Portrait of Wally

The year was 1912, the artist was Egon Schiele and the "Wally" of the small-scale, disarmingly intimate portrait (half of an artist-and-model diptych) was of his mistress Walpurga Neuzil. It was bought by gallery-owner Lea Bondi, then one of Schiele’s few serious admirers, and remained one of her prized possessions—until it was stolen by the Nazis in her presence. But Bondi never forgot about her painting, and spent the rest of her life trying to wrest it from the grip of an art establishment eager to profit from Nazi plunder.

After the war, the painting was recovered by American troops and sent off to Vienna’s Belvedere Museum, where it fell into the enthusiastic grasp of the world’s foremost Schiele collector and expert Rudolf Leopold, who neatly established a false provenance for it and installed it in his collection. It’s value began to spiral. When, in 1997, the work was loaned out to the Metropolitan Museum in New York for a major retrospective, Bondi’s American nephew filed a claim against the painting, arguing that as Bondi’s heir, it belonged to him. The panic in the art establishment—which depends on a lot of “looking the other way” in questions of provenance and attribution—was palpable. Was no painting safe from its rightful owners? Andrew Shea’s documentary "isn’t just about stolen art: It’s about cultural skullduggery, political sleaze, institutional hypocrisy and the virtues of persistence."—Variety