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 Au...