Portrait Of Wally

Andrew Shea’s documentary Portrait of Wally recounts the tortured history and maelstrom of legal complications surrounding the titular canvas -- a likeness of Austrian artist Egon Schiele’s mistress, Valerie Neuzil, that Schiele painted in 1912. The film relays how Jewish art collector Lea Bondi -- the work’s original owner -- lost the artwork at the hands of a Nazi officer. Through a long and complicated series of events, it then landed in the collection of the Austrian National Gallery; upon learning this, Bondi naively (and ill-advisedly) trusted Austrian art collector Rudolf Leopold to reobtain it for her. He did indeed manage to wangle it out of the Galle...