Wally: Egon Schiele and the Story of a Portrait that Changed the World

An engrossing work of narrative nonfiction that reads like a novel, Wally traces the strange journey of a single picture—from its creation in the ateliers of fin de siècle Vienna to its theft by a Nazi on the eve of the Second World War, to its emergence decades later at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to the legal battle championed by some of America’s most legendary prosecutors.

Painted by Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele in 1912, Portrait of Wally—often called the Mona Lisa of Austria—depicts the artist's lover and muse, Walburga “Wally” Neuzil. It emerged from the studio of a painter once dismissed as degenerate and immoral, and its power has held admirers in its thrall ever since.

Among its earliest and most devoted owners was Lea Bondi, the Jewish gallerist who bought the painting in 1925 and hung it in her Vienna apartment—until a rival dealer, a Nazi, took it from her home. She spent the rest of her life trying to get it back. Its provenance obscured, Wally passed among crafty dealers and collectors until 1997, when it turned up at the Museum of Modern Art on loan from the Viennese collector Rudolf Leopold. A bombshell New York Times article accused the museum of hanging Nazi-looted art on its walls.

What followed was “the case that launched a thousand lawsuits”: a thirteen-year saga of prosecutors and defense attorneys, reversals, seizures, and tantrums that engulfed museum directors and billionaire collectors alike. At its heart was a multigenerational effort, led by a group of women working across decades, to right an old injustice.

The fight for restitution put the art world under a microscope, exposing the greed and hypocrisy teeming beneath its surface. The painting came to stand for everything—beauty, money, betrayal. Binding the story together is the dream of Vienna as the glowing capital of art and ideas it was before fascism destroyed one of the world's most vibrant Jewish communities. Told in vivid, heartbreaking detail by New York Times bestselling author Rich Cohen, Wally shows how, in pursuing the painting, the Bondi family was pursuing a mirage.