What Wally Neuzil Left in Her Own Hand

The panel has a fuller record than the woman in it

Egon Schiele's Portrait of Wally Neuzil has a long and well kept documentary record, and the woman it shows has almost none.

The panel has an inventory number, a catalogue history, a seizure, a federal forfeiture action, a settlement figure, a postage stamp and a museum campaign built on its face. This archive's own record for it runs to tens of thousands of words, most of them about title. Set beside that, the paper trail for Walburga Neuzil is a parish entry, a handful of registration forms, one receipt, one letter, a postcard signature, a military hospital posting and a line in a death book.

That asymmetry is the subject here. It is not a complaint about scholarship, which has in fact gone looking, and it is not an argument that the litigation was unimportant. It is a measurement of what an object can carry and what it cannot, and the answer is that a picture remembers its owners far better than it remembers its sitter.

She was born in Tattendorf before her parents married

Walburga Neuzil was born on 18 August 1894 in Tattendorf, a village of about 800 people some 35 kilometres south of Vienna.

The Wally-Neuzil-Society, working from the parish register of Tattendorf, gives her mother as Thekla Pfneisl, a day-labourer who lived from 1872 to 1933, and her father as Josef Neuzil, an elementary school teacher from South Bohemia who lived from 1863 to 1902. She was baptised in the village church and named Walburga. Her parents married on 11 March 1895, which is to say after she was born, and she took her father's surname then. The Leopold Museum's own exhibition material reproduces the baptismal entry and dates it 19 August 1894, the day after the birth the Society gives.

She had four sisters, Anna Emilia, Antonia, Maria and Berta, and the Society gives her two brothers as half-brothers, with the qualification its own page carries; both were born after her father's death. Her father was given charge of the elementary school at Sparbach in September 1901 and died in the hospital at Moedling in February 1902. His widow drew an official's widow pension until her death in 1933 and moved with her daughters to Vienna, where, the Society states, they changed address frequently and lived in the poorer districts.

None of that is remarkable, and that is the point. The documents that record her are the documents that record everybody: a baptism, an address, a pension.

She had a job in a shop while she sat for him

The Leopold Museum states that while she modelled for Schiele, Wally Neuzil was also working as a sales assistant, a cashier and a mannequin at a clothing store.

That single sentence does more to place her than most of what has been written about her. On the museum's account modelling was not her whole income. The museum also states that she stood by Schiele during his imprisonment at Neulengbach in April 1912, and the Society records what she carried in: the materials for the thirteen prison drawings now in the Albertina, and an orange, on which he wrote that the one orange was the only light.

Schiele had been arrested on 12 April 1912 on an allegation of abducting and dishonouring an under-age girl. He was acquitted of those charges and punished instead for displaying indecent drawings where children could see them. The picture in this record was painted in that year.

Our own record said she had modelled for Klimt, and the specialists doubt it

This archive's record for the panel carried a caption stating that Wally Neuzil had modelled for Gustav Klimt, and the body that researches her says that claim is doubtful.

The Wally-Neuzil-Society addresses the story directly. It calls the idea that Klimt passed his model to Schiele a common myth, says it seems very doubtful, and gives two reasons: Klimt was not working with very young models at that time, and no work by Klimt showing Wally Neuzil is known. One Klimt does carry her name. A Portrait of Wally of 1916, from the Lederer collection, burned at Schloss Immendorf in 1945 and survives only in a black and white photograph, and the older literature identifies the sitter as her. The Klimt Foundation's own catalogue database does not: it states that the title does not allow the sitter to be identified, and that the assumption that she was Wally Neuzil has been made repeatedly but rests on no evidence. So two specialist bodies say the same thing, the one that researches her and the one that catalogues him. We had the claim from the general literature, and the Leopold Museum's own 2015 press text keeps a softer version alive by suggesting she became Schiele's model perhaps through Klimt's mediation. It should not have been stated by us as fact. The caption is corrected in the same push as this article, and the correction is recorded here rather than made quietly.

A second disagreement is live and we are not going to settle it. The Leopold Museum, which holds the painting, dates her to Schiele from early 1911 and says she moved with him to Krumau in the spring of that year. The Wally-Neuzil-Society's biography page puts the meeting in 1912 and states there is some evidence she was staying in Vienna in 1911. The Society is not consistent on it: its own research page reproduces a City of Baden release giving around 1911, and the abstract of its chairman's Sinj publication dates the relationship from around 1911. So the honest answer is a range, 1911 to 1912, with only one page of one specialist site arguing for the later date.

Six pieces of handwriting, as far as anyone has found

The Wally-Neuzil-Society states plainly that very few handwritten sources in her handwriting are available or documented, and then lists them.

There are sixteen registration forms in the archives of the city of Vienna, of which the Society judges probably three to be in her hand. There is a receipt made out for Schiele's landlord Moritz Otto Kuntschik. There is a letter to the painter Felix Albrecht Harta, dated 1915. And there is a postcard Schiele sent to his lawyer and collector Alfred Spitzer on 31 December 1912, now in the Egon-Schiele-Archiv of the Albertina with the inventory number DG2003/2798, carrying a New Year greeting in Schiele's hand and, below it, four words in hers: also from Wally Neuzil. The Society notes that the Leopold Museum's database of Schiele autographs corrected its presentation of that card, including its date, after the Society asked.

