Controversy Over Painting By Monet That Nazis Looted

BOSTON - Following a Jewish group's complaint over the "morally murky" history of a Claude Monet painting, the director of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts has acknowledged the painting may have been stolen by Nazis during World War II, The Boston Globe newspaper reported today.

The World Jewish Congress had faulted the museum for failing to fully describe the troubled provenance of "Water Lilies, 1904" borrowed from a French museum for an exhibition.

Almost 2,000 works of art in the custody of the French government are believed to have been sold under duress or looted after the Nazis overran France in 1940. The owners, many of them Jewish, have never been located.

"Water Lilies, 1904" is identical to a Monet in a collection put together for Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, said Jonathan Petropolous, an expert in looted art. The Globe said National Archives lists include a record of a theft from Paul Rosenberg, a French Jewish collector, of a Monet painting similar to the one in Boston.

Paul Hayes Tucker, the outside curator for the museum show, said evidence disclosed during the weekend "leads me to believe that the painting in the exhibition had been confiscated from the Rosenberg collection."

Museum Director Malcolm Rogers said he would consult with French museum officials, but intended to keep the painting, which is on loan to the museum as part of the "Monet in the 20th Century" exhibition, in the show.

"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," said Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress.

Last June, the museum helped create guidelines that said museums would not "borrow works of art known to have been illegally confiscated during the Nazi/World War II era and not restituted."

And, in the absence of a legitimate claimant, the "museum should acknowledge the history of the work of art on labels and publications referring to such work."