Silences that are Hardly Golden

by Ori Z Soltes

edited by Marc Masurovsky

With the untimely passing of Elie Wiesel, my mind wanders back to issues that, over the years, I discussed with him, and things that I wrote about him. A consistent subject of both processes was the kind of responsibility Jews have to make the world a better, more justice-ridden place—in general, given the rabbinic and particularly Lurianic mystical imperative of tikkun olam (“repairing the world”), and in particular given what we as a group endured during the Holocaust. I confess that I confessed to him my disappointments at times in the failure of the Israeli or American Jewish communities to do this or that where they might have responded more positively or aggressively to a given situation. 

In one conversation with Mr. Wiesel I mused over what it is that too often prevented Jews from doing what I thought was the right thing. On the other hand, in one article that I was asked to write on “Who Speaks for the Jews?”—in which one of the figures I discussed was Elie Wiesel—the assertion that I offered was that there is nobody, per se, who plays that role in the Jewish world—there is no Pope or universally embraced political leader. One of the things that has historically prevented Jews from engaging in religious or political wars with each other on anything approaching the scale of the Crusades or the age of Religious Wars in Europe was the widespread diaspora—a thirteenth-century Jew in Germany would have been unlikely to know much about the gastronomy on Passover of Jews in Morocco, and therefore to have objected to it, much less spilled blood over it.

We remain a fractious community of communities today. Depending upon whom you ask and his/her spiritual and/or political affiliations, a given Jew may see his rabbi or his rebbe or the Prime Minister of Israel or the President of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) or the American Jewish Congress (AJC) —or a charismatic speaker, writer and Nobel Prize winner like Elie Wiesel—as the most appropriate figure to whom to turn for guidance regarding how to think, speak and act as a Jew. Non-Jews might think it’s the President of B’nai B’rith where few Jews are likely to think so. So it would be a surprise if we all agreed on what constitutes the “right thing” in a given situation.

There is some irony that one of Elie Wiesel’s first divergences, (following his memoir, Night), from writing novels, was his work—a personal journalistic reportage—regarding the plight of Soviet Jewry, called “The Jews of Silence.” Published in 1966, it was one of those important literary sources for inspiring Jews in America to speak up and speak out, because their oppressed co-religionists in the USSR could not. American Jews have not always been afraid to speak up, it seems.

The questions of contemporary Jewish silence in the face of injustice reminds me of another signal instance, more than fifteen years ago, when the same queries might be proffered. I refer to the attempt by the then District Attorney of Manhattan, Robert Morgenthau, to hold back two Egon Schiele paintings—“Dead City III” and “Portrait of Wally”—that had been on display at MOMA as part of a loan exhibition from the Leopold Museum in Vienna. Morgenthau sought to keep them from immediately heading back out of New York with the rest of the collection when the exhibit ended so that the claims put in by two Jewish families that these two paintings had been plundered from them by the Nazis—and that Dr. Kurt Leopold had acquired them with full knowledge of that fact—could be explored and adjudicated.

The museum community was up in arms: amicus briefs, both formal and informal flew fast and furiously. The museums challenged the validity of government interference in cultural matters. They argued the threat that the economic base of New York City would be deleteriously affected by this: that base, the assertion went, was heavily dependent on culture, specifically large-scale tourist visitation to New York’s art museums, and if the government was successful at holding back these two works, museums across the world would cease and desist from lending objects to New York museums, causing a dynamic shrinkage in loan exhibition quantity and quality, and thus of museum visitation and thus of the New York City economy.

All the museums joined this doleful chorus. My colleagues, Willi Korte and Marc Masurovsky and I, who had joined together to create the Holocaust Art Restitution Project (HARP) in September 1997, were on the other side of the fence. Willi had done and continued to do an enormous amount of research to validate the two families’ claims. Marc and I met with Robert Morgenthau to explain it—and to argue that the very assertion of the museum community was the proof of its fallaciousness: that art is big business, and that, unless one is pretty certain that one’s painting or sculpture is an ill-gotten good, one will not to hesitate to lend it to the Met or MOMA or the Guggenheim, knowing that art that has been on display in such places will exponentially increase in value.

