Word: leopold
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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...
...fall in Washington to document Jewish cultural losses under Nazism, got into the act and started urging MOMA and its chairman, Ronald Lauder, not to return the paintings. (As it happens, Lauder was ambassador to Austria from 1986 to 1987 and is a notable Schiele collector.) In response the Leopold Foundation proposed that an international tribunal be set up to examine the Schieles' true ownership, and it pledged to comply with the tribunal's findings. Constance Lowenthal, director of the World Jewish Congress's Commission for Art Recovery (whose chairman is Lauder), said the foundation's offer was unique...
...Morgenthau step in? Dr. Klaus Schroder, the Leopold Museum's managing director, suspects that behind the D.A.'s subpoena lies the hand of New York's Republican Senator Alfonse D'Amato, who is seeking support during this election year for his bill on property restitution to the heirs of the Holocaust, which passed the Senate in November and awaits House action. "It is of course political," said Schroder. He dismisses the Reif and Bondi claims as invalid, as the statute of limitations has expired, and vehemently defends Rudolf Leopold as a good-faith purchaser...