E Tu, Israel Museum
January 6th, 2008 by Menachem Wecker
Returning looted Holocaust art to rightful owners (or sadly often to their descendants) is a huge task that requires mountains of research. From the Bloch-Bauer family’s Klimt to Elizabeth Taylor’s van Gogh, looted works have received a lot of media attention recently.
But it will perhaps surprise many readers that the Jerusalem-based Israel Museum is also mixed up in the restitution controversy, only now launching an exhibit “Orphaned Art: Looted Art from the Holocaust in the Israel Museum” (file is a PDF), which will hang February 19 - June 3, 2008. It also is housing the show Looking for Owners: Custody, Research, and Restitution of Art Stolen in France During World War II (also PDF) with France’s Musées Nationaux Récupération. “CultureGrrl,” Lee Rosenbaum, calls these shows 10 months late, and indeed she did the same thing in an August 27, 2007 post.
She writes in the January 3, 2008 post:
James Snyder, director of the Israel Museum, noted that “there has been much misunderstanding about the history of works taken during World War II and the efforts relating to their recovery following the war.”
One such “misunderstanding” may be why it’s taken so many years for the Israel Museum and the French National Museums to mount these overdue, high-profile exhibitions of unclaimed art. The “Orphaned Art” show came only after pressure on the Israel Museum from a new Israel-based restitution group that wanted to sell works for which rightful owners could not be found, distributing proceeds to needy Holocaust survivors.
… Was an “appropriate time” more than a decade after the commission made this recommendation?
I wonder how so many Jewish institutions and publications think they can attack non-Jewish museum and gallery owners for not being sufficiently transparent and accommodating with their collections when all is not well on the home front.
For more information, see the following coverage: ARTINFO
Artdaily, Jerusalem Post, Haaretz, CBC and France Diplomatie. It is important to note not one raises the questions Culturegrrl boldly asks about why these shows were 10 years in the making. I hope she doesn’t end up getting accused of anti-Semitism for this.