Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1880 Mainz, Germany

Died: 1969 London, England

Year of Migration to the UK: 1939

Other name/s: Leah Bondi Jaray, Lea Jaray, Lea Bondi-Jaray, Leah Lishi Jaray, Lea Jaray-Bondi, Leah Bondi

Biography

Gallerist Lea Bondi Jaray was born Leah Bondi into a Jewish family in Mainz, Germany in 1880. Her parents, Marcus Bondi (1831–1926) and Bertha née Hirsch (1842–1912) had 16 children. She later moved to Vienna and in 1919 began working for Galerie Würthle. Following the retirement of the owners in 1926, she became its sole proprietor. The gallery was a champion of expressionism, exhibiting work by Oskar Kokoschka, Emil Nolde, and Egon Schiele, among others, thanks partly to a partnership, initiated by Jaray, with Alfred Flechtheim’s renowned gallery in Berlin. Jaray was a board member of the Society for the Advancement of Modern Art in Vienna, also personally collecting the work of the Society's artists. She married the Hungarian sculptor Alexander Sándor Járay (1870–1943) around 1936. Following the Anschluss (annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany) in 1938, Jaray’s gallery was Aryanzed. She was forced to give up it up to Nazi art dealer Friedrich Welz, along with with a valuable painting from her personal collection, Schiele’s Portrait of Wally Neuzil (1912).

In 1939, Jaray and her family fled Vienna for London, England, Jaray bringing only what she could carry, including several sheets of drawings by Schiele. She was exempt from the government’s policy of mass internment of so-called enemy aliens, initiated in late spring 1940. In 1943, she co-founded the St. George’s Gallery in London's Mayfair with fellow Austrian-Jewish émigré Otto Brill. The gallery showed work by a range of modern artists, including Oskar Kokoschka (another Austrian émigré), Ceri Richards, Massimo Campigli, Lucian Freud, Alberto Giacometti and André Masson. It also became one of the first London venues to stage an exhibition of expressionist art. The gallery provided wartime employment for two émigrés, German-born Erica Brausen (later of the Hanover Gallery) and Austrian-born Harry Fischer (later of Marlborough Fine Art). Jaray settled with her husband at Lambolle Road, Belsize Park, and subsequently at 13 Thurlow Road, Hampstead, London, NW3. She became a naturalized British citizen on 9 April 1948.

In spite of embarking on a new life in England, Jaray never forgot the injustice of losing her painting. For three decades, until her death in 1969, she attempted to recover it, soliciting help from Dr. Rudolf Leopold, a Schiele expert and art collector who frequented her gallery in London. It subsequently transpired that Leopold had found her painting at the Belvedere Palace in Vienna, among the works of the Austrian National Gallery, and in the 1960s, had traded another Schiele painting for Portrait of Wally Neuzil; however, instead of returning it to Jaray, he had kept the stolen artwork for himself.

Lea Bondi Jaray died in London, England in 1969. Posthumously, the restitution claim for her artwork continued. The works from Leopold’s collection were transferred to the Leopold Museum Private Foundation in 1994 and formed the basis for the Leopold Museum, which opened its doors to the public in 2001. Following the decision in 1997 to lend the work to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York for their exhibition of Schiele’s works, Jaray’s heirs embarked on a lengthy lawsuit against the museum to attempt the return of the painting. In July 2010, the Leopold Museum agreed to pay $19 million to Jaray’s heirs under an agreement that would address all outstanding claims on the painting. The history of the painting and the legal efforts by the Bondi heirs to recover it were the subject of a 2012 documentary, Portrait of Wally, by filmmaker Andrew Shea.

In 2019, Jaray was included in an exhibition Brave New Visions: The Émigrés Who Transformed the British Art World at Sotheby’s, London. The exhibition explored, among other themes, how in 1947, Jaray’s European background helped her secure the support of the British Council to curate exhibitions featuring emerging British and French artists. Furthermore, by 1950, leveraging her strong ties with Austrian cultural officials, she had organised an exhibition at St. George’s that showcased modern Austrian painters. This event was a joint effort with the Albertina Museum in Vienna, the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, and a commercial gallery in Austria. In summer 2024 Ben Uri Gallery and Museum featured Jaray in its exhibition Cosmopolis: Refugee Art Dealers in Twentieth-Century London. Lea Jaray's great-niece is the painter and printmaker Tess Jaray RA (b. 1937).

Related books

Burcu Dogramaci, 'Trading Modernity. Female gallerists at work for the art of their time in the first half of the 20th Century', Journal of Art Historiography, No. 29, 2023, pp. 1-17
Richard Aronowitz and Shauna Isaac, 'Émigré Art Dealers and Collectors', in Monica Bohm-Duchen, ed., Insiders Outsiders. Refugees from Nazi Europe and their Contribution to British Visual Culture (London: Lund Humphries, 2019), pp. 129-135
Cherith Summers, ‘St. George's Gallery', in Monica Bohm-Duchen, ed., Brave New Visions: The Émigrés who Transformed the British Art World, exh. cat. (London: Sotheby's, 2019), p. 27-28
Howard N. Spiegler, 'Introduction and Overview of Nazi Looted Cases', Canadian Criminal Law Review, Vol. 17, No. 1, 2012, p. 3
Agnieszka Yass-Alston, 'The Christie’s Symposium: “The Holocaust Art Looting and Restitution"', Scripta Judaica Cracoviensia, Vol. 9, 2011, pp.189-195
Howard N. Spiegler, 'What the Lady Has Wrough', The Art Law Newsletter, 2010, pp. 1-8
Deirdre Conneely, 'The Aftermath of Schiele and the Museum of Modern Art', Collections, Vol. 6, No. 1-2, 2010, pp.63-72

Related organisations

St George's Gallery (co-founder)
Society for the Advancement of Modern Art in Vienna (board member)

Selected exhibitions

Cosmopolis: Refugee Art Dealers in Twentieth-Century London, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum (2024)
Brave New Visions: The Émigrés Who Transformed the British Art World (group exhibition), Sotheby’s, London (2019)
Contemporary German Painters (group show), St. George’s Gallery, London (1949)
Waldemar Stabell (solo exhibition), St. George’s Gallery, London (1947)
The Known and Unknown Paintings by British and Continental Artists (group show), St. George’s Gallery, London (1947)
The New Generation (group show), St. George’s Gallery, London (1947)
Honoré Daumier: Lithographs, St. George’s Gallery, London (1946)
Cosmopolis: Refugee Art Dealers in Twentieth-Century London, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, London (2024)

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Lea Bondi Jaray]