A bright landscape with nudes by Max Pechstein, a painter of the Expressionist group Die Brücke, was seized from the Paris home of Hugo Simon and only returned to his heirs this year.īut when you read the text beside the first painting you see in this show, Franz Marc’s “ The Large Blue Horses” of 1911, you’ll discover that it was never looted at all.
A small, thick floral still life by Bonnard, now owned by the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, was one of thousands stolen by the Nazis from the French banker David David-Weill and stored in an Austrian salt mine.
“Afterlives” tells us from its subtitle on that it aims at “recovering the lost stories of looted art.” An introductory text promises to recount “the stories of the people who experienced it.” Two of the three paintings in the first gallery indicate the subject’s stakes.
