Charting a New Course: Vienna’s Leopold Museum is attempting to identify potential war loot in its collection
In the years leading up to his death in 2010, Dr. Rudolf Leopold, the patron and director for life of Vienna’s Leopold Museum, was not willing to concede that any of the museum’s artworks should be restituted to the heirs of Holocaust victims. “I’m not a Nazi, and I’m not a Nazi profiteer,” he famously told the Jerusalem Report in 1998. “My family [was] totally against Hitler’s regime.”
Today, however, under the leadership of Rudolf’s son, Diethard Leopold, a large part of the collection of Austrian modernism is undergoing exacting provenance research to identify once and for all works that were obtained illegally or stolen. According to Diethard, works found to have been looted before and during World War II will be restituted, or suitable compensation will be paid to the rightful heirs to allow the museum to keep them.
Diethard led the museum’s effort to settle the case of Egon Schiele’s Portrait of Wally (1912), ending a legal imbroglio that began in 1998 with the seizure of the painting, which had been on loan to the Museum of Modern Art, by Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau. Rudolf Leopold fought Morgenthau, and then the United States government, for more than a decade, in an effort to keep the painting from being restituted to the heirs of the Viennese dealer and collector Lea Bondi Jaray, the owner of the work before World War II.
Rudolf Leopold died just months before the case was scheduled to go to trial in Manhattan, and shortly thereafter, the Leopold Museum settled the case. The museum gave the Bondi Jaray heirs $19 million in exchange for the painting, which now hangs in a prominent place in the museum next to a plaque that recounts the controversy surrounding it.