(bluesy piano music)
- [Narrator] We're looking at a beautiful portrait
of Wally Neuzil by the great Austrian artist Egon Schiele
that has a fascinating history in
the 20th century that we wanna talk about.
- [Narrator] It's a portrait of his
mistress at the time, and is very
characteristic of Schiele's work.
You can understand why many people
really wanted to own this painting.
- [Narrator] Especially because this painting is
a companion to a self portrait.
- [Narrator] Schiele died shortly before
the disruptions that would lead to World War II.
Many of his artworks had been collected by
Jewish art collectors or gallerists,
and this portrait of Wally was one of
the many Shieles confiscated by the Nazis.
We estimate that somewhere between a quarter to a third
of all fine artworks in Europe were moved
during World War II, or hidden,
or confiscated, were sold, were destroyed.
- [Narrator] Works of art were taken
not just from museums and galleries.
They were taken from private collections,
from churches, from basically every site imaginable.
So we have this legacy of an enormous number,
hundreds of thousands of works of art
that have been displaced, that essentially one needed
almost an army to figure out how to return,
where they should go, who were the rightful owners.
In many cases the owners were dead.
Heirs needed to be identified.
So this was a very complicated
and long process to sort this out.
- [Narrator] It needed an army.
The Allied forces after the conclusion of
hostilities sorted out all of these
artworks that they found in Nazi holdings.
They found Nazi high officials with
castles full of artworks.
They found trains stuffed full of stolen art works.
- [Narrator] Salt mines filled with great works of art,
including things like the Ghent Altarpiece.
- [Narrator] And what the Allied forces did was
return as best they could artworks
to the country they came from and then
they let those countries figure out
how to get the artworks back to their owners,
or the heirs of owners who had been killed.
So for example, France still has warehouses full
of artworks where the authorities still can't
figure out who they once belonged to.
- [Narrator] Just in the last 20 or 30 years,
the legal frameworks, the precedents
for how to cope with this have emerged.
- [Narrator] In part, it's taking so long because
some states, Austria being one of the most notorious,
are very reluctant to return works of art.
So Portrait of Wally was the subject of a long-running
legal battle, precisely because of this reluctance of
the museum in Vienna that held it
to return it to the people who were claiming it.
- [Narrator] It's hard to imagine how the Nazis,
who were murdering people by the millions during the war,
also were incredibly interested in art.
They designated some art as degenerate,
but they were also avid collectors.
And, in fact, Hitler planned to create his
own museum in Linz of the greatest works
of art that he could find in Europe.
- [Narrator] The Nazis wanted to control
the culture of the entire world.
So that meant if they thought that if someone
was not worthy of owning a great work of art,
they were gonna take it away.
This Nazi grand plan came to bear on the
Portrait of Wally because who owned it in 1938.
- [Narrator] Lea Bondi, who was a Jewish
art dealer in Vienna, owned this painting.
This painting was part of her private
collection that was hanging in her home.
She was forced to sell her gallery because there
was a law against Jews owning businesses,
and so her gallery was forcefully bought,
one could say, by a Nazi art dealer.
- [Narrator] And then this Nazi came to visit
her house to finalize the sale,
and saw this portrait hanging on the wall
and said, "I'll take that too."
- [Narrator] And she was planning to flee Vienna
the next day, but you can imagine that she
didn't feel that she had a choice at that moment
about whether to turn over the painting or not.
- [Narrator] So Lea Bondi escaped from Austria,
but she never left behind the
thought of this prized possession.
For decades, she tried to keep track of where it was,
who owned it, and tried to get it back.
And she trusted one person she shouldn't have,
a man named Rudolf Leopold who is a collector of art,
who came and visited her in London.
And she said, "By the way, this museum in Vienna
"has my artwork, could you help me get it back?"
What he did instead was go to the museum and acquire the
painting for himself, for his own private museum.
- [Narrator] He actually bartered a couple of works
in his own collection in order to get this one.
And he especially wanted this one because he
already owned the self-portrait that this belonged with.
We should say that the museum in Vienna, the Belvedere,
and Rudolf Leopold, who's a very powerful collector,
all should have known or all knew, I think we can say,
that Bondi was the rightful owner of this painting
and it had in fact been stolen from her.
- [Narrator] So eventually Leopold gave his
collection to Austria and eventually this
portrait was lent to the Museum of Modern Art.
And there, finally, at last in the United States,
the history of this painting started to change.
- [Narrator] When Lea Bondi's heir saw that the
painting was in New York, they worked hard to
alert the authorities and have it returned to them.
- [Narrator] They thought at last here the painting
is in a climate very sympathetic to the
claims of Holocaust survivors and their heirs.
So they convinced the New York authorities
to seize the painting and the New York authorities
kept this painting in storage for more than a decade
while the case was fought out in the courts,
who was able to show ownership.
And interestingly, MoMA argued,
"We'll never get anybody to loan us a painting
"again if this lawsuit is successful."
- [Narrator] The chilling effect everyone
was worried about never occurred and we
should say too that it wasn't just MoMA.
There were many other museums who took the same position.
- [Narrator] Interestingly, if you wanna go see
the painting today, you would still go to Austria.
It's hanging in the very same museum that denied
that Bondi and her heirs had any claim to it.
The heirs and the museum settled the case out of court.
The museum paid the heirs a large amount of money,
but got to keep the painting with one stipulation,
that next to the painting would be displayed
a sign explaining the history of who owned
this painting and how she lost it.
Now I wish that many works of art in many museums had
similar signs explaining how they came to be in the museum.
Because often something that just looks like a piece of
beautiful art has a long history of violent collecting.
- [Narrator] In fact, Hitler's idea of taking everything
that he had seized and stolen and making a museum
out of it is not actually that unusual an idea.
The first incarnation of the Louvre was made
of the paintings that Napoleon confiscated as
he and his army swept through Europe.
- [Narrator] And many collections today are based on
works taken from countries under colonial rule,
when people had as little choice in the matter
as Lea Bondi did over whether or not to
sell her art gallery to the Nazis.
Museums today, they're going through their own records,
doing their own research to figure out
could something have had a Nazi-looted provenance.
But the vast majority of museums are not doing similar
research, similar repatriations for objects taken under
colonial rule or under other questionable circumstances.
- [Narrator] It make me think about that glass box in the
museum with this very special object in it with minimal
information in the museum label and the ways that we in the
20th and 21st century focus on the aesthetics of the object
and all the things we leave out when we do that.
Lea and her husband were fortunate.
They were able to get out of Nazi-controlled Austria.
But many other Austrian Jews were not as fortunate,
many of them who died in concentration camps.
- [Narrator] This painting stands in such contrast to
official Nazi art which is all perfect Aryan figures
and here Shiele shows that he understands
people's frailties, individualities.
He is using art to celebrate the different and the unusual,
which is exactly the opposite of what Nazis wanted to do.
(bluesy piano music)