A member of the Leopold Museum board presents Egon Schiele’s painting Portrait of Wally at the Vienna museum on Monday. (Hans Punz/Associated Press)

Nazi-looted painting returns to Vienna museum

Monday, August 23, 2010 - The Associated Press

Bondi Jaray was forced to sell the painting, Portrait of Wally, at an unrealistically low price in the prelude to World War II as part of a widespread Nazi campaign that stripped Jews in Austria, Germany and later other European countries of their possessions.

Portrait of Wally— which pictures Valerie “Wally” Neuzil, a woman Schiele knew and used as a model — was among more than 100 works the Leopold Foundation had leant to MoMA.

U.S. customs refused to let the work leave the country after Henry Bondi of Princeton, New Jersey, filed a claim that said his late aunt was forced to give up the painting before fleeing Vienna in 1939 to escape to London when Germany annexed Austria.

She died in 1969. Henry Bondi also has since died.