All of the museums joined the chorus, including, of course, the doyenne of Jewish museums, the Jewish Museum of New York. Moreover, nobody among the “leadership” of the New York Jewish cultural and political communities spoke up on behalf of the claimants. The WJC really couldn’t, since its then vice-president—who in establishing the Committee on Art Recovery, announced that they would be “taking paintings off museum walls,” and might have been expected to speak up but could not—was the vice-president of MOMA’s Board and had put half a million of his own dollars into the project of bringing the Leopold Museum exhibition to MOMA. His quadruple conflict of interest—his role at MOMA vs his role at CAR vs his role in the WJC vs his earlier ambassadorship to Austria, shortened by the Austrians’ objections to his purchasing and carrying away the likes of Schiele paintings that they considered part of the Austrian patrimony, by diplomatic pouch—certainly explains his silence.

But why the Jewish Museum? What of the rest of the Jewish world? It was clear that, having spent so many decades trying to define itself as both a museum of Jewish history and culture and of art, and closer than ever since the 1960s to being accepted as part of the art museum world without alienating the Jewish world (in the 1960s it had managed the first but not the second), the Jewish Museum did not want to oppose that art world and re-isolate itself—two paintings and two Jewish family claimants seemed a small price to pay for amicus brief acquiescence. (I am not even going to raise the question of provenance in the museum’s own collections).

And the Jewish community in general?

A pundit well over a century once observed—as Emancipation was gradually breaking down ghetto walls throughout Western and Central Europe and Jews found themselves more welcome into the mainstream of culture, socio-economics and even, almost, politics, between 1780 or so and World War I—that “you can take the Jew out of the ghetto, but you cannot take the ghetto out of the Jew.”

He meant the extreme care with which a Jew feels he must operate, in words and actions, not because a riot might sweep through the now-gone ghetto, but because full acceptance into the larger community and all of the advantages of being mainstream might be denied or retracted. Is that what the Jewish “leaders” of New York City were and still are afraid of, in an America whose principles of eschewing anti-Christian sentiment have always been under assault from some quarters? Where Jews could not run for political office in some places (the state of New Hampshire) until late into the nineteenth century? Are we still faced with fear of what the non-Jews will think about us—or has it resurfaced after a period, in the 1960s and 1970s when Jews marched in Selma, Alabama on behalf of Blacks and marched in New York City on behalf of Soviet Jews?

The question is not who speaks for the Jews these days, but how many and which Jews speak up when the situation is potentially awkward but when silence is acquiescence to the miscarriage of justice. We have justifiably become fond of pointing out—it was one of Elie Wiesel’s important contributions to our thinking about the Holocaust, and the specific subject of his third novel, The Town Beyond the Wall—that silent acquiescence is a form of passive collaboration. There is a particular irony when this issue falls into the context of Nazi-plundered art, when one considers the disturbing datum that Jewish dealers like Georges Wildenstein were often more than willing to see harm done to other Jewish dealers, like Paul Rosenberg, if it served art-dealing business needs—or that perhaps the key dealer on behalf of Hitler, Hildebrandt Gurlitt, was half-Jewish.

If the Jewish role in history and art history is a complex one, and if the role of art within the context of the Holocaust was complex (another long story for another time), then the failure of Jews to speak now, so many decades later, in too many contexts where the matter of restituting Nazi-plundered art to victims’ heirs is also complex, perhaps. Or perhaps simple: fear. Whatever the reasons, that failure would have rabbis like Isaac Luria—and no doubt Elie Wiesel—rolling in their graves.

Provenance research—now and later (Second Installment)

Since the seizure of “Portrait of Wally” in early January 1998, provenance research has lost its innocence. Battle lines have been drawn between defendants upholding their rights to keep art objects under fire for being “looted”, on one side, and plaintiffs demanding the return of those art objects arguing that they were the rightful owners. These claimants argued that their families had been despoiled for racial, ethnic, religious and other reasons at some point between 1933 and 1945 during the twelve year reign of the Nazi Party and as a result of the expansionist war decreed by Adolf Hitler and his minions against Europe’s “undesirables”-Jews, Slavs, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, emotionally and physically challenged individuals, and anyone else who was caught in the cross hairs of the Axis powers in a continental-wide fit of man-made madness, verging on an apocalyptic nightmare worthy of any painting signed by Hieronymous Bosch.