That is the whole surviving voice, and the table is short enough to print.

A reader used to provenance work will recognise the shape. This is what a chain of custody looks like when the object is a person: four entries, two of them without a stated location, and one of them a signature four words long.

In 1915 he married someone else and she became a nurse

Schiele ended the relationship in 1915 in order to marry Edith Harms, and Wally Neuzil signed up as an auxiliary nurse.

The Society quotes his own letter writing that he meant to marry, but maybe not Wally. The Leopold Museum describes the separation as a devastating scene and says he was drafted soon after, which it treats as one reason for the speed of the wedding. What she did next is documented rather than inferred. She served in military hospitals in Vienna. In August 1917 her mother Thekla signed a registration form recording that Wally was moving to Sebenico in Dalmatia, today Sibenik, and she arrived around her twenty-third birthday. Robert Holzbauer's private collection holds a copy of that form from the Vienna city and provincial archive.

Schiele's collector Heinrich Benesch wrote her a postcard there addressing her as a nurse at the military hospital in Sebenico, and the Society reproduces it. She was then moved inland to Sinj, to the regional defence force's hospital, the k. k. Landwehr-Marodenhaus, where the Austrian war archive records her serving under the commander's office. Those are thin records and they are real ones, and they are the reason anybody knows where to look for her grave.

She died on Christmas Day 1917 and was buried two days later

Wally Neuzil died of scarlet fever in the military hospital at Sinj on 25 December 1917, aged 23.

According to the death book of the city of Sinj she was buried in St Francis Cemetery on 27 December. The Leopold Museum's own account says only that she volunteered to go to Dalmatia in 1917 and died towards the end of that year from scarlet fever aged only 23, which is accurate and stops one step short of the grave. Schiele and Edith Harms both died of influenza in Vienna in 1918, he at twenty-eight.

Her mother and two of her sisters, Antonia and Berta, are buried in the town cemetery of Baden. The Society found them through a notice in the Badener Zeitung of 1933, which is a good example of how this kind of research actually proceeds: not through a museum file but through a local newspaper and a cemetery register.

Nineteen million dollars for the picture, about two thousand euros for the grave

The two figures that describe this case best are 19 million dollars and 2,000 euros.

On 19 July 2010 the Leopold Museum Privatstiftung settled the New York forfeiture action by paying the estate of Lea Bondi Jaray 19 million dollars, and kept the panel. The Austrian government issued a postage stamp of the portrait the following year to mark the tenth anniversary of the museum's opening. In 2015 the museum devoted an exhibition to her, and in 2017 it was reported still to be using the picture in its promotional campaigns.

Meanwhile the grave was lost. The Art Newspaper reported on 22 November 2017 that the Croatian journalist Lana Bunjevac had tracked it down in Sinj two years earlier, that the Viennese provenance researcher Robert Holzbauer had launched a campaign to restore the site at a cost of around 2,000 euros, and that Tattendorf had committed funds towards it. Holzbauer, whom a City of Baden press release credits with scientifically supervising the research in the New York case for many years, visited the grave in 2016 while a visiting lecturer at the University of Zadar and found the corresponding entry in the book of the dead. The abstract of his own publication for the Sinj exhibition records that the Society renovated her tomb in 2017, and the exhibition, Who Was Wally Neuzil?, was due to open at the Galerija Galiotovic in Sinj on 19 December 2017, six days before the centenary of her death.

We are not claiming the museum owed her an estate. The settlement was paid to the heirs of a dealer from whom the picture had been taken, which is what a restitution settlement is for. The comparison is worth printing anyway, because it is the true scale of the interest the object attracted and the interest the person attracted, and the second figure was raised by a small association and an Austrian village rather than by anyone who had profited from her face.

The institution that owns the portrait also narrates her

The Leopold Museum's exhibition text tells the reader what Wally Neuzil was like, and for that passage its evidence is the painting it owns. The exhibition itself went much wider, to the parish register, the registration forms and the war archive.

The museum writes that her mirror gaze shows her to be at peace with herself, that she looks calmly and inquiringly at her companion, and that the enigmatic power of the look makes her a modern Mona Lisa. It also describes what she revealed to Schiele in terms of his development as an artist. Those are readings of a picture, offered by the body that holds it, and they are not documents about a person. Robert Holzbauer, whose association did the archival work, announced a 2021 lecture under a title that says the same thing more bluntly: whoever spreads unprovable stories about Wally could also damage the biography of Egon Schiele.

This archive holds a picture that shows the alternative. Klimt's Portrait of a Lady in Piacenza is a portrait of a young woman nobody has ever identified, painted over an earlier portrait of what radiography showed to be the same face. Her identity has not been recovered, and because it has not, nothing has been invented for her. Wally Neuzil has the opposite problem. Her name is known, which makes a biography feel available, and the six documents are what is actually there.

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