For the past couple of weeks the international museum world has been getting an increasing attack of the jitters over two works by the Austrian Expressionist artist Egon Schiele (1890-1918). Portrait of Wally, 1912, and Dead City III, 1911, were part of a large fall show of Schiele's drawings and paintings at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, all on loan from the government-financed Leopold Foundation in Vienna. The two paintings have long been claimed by descendants of Viennese Jewish families from whom the Nazis stole them in the 1930s. Right at the end of the show--in fact only hours before the works were to be crated for return to Vienna--Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau took the unusual and high-handed step of hitting MOMA with a subpoena that froze the disputed Schieles in New York City until a criminal investigation had determined whose property they are.
This was greeted with outrage in Austria and dismay in the U.S. Austrian Culture Minister Elizabeth Gehrer called Morgenthau's intervention a "heavy blow to the international exchange of art" that "shakes the foundations of trust." It seemed particularly insulting that Morgenthau's office had behaved as though the present Austrian government, whose conduct in the restitution of art stolen by Nazis after the Anschluss has been impeccable, would stoop to the sort of cover-up deployed by Swiss bankers over their stocks of stolen Jewish gold.
The chief claimants to the paintings are Henry Bondi, 76, a biochemical engineer in Princeton, N.J., and Rita Reif, a semiretired arts reporter for the New York Times. Wally had belonged to Bondi's aunt, a Viennese art dealer named Lea Bondi Jaray. Shortly before she fled to London in 1938, it was seized from her by a Nazi art dealer; eventually it passed through the hands of the Austrian Gallery and ended up in the collection of Dr. Rudolf Leopold, an ophthalmologist and self-styled art historian and restorer whose Schiele collection is institutionalized today as the Leopold Foundation. Dead City was owned by a relative of Reif's, a Viennese writer-comedian named Fritz Grunbaum. Nazis confiscated it before sending him to die in Dachau. Its passage through the art market before Leopold bought it from a dealer is not fully clear.
Bondi and Reif had asked MOMA to keep the works in New York until the legal title to the pictures was clarified. "The museum," said Reif, "must make a moral determination on this." Exactly wrong: the museum's responsibility for moral issues stops with the works in its own collection. MOMA had a loan contract with the Leopold Foundation to return the works to Vienna as soon as the show closed. Such contracts are, of course, vital to the arrangement of institutional art loans. The free circulation of works of art among museums depends on them. "If we can't honor our contracts, it will have the iciest chilling effect on loans," MOMA's legal counsel, Stephen Clark, told the New York Times. "Who would lend, knowing that the pictures might not come back?"