To open a show about looting with a picture that wasn’t looted does not inspire confidence, and “Afterlives” only gets foggier about what its subject really is. By 1942, it entered the collection of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. After that, “The Large Blue Horses” was shipped to the United States, where it appeared in a touring show of banned German art. This large oil, a prime example of the Munich avant-garde movement Der Blaue Reiter, was shown alongside the Pechstein in an anti-Nazi exhibition in London in 1938, the year after the notorious “Degenerate Art” show that targeted so many German modern artists. 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.

Men of war assault squad halo