There had been a glimmer of hope at the time of the so-called Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets on November 30-December 3, 1998. Art was not supposed to be on the calendar of the conference. But the seizure of the Schiele paintings (actually, two paintings had been seized at MoMA in early January 1998) changed the configuration of the planning for the Washington Conference. American policymakers were not pleased about the seizure because they argued that it had besmirched the bilateral relations of the United States and Austria. In so stating, the US government had sided against the claimants and had upheld Austria’s argument at the time that the entire flap over “Wally” was a private matter to be resolved between the claimants—heirs of Ruth Bondi-Jarai and Fritz Grunbaum—and the Leopold Foundation, then owner of the seized paintings. Still, Morgenthau’s muscled intervention at MoMA triggered an existential debate inside Austrian political and cultural circles which forced Austria to reexamine its entire relationship with its past as it pertained to the illegal seizures of Jewish cultural property and how postwar Austrian authorities had mishandled claims for return of such looted assets. The end result: the only restitution law in the world which mandates “provenance research” in all Federal public cultural institutions of the Republic of Austria.

Begrudgingly, the US government and its many allies at the planning table for the Washington Conference inserted art as one of the many different types of looted assets whose status needed to be discussed by the representatives of nations and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) attending the international event. The Washington Conference produced the so-called non-binding “Washington Principles”—11 recommendations that have become de facto “policy” for lack of a better word in many nations that want to remove that cultural monkey off their backs.

For some, the Washington Conference was a success. For others, it was a dismal failure. For those who deemed it a success, the Conference had provided a unique forum to get a sense of where the world stood as far as justice to Holocaust survivors was concerned and to promote greater assistance to their dwindling numbers. The principles notwithstanding, everyone went home thinking they had done God’s work for three days. Those who saw in the Conference a dismal failure balked at the so-called Principles as yet another diplomatic way out of taking full responsibility for not having done anything concrete to render justice to the victims of plunder while throwing a sop at museums,  and other members of the art market by reassuring them that, although provenance research was highly recommended to fill “unavoidable gaps” in the history of ownership of art objects under their care and stewardship, “fair and just solutions” ought to be sought in order to ensure a measure of justice for all. In the end, for the naysayers, the Washington Conference led to a massive failure of international public policy, thus creating a vacuum of power and decision-making over the fate of countless art objects whose newfound status in legal limbo—plundered or not? Restitutable or not?—had to be resolved not with legislation but through, oftentimes, vicious legal battles pitting museums’ hired guns against plaintiffs’ hired guns.

The search for justice over a massive crime of plunder tied to genocide has turned into an international legal slugfest.  Instead of chasing airplane crash victims, it became more profitable to seek out victims of plunder.

Provenance research—now and later (First installment)

This “think-aloud” is neither the first nor the last on a topic that has become, despite its innocuous phrasing, far more contentious than it ought to be.

For now, it is best to throw out some questions for which answers are not necessarily forthcoming.

Why all the fuss about provenance research?

Up until the mid-to late 1990s, provenance research remained within the province of trained art historians working in cultural institutions where art objects are cared for and displayed for the benefit of the public. The research aims to enhance the understanding of the object—its author, its physical attributes, the period in which it was produced, the reasons for its existence, and how it evolved over time and space.

This kind of research is an academic/intellectual exercise that helps ascertain the authenticity of an object and its place in the history of art, writ large.

It is not a requirement incumbent upon its practitioner. Provenance research is one of many duties that “come with the job.” If it does not get done, no one gets fired. More often than not, the information that is collected about the object does not enter the “public record” insofar as it is communicated to the general public. If it is communicated, that is left up to the discretion of the institution where the research is conducted.

Then, the 1990s came and went, and, all of a sudden, “provenance research” became something else entirely.

