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Case file s235 · Literature and art · 1969
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1969
Died
Lea Bondi Jaray, 1969
Place
London · United Kingdom
Field
art dealer; painting by Egon Schiele · Visual art and architecture on the timeline
Legal tradition
US federal forfeiture law; New York law · Common law
Historical event
Anschluss of 1938 and Aryanisation of Jewish businesses
Literature and artSeized by the stateFortunes from conquest and slaveryPostwarEuropeUnited Kingdom
AI illustration: A painting crated and sealed in a New York museum storeroom, 1998
Illustration made with AI for celebrity.estate.

A Schiele portrait lent to MoMA was seized in New York as Nazi loot, and the Vienna museum paid the owner's heirs $19 million to keep it

Egon Schiele painted Portrait of Wally in 1912. Lea Bondi Jaray, a Jewish art dealer in Vienna, owned it. After the 1938 Anschluss the Nazi dealer Friedrich Welz forced her to give it up in 1939; her husband told her, "you know what he can do." After the war the US Army seized Welz's holdings, and a clerical error listed the painting with another collection, which went to the Austrian state. The collector Rudolf Leopold met Bondi in London in 1953 and bought the painting from the Austrian National Gallery in 1954. His 1972 catalogue left her out of its history. In 1994 Austria bought his collection for the new Leopold Museum. The museum lent the painting to MoMA for a show that ended on 4 January 1998. Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau subpoenaed it as stolen. New York's highest court rejected his claim in September 1999, and US Customs then seized it under federal law. In October 2009 Judge Loretta Preska ruled there was enough evidence for trial. Leopold died in June 2010. On 21 July 2010 the museum agreed to pay Bondi's estate $19 million and keep the painting.

What the law took from it

A family claim to looted property can outlive the original owner by decades when heirs keep pursuing it.

Sources
  1. The New York TimesPress
  2. BBCPress
  3. The New York TimesPress
  4. Wikipedia (English)Encyclopedia

Cite as: celebrity.estate, “A Schiele portrait lent to MoMA was seized in New York as Nazi loot, and the Vienna museum paid the owner's heirs $19 million to keep it,” story s235, https://www.celebrity.estate/a-schiele-portrait-lent-to-moma-1969, updated 30 October 2026.

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Where this case sits

Literature and artSeized by the stateFortunes from conquest and slaveryPostwarEuropeCommon lawUnited Kingdom