But will the Austrian institution auction off another Nazi-looted work to pay for “Wally” settlement? The lady who vanished reappears – in Queens. “Portrait of Wally,” Egon Schiele’s 1912 painting of his mistress, Walerie Neuzil, was taken out of a crate where it had been since 1998, and handed over Tuesday by an agent of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to Elisabeth Leopold, widow of the Austrian collector Rudolf Leopold, who died on 29 June.
The transfer took place at an unmarked warehouse in Queens, New York, as part of a settlement in which the Leopold Foundation in Vienna agreed to pay $19m to the heirs of Lea Bondi Jaray, a Jewish art dealer who fled Vienna after the picture was taken from her apartment by Friedrich Welz, a fellow dealer and Nazi party member.