If I had been working in a museum in the wake of the scandal surrounding the misuse of Swiss bank accounts owned by persons of Jewish descent who may or may not have perished during the Holocaust, I would have been rather oblivious to any debate about loot in general. Once the debate about the mishandling of “Jewish bank accounts” (I hate that expression!) transferred into the (mis)handling of art objects nestled in the permanent collections of countless museums both in North America and Europe, provenance research entered the spotlight front and center.

If I had been working in a museum at the time that the “Portrait of Wally” by Egon Schiele was seized at the Museum of Modern Art of New York in early January 1998, I probably would have wondered: what is that all about? And I would have naturally sided with the then owners of the painting, the Leopold Foundation of Vienna, and the exhibitors, the Museum of Modern Art, wondering what Robert Morgenthau, then district attorney of Manhattan, had had for coffee on the day that he decided to order the New York Police Department to seize the painting.

I would have done so because my training would have precluded me from even wondering if I should even worry about whether or not the institution that I served had actual title to the objects under my care and examination. Why should I have worried about title since I simply assumed that my institution was the rightful owner?

I write these words simply because it is the right thing to do: acknowledge that the beast that has become “provenance research” has been transformed from an innocuous art-historical practice into a tendentious, litigation-laced, means to an end: does the research into the origins of an object lead to the maintenance of that object in the collection that I help steward or does it lead to the de-accessioning of the object because of some historical wrong that broke the chain of ownership of the object, thus changing its status to “restitutable”?

Wild Weekend with Wally—Part One

Self-Portrait, by Egon Schiele, 1912
Source: Google Images

No, it’s not what it sounds like. I did not spend a wild weekend with Wally. 

Portrait of Wally, by Egon Schiele, 1912
Source: Google Images

The Wally in question is “The Portrait of Wally”, a new documentary which was screened at the TriBeCa Film Festival in New York, on April 28 and 29, 2012, and directed by Andrew Shea and co-produced by David D’Arcy and Barbara Morgan. Morgan and Shea hail from Austin, TX. D’Arcy is a veteran reporter, formerly affiliated with National Public Radio (NPR) who has filed many stories about the international art market especially in regard to looted art in American collections.

The Wally of which we speak is the now-iconic portrait of a Viennese woman, Walburga Neuzil, who was the mistress of the man who painted her, Egon Schiele. The painting dates from 1912. Schiele created it as a pendant to a self-portrait executed that same year, six years before his untimely death caused by the Spanish flu. Both works currently hang on the walls of the Leopold Museum in Vienna, Austria.

And that is the end of the story.

There would have been no “Wally Story” had this Schiele painting not been stolen from its rightful owner, Lea Bondi Jarai, a Viennese Jewish gallery owner.

Lea Bondi Jarai
Source: ArtsJournal

The thief was a self-avowed Nazi art collector and dealer, Friedrich Welz, who had become emboldened by the March 1938 Anchluss-the willing absorption of Austria into Hitler’s Greater German Reich. This would have been yet another story of Nazi thefts of cultural assets belonging to Jews had it not been for an unscrupulous art dealer and collector named Rudolf Leopold, who with his wife, Elisabeth, built up one of the world’s largest postwar collections of works by Egon Schiele, a collection that verges on idolatry and self-aggrandizing fetishism. By the time the Leopolds had “acquired” Wally through an illegal exchange with a leading Viennese museum in the 1950s, Lea was living in exile in London where she had resumed her art trading activities. She died in 1969, heartbroken at not having recovered the painting which she continually sought in the postwar years, pleading with Leopold to help her. Unbeknownst to her, Leopold now possessed it, despite the lies that he had spewed at her to disguise his machinations aimed at deceiving her so as to be able to acquire Wally and make her his to possess forever.

Rudolf Leopold
Source: The Arts Newspaper

Elisabeth Leopold
Source: Google Images

The story could have just ended there in all of its sordid details, a story of unremitting greed and lust displayed by a Viennese couple enraptured with Schiele’s works, who had openly flirted with and benefited from the Nazi years and the postwar continuum of Nazi influence in Austrian society, taking full advantage of the plight of Viennese Jews to build up their Schiele collection, revered the world over, in particular by American collectors and dealers, most explicitly those centered in New York City.

