Lea Bondi

Lea Bondi, later Lea Jaray or Lea Bondi-Jaray was an Austrian art dealer and art collector who was forced to emigrate to Great Britain due to Nazi persecution after the annexation of Austria to the Nazi German Reich. The Würthle Gallery, which she ran, was "Aryanized" by Nazis and her art collection, including the Portrait of Wally by Egon Schiele, extorted.

Biography

Family

Lea Bondi was born into a German-Jewish merchant family in Mainz who moved to Vienna in the mid-1880s. Her parents were Marcus Bondi and Bertha nee Hirsch. She had 15 siblings, eight brothers, seven sisters.
In 1936 she married the sculptor Alexander Sándor Járay from Temešvár, after his first wife died becoming Lea Jaray or Lea Bondi-Jaray.

Aryanization, robbery, emigration

There are no original sources about the Aryanization of the Würthle Gallery by the Salzburg art dealer Friedrich Welz, because – as emerged on the occasion of allegations of fraud against Welz in 1943 – according to Welz, “no written contract was concluded – only in its place a log that Welz keeps at the disposal of the tax office. ". Following the Aryanization of the Würthle gallery, Friedrich Welz visited Bondi-Jaray in her home at Weißgerberlände 38, on the Danube Canal the day before the planned departure for London, 17 March 1939. Schiele's Portrait of Wally hung on the wall. Welz immediately recognized the value of the painting and demanded it, as well as a piece of furniture. Lea Bondi-Jaray made it clear that it had been her private property for many years and that the picture neither belonged to Galerie Würthle nor was it for sale. Welz insisted until Bondi-Jaray's husband told her not to risk the planned escape. According to court filings, he told her she should not resist Welz, because "you know what he can do.'"

Holocaust: Fate of family members

Four sisters and a brother were murdered in the Shoah, Rosa Gradenwitz and Helene Hausdorff in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, Esther in Prague, Hilde in Majdanek and Siegmund Bondi in the final days of the Nazi regime in 1945 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Three brothers escaped, Joseph to New York, Hugo Naftali to Palestine and Samuel Bondi, a cardiologist, to New York via London.

Restitution

From 1945 onwards, Luise Kremlacek became acting as head of the gallery. After a decision by the Austrian Restitution Commission on 17 March 1948, Friedrich Welz had to restitute the "Galerie Würthle" to Lea Bondi-Jaray. Welz then claimed expenses for the gallery. A second hearing was decided in favor of Welz, the "Aryanizer". To get their company back, Bondi-Jaray had to pay him 9,000 shillings. The gallery's collection, including 47 works of art by Anton Kolig, as well as the Schiele painting “Wally” from 1912, whose legal owner was Lea Bondi-Jaray, were considered lost.
When she asked, Welz reported that Schiele's painting had been confiscated along with other works of art and was in the Belvedere's collections. Since Bondi-Jaray had to go back to London, she could not attend to the matter further. In 1953 she was visited in London by the doctor and collector Rudolf Leopold, with whom she also spoke about the picture of "Wally". She asked him to endeavor to return it. The next thing she heard about the picture was that it was in Leopold's possession. In 1957 she asked the collector, through a lawyer, to return the painting to her. Leopold replied that she no longer had any ownership rights to the painting because she had failed to reclaim it from the Belvedere. The picture now belongs to him. The attorney's answer was that Bondi-Jaray had never given up her claims to the picture and that the Wally only came into the possession of the Rieger heirs through a mix-up and from there to the Belvedere. The lawyer recommended a lawsuit, but Lea Bondi-Jaray refuses because she did not trust the Austrian judiciary. She wrote to the lawyer: "if the lawsuit is lost, I have lost my picture forever."
In August 1966 she asked Otto Kallir, Schiele expert and gallery owner in Manhattan, also an emigrant from Vienna, for help. In a letter to him written in German, she described how Welz's picture had been extorted from her. Lea Bondi-Jaray tried to recover the painting until her death. She died without receiving it or receiving any compensation.
In January 1998, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau placed Wally under subpoena as part of an investigation into whether the pictures were stolen objects brought illegally into New York State. It was on loan at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and was subsequently in state custody for more than ten years as the subject of legal disputes between Bondi-Jaray's heirs and the collector Rudolf Leopold. After the collector's death, the Leopold Museum paid $ 19 million and the painting returned to Vienna.
In July 2010 fifty members of the dispersed Bondi family reunited to commemorate and celebrate in the lobby of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. According to art chronicler Lee Rosenbaum, who was present at the event, it was a moment of great emotion. "Andre Bondi, Lea’s grandnephew...spoke movingly and emotionally of his father Henry‘s efforts to right a historic wrong. When Andre tearfully ended with a description of his late father’s reaction to a favorable legal development in the protracted case, there were few dry eyes in the house:
A documentary film was made about the case in 2012. The film presented the history of the artwork and the positive impact that Lea Bondi's struggle to recover it had on restitution efforts for Nazi looted art.