establishment of a Nazi protectorate in then-Czecholovakia, the disappearance of Poland, the Nazi invasion of Western and Northern Europe, and the subsequent onslaught against the Soviet Union and southeastern Europe.  Not much time left to discuss the fundaments of restitution except to indicate that market considerations reigned supreme in the immediate postwar which compelled the US government in 1946 to liberalize the art trade by quickly eliminating wartime restrictions on the imports of cultural objects into the US, without knowing what objects might be of illicit origin.  The US and its allies shut down art claims in and around 1948 in their respective zones of occupation in Germany and Austria, thereby shifting the claims process to national governments in Europe and the Americas.

Howard Spiegler, Larry Kaye's alter ego at the Art Law Group of Herrick Feinstein, delivered a genuinely entertaining lecture over lunch where he took on the critics of art restitution litigation, especially aimed at high-revenue firms such as his and Larry's.  Point well taken.  Someone has to do the work.  The problem since 1945? There is still no national and/or international mechanism by which claimants who cannot afford to pay legal fees can be guaranteed a satisfactory procedure through which to articulate their losses and seek redress.  It's now been 66 years since the end of the Second World War and chances are that nothing will ever happen.

The main disappointment in an otherwise productive conference was the inability of the conveners to make a link between Holocaust-era losses and cultural property disputes in the postwar era, and also to address the confusion and complications arising out of the distinction between cultural property and other types of art objects and works of art.  Currently countries such as Italy are deliberately placing Holocaust- and World War II-era losses under the roof of cultural property and cultural patrimony, thus treating a painting by Claude Monet on the same basis as an antique urn.  The end result? the likelihood that the object, even if restituted, cannot leave Italian territory without special permits.  Something akin to what takes place in Austria with works by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, and in France, with any masterpiece produced on French territory.

Hopefully, at some future forum, someone will take the brave step and challenge these artificial barriers that separate antiquities from the rest of artistic production.