The official story of what we have come to know as the Wally Case entered its prelude in October 1997 when the Leopold Museum exhibited its treasures at the Museum of Modern Art, whose chairman, Ronald Lauder, was a self-admitted Schiele fan and collector. Needless to say, the exhibit was a success but the presence of Wally on its walls ruined it all for MoMA, for its director, Glenn Lowry, for Leopold, and especially for the Bondi family, next of kin of Lea Bondi Jaraj, who had discovered that the painting was in the United States exhibited under their very noses, with a provenance worthy of a second-rate work of fiction—no mention of Lea’s true ownership of the work, a fictitious sequence of individuals who had nothing to do with the painting’s pedigree. But, as we know, provenances, more often than not, are mere adornments, however fanciful they might be.

Willi Korte
Source: Zimbio

The “Wally case” began after the Bondis attempted to clarify the true ownership of the work and failed to convince MoMA’s leadership and Leopold to engage in a dialogue over the ownership of the painting so as to determine its fate. After numerous futile attempts, MoMA invited the Bondi heirs to sue them in order to prevent the painting from leaving the US and returning to Vienna where there would have been no “fair hearing.”

Willi Korte,  veteran researcher, historian, jurist and investigator of looted cultural property and a co-founder of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project (HARP) helped Henri Bondi get his research ducks in order to prepare for a full-frontal campaign to get Wally back. Others like Marc Masurovsky, Ori Soltes and their legal counsel, Jeanine Benton, also of HARP, were urging Senate Banking Committee staff, Jewish organizations and law enforcement agencies to step into the breach and do “something” to keep the painting in the US.

By early January 1998, it didn’t look good. After Senator D’Amato demanded the seizure of the collection, he recused himself almost as dramatically, having received a phone call from one of his most ardent campaign donors who asked him to reconsider his rash statement. And so he did. US Customs—now ICE—in the person of Special Agent Bonnie Goldblatt were ready to pounce but were left out in the cold because of D’Amato’s sudden withdrawal and the equally callous abandonment by other Federal officials at State and Commerce who had ruled that this was indeed a private matter which should not require official American governmental interference that might intrude on the good relations between the United States and Austria.

Special Agent Bonnie Goldblatt
Source: ArtsJournal

Robert Morgenthau
Source: Google Images

All this to say that all five of us were rather alone that first week of January, dismayed at the cowardice displayed by elected and appointed officials alike, the cynicism of the art world, and the apparent indifference of American Jewish groups including the World Jewish Congress and the American Jewish Committee, who refused to lift a finger on behalf of the Bondis, the legitimate heirs of a victim of Nazi persecution. Is it a coincidence that the chairman of the board of MoMA was also the secretary-treasurer of the WJC? We’ll leave that alone for now…

The last hope was Robert Morgenthau, District Attorney of Manhattan. He emerged as the ultimate mensch of the Wally story, consistent with his lineage—a grandfather, Harry, who had blown the whistle on Ottoman massacres of Armenian civilians in 1915 before resigning as a foreign service official during President Wilson’s tenure; a father, Henry, Treasury Secretary under Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) and the most ardent anti-Nazi member in FDR’s government—its only “cabinet Jew.”

HARP forwarded a set of documents to Morgenthau’s office before and after New Year’s of 1998 outlining the weaknesses of MoMA and Leopold’s position—in their haste to exhibit the Schiele works, MoMA and Leopold had forgotten to “immunize” or shield the collection against any possibility of legal challenges arising from claims to rightful ownership while the works were on display in the United States—a foreshadowing of the proposed Senate Bill 2212 currently stalled in the Senate Judiciary Committee. The paintings were thus vulnerable to any legal action taken against them on US territory, especially arising out of a claim of rightful ownership. For Morgenthau, the presence of stolen property in his jurisdiction was, in his own words, “unacceptable.”

