An End in Sight to Portrait of Wally Forfeiture?


Martha Lufkin of the art newspaper summarizes the nearly 10-year-long dispute between Federal prosecutors, the Bondi family and the Leopold Museum in Vienna. For past posts on the long-running dispute over this work see here.

Lufkin also reports Federal prosecutors have asked that a judgment to be postponed to allow the review of some new evidence:

Judgement on a long-running lawsuit in New York, which helped launch a world outcry over Nazi-looted art at museums and prompted many institutions to begin examining their collections for history of Nazi theft, has been postponed to let the US government review new evidence. On 3 June the schedule was suspended on a case brought by the US government in 1999 to seek confiscation of Egon Schiele’s Portrait of Wally from the Leopold Museum in Vienna, under the US National Stolen Property Act. The US says the Leopold knew that the art was stolen by a Nazi in 1939 from its Jewish owner, Lea Bondi. The case, which the parties had asked the court to resolve without a trial, is before the federal district court in Manhattan.

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