Word: museume
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...sense that these works each reflect the life of a missing owner is brought home in an antechamber where five computers enable visitors to look up the provenance of every item on display. The hope, says museum spokeswoman Dena Sher, is that a visitor might "lay legitimate claim to the work...
...Israel Museum also offers a sampling of 1,200 unclaimed items that are currently held by Israelis until the true heirs of Holocaust victims are found. "Looking for Owners" was put together with help from French museum authorities, whose contributions to the Jerusalem show came from their collection of 2,000 unclaimed pieces. Claims for these paintings must be registered with the French government as the Israeli parliament recently passed a resolution giving any artwork in a traveling exhibition immunity from seizure. Since the exhibitions opened on Feb. 18, no serious claimant has yet appeared for any of the French...
This month, in Jerusalem, the Israel Museum features two new exhibitions that illuminate those dark days. "Looking for Owners" examines the sleuthing done by France to return artworks stolen during World War II to their owners, and shows 53 of the recovered paintings, while "Orphaned Art" presents 50 pieces of art that were looted from Holocaust victims and remain unclaimed. Both exhibitions, says James Snyder, director of the museum, are "about the same emotional subject - loss, and the sadness over a lost way of life...
...plunged into an anarchic free-for-all. Allied soldiers in Germany later found stashes of plundered art in a cavernous salt mine, in castles, piled to the eaves in churches, and in the private homes of Nazis. "For the Nazis, Paris was like an art toyland," says the Israel Museum's curator, Shlomit Steinberg. "Everything was free...
...Rothschild collections were so well known that many works were traced and returned after World War II. The Israel Museum exhibits one luminous Dutch canvas by Pieter de Hooch stolen in Paris from Edouard de Rothschild and seized by Hitler's boundlessly rapacious second in command, Hermann Goering. But greed alone hardly explains the Nazis' frenzied grasp for Jewish-owned art, says curator Steinberg: "Taking an art collection was a way of stripping the Jew of what made him a citizen in the world." Out of gratitude for French help in restoring their stolen art, the Rothschilds donated...