During that first week of January 1998, the skies were bleak, the prospect of a fair hearing for the Bondi heirs seemed more like a remote fantasy than an impending reality. With no one left to uphold their interests, MoMA and Leopold were about to breathe a sigh of relief, except that they did not factor in the unlikely and outrageous possibility that something drastic might just prevent the paintings from leaving the United States. On January 7, 1998, Morgenthau obtained the necessary legal instruments by which to order the seizure of Wally and another painting, Dead City III, until the ownership of these works could be clarified. The men in blue entered MoMA’s front doors on 53rd Street and made arrangements to have Wally and Dead City III sequestered. For the first time in recent memory, an American official had directly intervened with a cultural event in an American museum by ordering the seizure of works on loan for display there.

End of Part One.

Letter to Marilyn Henry concerning the return of 'Portrait of Wally' by Egon Schiele

Note: This letter was sent to the late Marilyn Henry in an effort to articulate complicated thoughts pertaining to the unsettling resolution of a decades-old battle to recover the 'Portrait of Wally' by Egon Schiele from the clutches of Mr. and Mrs. Leopold.  It constitutes mostly an attempt to sort out conflicting emotions and to restore a semblance of historical truth to an international story of racially-motivated theft, punctuated by a half-century of injustice towards a Viennese family whose sole crime was to be Jewish.

August 17, 2010

Dear Marilyn:

I debated even writing this note regarding the return of Wally to Vienna—the scene of the crime, as it were.

The ceremony on July 29 was emotional. After all, we did wait for 12 years to see a case closed that, had cooler, pragmatic, and ethical heads prevailed, would have been resolved a long time ago.

But, there were none of the above at the time of the ‘event’, the seizure of Wally at the Museum of Modern Art on that fateful Wednesday afternoon, in early January, on the eve of its planned departure for Europe. Had Wally left the United States, there would have been nothing to discuss, no strategies to implement. More to the point, there would have been no restitution law in Austria, of the kind that we now see today being implemented, albeit in a limited way, but in a more efficient manner than in most other countries that boast similar laws.

Indeed, not only would there have been no restitution law in Austria, but Randy Schonberg would not have recovered Maria Altmann’s fabled Klimt paintings which set astronomically high records at auction. Randy would still be wondering exactly how to approach the Austrian government and would be haunting the halls of the State Department looking for someone with enough spine to go and rattle a diplomatic saber at an indifferent Austrian government.

Worst of all, Dr. Leopold and his wife would continue to enjoy in apparent indifference to the suffering of Holocaust victims and their families, the pride and joy of their collection—so many Schieles with provenances that would make one’s hair raise on one end, to defy logic—in an unholy alliance with the Austrian government’s representatives on the board of the Leopold Foundation.

And, yet, most of the above did not come to roost because Wally did not go home in January 1998, as it was supposed to like an obedient child whose estranged biological relatives were clamoring to keep it in the US so that they could have their day in court and assert their rights to it.

I made the mistake of sitting in the same row as Frau Leopold and her coterie of dowagers. She snickered through the entire ceremony not four seats away from me. The same woman who together with her late husband, Dr. Leopold, prevented the Bondi family for more than 12 years from recovering Wally, on legal, moral and ethical grounds with the Anschluss and the Holocaust as the historical backdrop.

On July 29, my stomach turned while I saw the glitterati of New York City and of our own Federal government fawning over Frau Leopold, she who kept justice at bay for 12 years. Some might say that the time had come for reconciliation. Well, perhaps, we should just shake hands with former war criminals and collaborators and call it a day. Let bygones be bygones, right? After all, what is done is done, and so we should all move on. America loves stories of redemption, but they should not apply to the Holocaust.

My two heroes on the 29th of July were Andre Bondi and Robert Morgenthau. Andre because of his steadfastness and his family’s persistence in seeking what was rightfully theirs, in the face of total indifference to their cause in the late 1990s, except for one small group of irreverent folks based in Washington, DC. Those who comprise the Holocaust Art Restitution Project or HARP.

