JERUSALEM -- The Nazi plunder of European art collections during World War II left a trail of unsolved mysteries. The rightful ownership of Claude Monet's masterful and elegiac study "Snow at Sunset" is but one.
A German officer somehow acquired it in wartime Paris and entrusted it to a soldier for safekeeping in Germany but never came to collect it. In the 1990s, the soldier confessed to a priest, and the painting, along with 27 other works removed by the Nazis, were taken out of hiding and returned to France.
Over objections of many Jews and others dispossessed in the war, the French government took custody of the Monet and about 2,000 other paintings repatriated from postwar Germany. Insisting they were unable to determine the provenance of the works, officials put them on display in French museums.
But in a new effort to shed light on their history, France has sent 50 of the works to Israel's national museum for an exhibition titled "Looking for Owners." The collection, which went on display Tuesday, is the first of its kind to be shown in Israel, where restitution of Jewish property seized in the Holocaust is a national cause.
Monet's quietly intense 19th century Impressionist work shares a red-walled gallery with other paintings whose placid themes belie tragic and murky tales of how they changed hands in Nazi-occupied France.
There's the boyish innocence of German-born Philippe Mercier's "The Flute Player," an 18th century portrait acquired under unclear circumstances by a French art dealer for the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Germany.
"The Bathers," an 1858 figure painting by French Realist Gustave Courbet, was purchased by Joachim Ribbentrop, Hitler's foreign minister, from another French dealer who did frequent business with the Nazis and is suspected of having obtained it in a forced sale.
An early work by Henri Matisse, "Landscape, the Pink Wall," was found by Allied troops hidden behind a plaster wall in the home of Kurt Gerstein, the SS officer responsible for transporting the gas used for mass killings at Nazi death camps. The 1898 Postimpressionist painting bore a French customs seal, but the only known information about its provenance is testimony that Gerstein bought it from a school friend in Berlin.
"If the paintings could speak, they would tell the real story," Isaac Herzog, Israel's minister for the Diaspora, said Monday night at the show's inauguration, noting that much of the art had belonged to Jews. "They would tell us of looting and robbery, of harassment and trespassing, and, of course, the extermination of millions."
