Feb. 19




ISRAEL:

Nazi-looted art goes on display
Most famous painting in "Orphaned Art" exhibit is by Egon Schiele


Israel's national museum opened two new exhibits Monday of paintings with
a tragic history: They were stolen from museums and salons by the Nazis
and never reclaimed because many owners perished during World War II.

Paul Cezanne's "Portrait of Artist" and Edgar Degas' "Portrait of the
engraver Mansi" hang at the museum.

The exhibits, which include paintings by masters like Henri Matisse,
Claude Monet and Georges Seurat, are meant to bring to life the dramatic
stories behind the art -- and perhaps reunite the works with the owners or
heirs. Visitors who recognize a painting as their own and can prove it can
file a claim.

"Our feeling about them is that our job is to hold them in custody, in a
way, as a kind of memorial to their loss. And when the opportunity arises
to return a work we are happy to do so," said James Snyder, the Israel
Museum's director.

Worldwide, experts say, anywhere between 250,000 and 600,000 pieces of art
looted by the Nazis were never claimed and remain in the possession of
museums, governments and private collectors.

Last year, an Israeli group in charge of returning the property of
Holocaust survivors accused the Israel Museum of not being forthcoming
enough about the looted art in its possession and not doing enough to
return the art to its owners.

The museum rejected the criticism, saying that as a national institution
of the Jewish state, it was a fitting place for the art. Since then, the
institution has launched an Internet database of all of the looted art in
its storerooms.

Over the years, the museum has returned about 20 pieces to owners or
heirs, Snyder said.

The new exhibits contain about 80 pieces. The first exhibit, "Looking for
Owners," is made up of 53 paintings on loan from French museums. Put
together by a team of Israeli and French curators, it includes several
works bought by prominent Nazis like Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler's top
diplomat.

Most paintings in that exhibit have been painstakingly researched, meaning
that there is little chance that they will be claimed 60 years after the
war's end, Snyder said.

The companion exhibit, "Orphaned Art," includes mostly lesser-known
paintings and items of Judaica. It is a small sampling of some 1,200
pieces given to the Israel Museum decades ago by a group known as the
Jewish Restitution Successor Organization, which was entrusted by the
Allies with returning unclaimed Jewish property in postwar Europe.

The most famous painting in the "Orphaned Art" exhibit is one by the early
20th century Austrian master Egon Schiele thought to be worth more than
$20 million.

In the "Looking for Owners" exhibit, nearly every painting has a story.
Some were seized by the Nazis for inclusion in a museum of European art
that Hitler planned to build in Linz, Austria.

Several pieces on display were returned to their owners, like "La
Buveuse," a 1658 painting by Dutch master Pieter de Hooch that hung in the
salon of financier Edouard de Rothschild in Paris before the war.

"This painting was coveted by Hitler. He knew about it, he wanted it, and
he made every effort to get it," said Shlomit Steinberg, one of the
exhibit's curators.

Reclaimed after the war and returned to the Rothschilds, "Le Buveuse" was
later donated to the Louvre by Edouard's daughter.

Also on display are photographs taken after the war showing warehouses
with thousands of crates of looted paintings, shelves of sculptures, and
dozens of Torah scrolls stacked like logs. The exhibits include computer
terminals connected to databases of looted art so visitors can research
the pieces on view.

(source: Associated Press)