More on that later…

Robert Morgenthau will always remain an outsized mensch in my personal pantheon of individuals to look up to, true mensches. He inherited the best genes in the world, those of his father, Henry Morgenthau, one of the few in Franklin Delano Rooselvelt’s cabinet who stood up in explicit terms against National Socialism and Fascism when it was not fashionable to do so. Decades later, Robert stood up against the American museum establishment, the art world, complacent Jewish organizations, and a meek, passive Federal bureaucracy, more interested in accommodating America’s allies than standing up for a single citizen over a single painting that turned out to be property stolen during the Holocaust. Robert did the right thing. What he called a Hail Mary pass, was actually a calculated moment that did not come out of left field , but the outcome of a thoroughly well-rehearsed strategy that would not have been put into motion, had everyone else done their job to safeguard Wally and the rights of American citizens like the Bondi’s.

First off, the Departments of State and Commerce who, instead of considering the possibility that the Bondi Affair was worthy of note and thinking a bit harder about the implications of an inquiry with the Austrian government over property looted during the Holocaust, whose true owners are American citizens, chose to place the overarching national interests of the United States over those of its citizens. Granted, the logic is well entrenched in customary international law, but such logic has been mercilessly applied as a foil against Holocaust victims seeking redress since the late 1940s. In other words, the Federal government was simply being consistent with its stated policy not to intercede on behalf of Holocaust victims and their families in a forceful and meaningful manner.

While State and Commerce were not willing to modulate what was fast becoming an international incident, the Senate Banking committee leadership, under Senator D’Amato, had voiced its concern over the fate of Wally and contemplated some drastic action that would require the painting to remain in the US until its provenance could be sorted out in the interest of justice for Holocaust victims and their families. There too, the will to act quickly vanished, presumably under pressure from some unnamed notables close to the Museum of Modern Art and who also bankroll the World Jewish Congress. With State, Commerce, and the Senate Banking Committee running for cover, there was no one left to support the Bondis in their plea to keep the painting in the United States, at least long enough so that their side of the story could be heard in a fair and objective manner.

Except for HARP. Founded by Willi Korte, Ori Soltes, then director of the Klutznick Museum at B’nai B’rith in Washington, DC, and myself in September 1997, HARP’s mission was and continues to be to document the historical cultural losses suffered by Jewish owners during the 12 year reign of the Nazis. The Bondis had contacted Willi Korte and asked him to dig up the historical documentation surrounding the illegal seizure of Wally by Friedrich Welz and its subsequent wartime and postwar fate, which landed it in the hands of Dr. Leopold. Willi then turned to HARP for assistance and asked HARP to use whatever means possible to create sufficient pressure to keep the painting in the US.

Meanwhile, in late December 1997, Judith Dobrzinsky wrote a lengthy article for the New York Times on the Schiele exhibit and the brewing controversy surrounding Wally and another painting, Night City III, which was being claimed by the Reifs. However, in the same article, Judith also wondered whether venality had played a role in the Bondis’ decision to seek the return of Wally since they knew that the painting was then worth an estimated 2 million dollars.

With that type of adverse publicity, the Bondis had very few people to whom they could turn. Certainly no one in the Federal and legislative branches were willing to assist them. Jewish groups were pretending that they didn’t exist. And what was a District Attorney of Manhattan to do?

HARP, in the mean time, was seeking an accommodation with MOMA, a middle ground which would form the basis for a dialogue over the fate of the painting, as long as they could remain in the US. The general counsel of the Museum of Modern Art issued a terse rebuff—the reply to HARP’s request for dialogue and postponement of the shipment of Wally to Europe was: “Come and sue us if you want to prevent the painting from leaving. You have until Thursday.” Or something to that effect.

Without the painting in hand on US territory, the Bondis had no case. Fortunately, there were a number of legal issues that surrounded the Schiele exhibit’s hasty entry into the United States. Those legal issues provided a minimal opening for the District Attorney’s office to contemplate an aggressive move against MOMA to secure the painting and protect the rights of the Bondis on the suspicion that the painting might in fact be stolen property.

But the District Attorney’s office could not consider any form of drastic action against MOMA. It waited for the federal government to act. On the Monday preceding the expected departure of the painting, the Federal and legislative branches pulled their pins out of the game. Morgenthau was truly alone. But he was ready, whether he admits it or not, to launch his action.

