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A Stolen Self-Portrait

A friend of Manet’s, Henri Fantin-Latour, painted himself in 1861 as an unchained melody, a wild boho getting into scrapes. He looks even downright dishonorable.

Despite the subject’s raffish quality, the work was appropriated aka stolen by the Nazis from the David-Weill collection in France along with others but made its way back post war only after stops in Austrian and Munich Nazi collection points.

The Jewish Museum tracks the long and winding road to repatriation for this and other beautiful works.

Yet the most haunting element in the exhibition Afterlives was a series of photographs of the collection points with thousands of stolen works and then the veritable factories of refugees who painstakingly pieced the objects and their histories back together.