Art from ‘the darkest of history’s hours’

JERUSALEM -- The Nazi plunder of European art collections during World War II left a trail of unsolved mysteries. The rightful ownership of Claude Monet’s masterful and elegiac study “Snow at Sunset” is but one.

A German officer somehow acquired it in wartime Paris and entrusted it to a soldier for safekeeping in Germany but never came to collect it. In the 1990s, the soldier confessed to a priest, and the painting, along with 27 other works removed by the Nazis, were taken out of hiding and returned to France.

Over objections of many Jews and others dispossessed in the war, the French government took custody of the Monet and about 2,000 other paintings repatriated from postwar Germany. Insisting they were unable to determine the provenance of the works, officials put them on display in French museums.

But in a new effort to shed light on their history, France has sent 50 of the works to Israel’s national museum for an exhibition titled “Looking for Owners.” The collection, which went on display Tuesday, is the first of its kind to be shown in Israel, where restitution of Jewish property seized in the Holocaust is a national cause.

Monet’s quietly intense 19th century Impressionist work shares a red-walled gallery with other paintings whose placid themes belie tragic and murky tales of how they changed hands in Nazi-occupied France.

There’s the boyish innocence of German-born Philippe Mercier’s “The Flute Player,” an 18th century portrait acquired under unclear circumstances by a French art dealer for the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Germany.

“The Bathers,” an 1858 figure painting by French Realist Gustave Courbet, was purchased by Joachim Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister, from another French dealer who did frequent business with the Nazis and is suspected of having obtained it in a forced sale.

An early work by Henri Matisse, “Landscape, the Pink Wall,” was found by Allied troops hidden behind a plaster wall in the home of Kurt Gerstein, the SS officer responsible for transporting the gas used for mass killings at Nazi death camps. The 1898 Postimpressionist painting bore a French customs seal, but the only known information about its provenance is testimony that Gerstein bought it from a school friend in Berlin.

“If the paintings could speak, they would tell the real story,” Isaac Herzog, Israel’s minister for the Diaspora, said Monday night at the show’s inauguration, noting that much of the art had belonged to Jews. “They would tell us of looting and robbery, of harassment and trespassing, and, of course, the extermination of millions.”

French Culture Minister Christine Albanel, who attended the event, said the exhibition is part of an international effort to close a chapter on “the hardest and darkest of history’s hours.”

France yielded the biggest trove of art to Nazi forces, which had instructions from Hitler to loot or buy up enough works to transform his hometown of Linz, Austria, into a world art capital. The plunder lasted from 1938 till the war’s end in 1945.

Of about 100,000 works taken from France, Albanel said, 60,000 were returned to the country and 45,000 given back to their owners. Of the remaining 15,000, about 13,000 were judged to be of little commercial value and auctioned off. In the mid-1960s, France closed its file on compensation claims for wartime losses of art.

But in the 1990s, new historical research and lobbying on behalf of Holocaust victims revived interest in the tens of thousands of pieces of art looted by the Nazis that, researchers say, were never claimed and remain in the possession of museums, governments and private collectors around the world.

A French commission set up in 1997 reopened the files on France’s 2,000 unclaimed works and recommended that some of them be exhibited in Israel to publicize the new effort at restitution.

Along with the 50 unclaimed works exhibited here are three being shown as examples of paintings successfully returned to their owners. They include “La Buveuse” (Woman Drinking With Soldiers), a 1658 painting by Dutch master Pieter de Hooch that was confiscated from the salon of financier Edouard de Rothschild in Paris. After getting the painting back, the family donated it to the Louvre.

James S. Snyder, the Israel Museum’s director, said the unclaimed works have been so well cataloged and researched over the last decade that there is little chance anyone will claim them here.

But he and French officials say anything is possible.

“We are hopeful that someone will step forward and say, ‘Here, I recognize this painting. I know where it comes from,’ ” Albanel said.

Each work in the exhibition is accompanied by an enlarged label detailing everything known about its ownership history. Computer terminals are set up in a room of the gallery, connected to databases of looted art so visitors can research the pieces on view.

Should an Israeli spot one of his family’s long-lost possessions, however, the claim would have to be made in France. Under an Israeli law passed to facilitate the exhibition, artwork on loan from another country cannot be seized in Israel for adjudication of ownership.

Michael Melchior, the lawmaker who pushed it through Parliament last year, said the law broke a deadlock that was holding up the exhibition. France had insisted on immunity from seizure, he said, and Israel had resisted until France agreed to make it easier to file claims for looted art.

“This is the best compromise possible for the heirs of Holocaust victims, who otherwise might not be able to identify the paintings that belong to them,” said Avraham Roet, who heads an Israeli agency charged with locating assets of Jews killed in the war.

Exhibiting the works here stirred controversy in France. Jean-Jacques Aillagon, who was culture minister in 2000, was quoted in Liberation saying, “Israel does not represent the French-Jewish community, which has been the victim” of Nazi looting.

Corinne Hershkovitch, a French lawyer specializing in art stolen during the war, said France should continue its efforts to find the artworks’ proper heirs but give interim custody to an independent scientific organization.

Other countries have come under criticism for hoarding recovered Nazi booty in their museums, and Israel is not immune.

The Israel Museum came under pressure last year from Roet’s agency to turn over the collection of 1,200 works it got when the Allies returned a batch of unclaimed Jewish property from postwar Germany.

But the agency dropped its demand after the museum launched an Internet database of all the looted art in its storerooms. Fifty pieces from that collection, few of which have commercial value, were put on display Tuesday under the title “Orphaned Art.” It will run in tandem with the “Looking for Owners” show until June 3.

--

boudreaux@latimes.com

Times staff writer Geraldine Baum in Paris contributed to this report.