And so, Robert did what he normally does, but which stood out as an outrageous exercise of bravura against the caste of Brahmins, symbolized by the tier one museums of New York and their friends and sycophants and followers and admirers. It was more like the 7th Cavalry charging when all hope had faded. As he explained it to us—Willi, Ori, and I—he doesn’t tolerate stolen property in his jurisdiction, especially if it is tainted by crimes against humanity.

Wally was saved. All hell broke loose. New York Museums instantly vilified Robert Morgenthau as a villain who was about to rain an economic calamity onto New York City. This message was delivered in unison by every major cultural institution in Gotham.

Morgenthau contacted HARP and asked if we would supply him with an affidavit in defense of his action to safeguard the rights of the Bondis. We complied with pleasure. Ori Soltes did the honors as chairman of HARP. We sat in Robert’s rickety conference room under the watchful eye of his late father, Henry. We were in good company. As it turns out, HARP is the only group that provided such an affidavit in defense of Morgenthau’s action.

This is basically the story of HARP’s involvement in preventing Wally from leaving the United States and securing the rights of the Bondis to a fair hearing of their claim. Wally did not mysteriously stay in New York by some act of divine inspiration that befell Robert Morgenthau. Without plenty of assistance, he could not have acted without knowing what we knew about the already-emerging complexities of the case. What had started as a simple request to modify the provenance of a painting in MOMA’s catalogue of the Schiele exhibit turned into a nightmare, both for the museum community, the US government, the Austrian government, and, the Bondis.

The rest is history. But on that fateful Wednesday afternoon, history was made as a result of a month of intensive lobbying, all-out pressure, and persistence from a small group of individuals who simply wanted Wally and Night City III to remain in New York so that their origins could be sorted out in the name of justice for Holocaust victims and their families.

I am relieved for the Bondi family, but the relief is bittersweet.

The only outcome that we had envisioned as just was restitution, assuming that there would have been no systemic failings.

I commend Larry Kaye and Howard Spiegler of the law firm of Herrick, Feinstein, for having found the best possible result to allow for closure to a very unpleasant and painful and trying ordeal, prompted initially by a racial crime perpetrated against a Jewish woman who loved her Wally. At least, Wally returns to Vienna with a price tag attached to its frame. But at what cost?

Regards,
Marc Masurovsky

Cardozo Law School follow-up—Larry Kaye and the 'Portrait of Walli'

Portrait of Wally, Egon Scheile
Source: MJH

Larry Kaye discussed the circumstances under which Egon Schiele's 'Portrait of Walli' had been seized under orders of the then-District of Attorney of Manhattan, Robert Morgenthau, in early January 1998 from an exhibit of Schiele's works held at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City.

According to Larry, the claimant family represented by the late Henry Bondi, on behalf of his deceased aunt, Ruth Jarai Bondi, had petitioned Morgenthau's office to intervene in the squabble between his family, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Leopold Foundation, current owner of 'Walli.'

Larry was unaware of the role played by the Holocaust Art Restitution Project (HARP) in the events leading up to the seizure of 'Walli'.  Indeed, Henry Bondi had sought HARP's help in November-December 1997 via Willi Korte, a veteran German-educated legal and historical researcher and investigator on looted art issues whom Henry Bondi had retained to flesh out the provenance of the 'Portrait of Walli.'

HARP conducted its own research and inquired into the legal circumstances under which 'the Portrait of Walli' had entered the United States.  It turns out that MOMA had made a number of mistakes both at the Federal and State levels which exposed it to possible legal action.  HARP recorded these flaws and transmitted them to Robert Morgenthau's office in the hope that it could use them to act on behalf of the Bondi family.  Previous attempts by HARP's chairperson, Ori Z. Soltes, then director of the B'nai B'rith Klutznick Museum in Washington, DC, to open up a dialogue with MOMA over the ownership of 'Walli' had been met by blunt dismissals and invitations to sue MOMA in order to keep the painting from being returned to Vienna, Austria.

As Larry pointed out, the rest is history.