Israel's national museum opened two new exhibits on Monday of paintings with a tragic history: They were stolen from the museums and salons of Europe by the Nazis during World War II and never reclaimed by their rightful owners, many of whom perished in the war.
The exhibits are meant to bring to life the dramatic stories behind the art, and perhaps reunite the works with their rightful owners. Visitors who recognize a painting as their own and can prove it can file a claim and potentially take it home.
"It is possible that someone might surface who might find something that belonged to his or her family,'' said James Snyder, the Israel Museum's director, as workers put the final touches on a red-walled gallery at the museum in Jerusalem.
"Frankly, if that happened, it would really underscore the point that museums are making an effort to close this still-open chapter in the history of the loss that occurred broadly during the war,'' he said.
Last year, an Israeli group in charge of returning the property of Holocaust survivors accused the Israel Museum of not being forthcoming about the art in its possession.
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.
Consisting of some 80 pieces in all, the exhibits at the Israel Museum include works by masters like Henri Matisse and Georges Seurat, paintings owned by the Rothschild banking family, and other masterpieces worth millions of US dollars.
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 owned by prominent Nazis like Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler's top diplomat.
Most of the French paintings are well-known and 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, a small sampling of the 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 pieces were amassed in Allied collection points set up to process artwork looted by the Nazis.
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.
Over the years, the Israel Museum has returned some 20 pieces to owners or heirs, Snyder said.
"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,'' Snyder said.
The exhibit of art the museum received from JRSO includes a 19th-century wedding portrait of the beautiful Charlotte de Rothschild, scion of the wealthy Jewish banking family, along with one of her husband and cousin Lionel. The paintings hung in a Jewish nursing home in Frankfurt before they were taken by German troops.
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