The most famous painting in the JRSO exhibit is one by the early 20th century Austrian master Egon Schiele thought to be worth more than US$20 million.
In the exhibit of art from France, 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. The Bathers, an 1858 nude by the French realist Gustave Courbet, was purchased by Von Ribbentrop, the Nazi Foreign Minister, in a legitimate transaction with a Parisian art dealer.
The Allies took the painting after the war, and Von Ribbentrop was hanged for war crimes in 1946.
Landscape, the Pink Wall, an early Matisse, was owned by Kurt Gerstein, an SS officer who took an active part in Nazi Germany's methodical murder of Europe's Jews and others they deemed undesirable. Gerstein was responsible for transporting Zyklon B, the gas used for mass killings at the Nazi death camps.
The painting was found by Allied troops hidden in an alcove behind a plaster wall in Gerstein's house after the war. The Nazi officer killed himself in July 1945.
The exhibit also includes several pieces that were successfully restored 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.
All in all, the Nazis took 100,000 pieces of art from France during the war. Of those, 60,000 were recovered, and 45,000 of them were returned to their owners or heirs. Most of the rest were auctioned off.
With the new exhibit, the Israel Museum is also making the point that it is forthcoming about the looted art in its possession, in the wake of the accusations leveled against it last year by the Holocaust restitution group.
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