November 29

CONTENTS:

Stolen Swedish painting sold for 2.9 mln crowns

Following in stolen dinosaur footprints

Foreign legislation

Painting Lost in Holocaust Resurfaces in Dutch Ambassador to Israel's Official Residence

Monet painting's past left unexplained by MFA

By now, more than 350,000 people have seen the 85 paintings in the ``Monet in the 20th Century'' exhibition at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, including the greatest number of Monet waterlily canvases - 24 - on display together since 1909. The color and texture of Monet's signature waterlily paintings are spellbinding. So museumgoers may not notice the accompanying labels citing their ownership, including one that says, ``Recovered after World War II and placed in trust with the Musees Nationaux de France; Caen, Musee des Beaux-Arts.'' Left unsaid by the MFA is that the painting, ``Water Lilies, 1904,'' is one of nearly 2,000 artworks in French government custody that are believed to have been looted or sold under duress after the Nazis overran France in 1940. Their owners, many of them Jews, have never been located. In an interview yesterday, Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress, expressed disappointment that the MFA chose not to include on the label more information about France's controversial ``homeless'' art collection after deciding to take one of those paintings on loan. ``In light of the heightened awareness of this problem of looted art, the MFA had a very clear obligation to make known to the general public the morally murky history of this painting,'' Steinberg said. Indeed, guidelines the MFA helped create last summer would appear to require such information. Last June, even as the Monet show was being readied, MFA Director Malcolm Rogers joined other members of an Association of Art Museum Directors task force to announce that member museums would search their collections to ensure that they had not unwittingly acquired any tainted wartime art. As part of that pledge, the task force members also said they would not ``borrow works of art known to have been illegally confiscated during the Nazi/World War II era and not restituted.'' The task force said that in the absence of a legitimate claimant - a category the Monet would appear to fit - the ``museum should acknowledge the history of the work of art on labels and publications referring to such a work.'' Kelly Gifford, a museum spokeswoman, said she could not comment on the issue, since the museum's top officials were unavailable yesterday. But Paul Hayes Tucker, the outside curator responsible for the exhibition, noted that the label says the painting was recovered after the war. The MFA, he said, did nothing to hide that fact. ``It's not as if we disguised it,'' Tucker said. ``If we had wanted to be duplicitous, we could have simply said that it came on loan from the museum at Caen.'' Tucker, who emphasized he could not speak for the MFA, said he had been aware when the loan was arranged that the work was among those involved in Nazi confiscation. If the MFA were to hold an exhibition of paintings that had once been looted, Tucker said, it would be appropriate to cite the full history of such paintings. ``But the public is not coming to this show to be informed about such issues,'' he said. Even so, Tucker acknowledged, ``there may be more to be said about the painting.'' If Steinberg were to suggest some language, he said he is certain the MFA would discuss it. Steinberg's criticism of the MFA coincided with a decision by the World Jewish Congress to call on France, at an international conference in Washington next week, to auction off all 1,955 ``homeless'' artworks, and to donate the proceeds to Holocaust survivors. The existence of these French artworks caused a scandal in 1995, when a book by author Hector Feliciano, ``The Lost Museum,'' disclosed that the French national museum system, including the Louvre, the d'Orsay, and the National Museum of Modern Art, had custody of the artworks - about half of them paintings - but had done virtually nothing to locate their owners. Many of the works, which include 16 by Renoir, 11 by Monet, and seven by Degas, were once owned by many of France's best-known Jewish collectors and dealers, whose holdings were systematically plundered by Nazi art looting units. After the war, France recovered and returned to their owners about 45,000 works of art that had been carted off to Germany during the occupation. But after selling off several thousand others, mostly of minor value, the museum system kept the remaining 1,955. In an interview last year, Francoise Cachin, director of France's museum system, acknowledged that the government abandoned efforts to locate the true owners long ago. ``We were not in charge of finding where they came from,'' she said. Steinberg, in telegraphing the demand that the World Jewish Congress will make at the 45-nation conference on Holocaust-era assets next week, noted that the French museum system has loaned many of the artworks in question for years. But he said that a year ago, the French said they would cease doing so until the fate of the works was resolved. Tucker, an art historian at the University of Massachusetts at Boston who was also the curator for the MFA's last Monet extravaganza, in 1990, said the last identified pre-war owner of the 1904 waterlily painting was a ``Prof. Vaquez, circa 1932.'' Because so little is known about the ownership of the 1,955 artworks, there is no certainty that the Monet was looted by the Nazis, or taken from a Jew. Many of the artworks that left France during the war were sold to Germans, but the French long ago declared those sales to be ``forced'' and therefore invalid. Though Tucker said additional description might be warranted, he said that putting any special label on ``Water Lilies, 1904'' could amount to ``an inappropriate designation'' that might draw attention away from the other paintings. ``It would be a disservice to the exhibition,'' he said. Ori Z. Soltes, chairman of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project, agreed with Steinberg that the public - and the MFA - would have benefited from full disclosure on the Monet. The brief mention of the post-war recovery, he said, is bound to leave most people ignorant. ``What would it cost the museum to add just a few sentences?'' asked Soltes, a former director of the National Jewish Museum. ``I would think they would have done that. They can still do that. There are no minuses, only pluses, to fuller disclosures. In every respect, it's to the MFA's advantage. It's part of their responsibility to educate their public.''
This story ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on 11/28/98.

Courtauld offers reward for lost paintings