Word: leopold
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...should our outrage be dampened, rather than inflamed, by knowing that these atrocities are common? Well, you cannot focus your rage against an evil that is universal. You deepen your sadness with stories--think back to the Leopold-Loeb case in 1924, for example. Everyone in America wanted to hang those two in Chicago for murdering 14-year-old Bobby Franks as a sort of Nietzschean thrill; Clarence Darrow, with a magnificent speech against the death penalty, got the idiots off with life imprisonment. Nathan Leopold was released in 1958 and lived to the age of 66, strolling upon...
Chicago ran Bruce out of town, but I claim him nonetheless as having uttered one of the hippest of asides while in our boundaries. And speaking yet again of the Leopold-Loeb Trial (that first of many Trials of the Century, Chicago, 1924), I cite Chicago as Capital of the Brash, for the immortal Best Lead Ever Written by a Journalist. Boy geniuses Leopold and Loeb killed Bobby Franks, and they went to prison. Loeb was filleted in what was presumed to have been a failed homoerotic approach, and Ed Lahey, in the Daily News, led off, "Richard Loeb, despite...