Where to Go to See Stolen Art

PARIS - When a valuable painting is stolen it leaves scars that can linger for generations. The financial loss is searing, but the theft of a painting also takes an emotional toll on the victims of plunder, holding them in its grip, creating obsessions.

How else to explain the 70-year-pursuit of Ginette Heilbronn Moulin, the matriarch and chairwoman of the Galeries Lafayette department store chain in France? She, and now her grandson, are carrying on her family's search for a Monet painting of the shimmering, blue Creuse River that vanished after a Gestapo raid of the family's bank vault in 1941.

Or what possessed the artist Lucian Freud to yearn so much for his missing portrait of Francis Bacon? The painting on copper was wrenched from the walls of the Neue National Galerie in Berlin in 1988. Some 14 years later he created a wanted poster, advertising a reward of 300,000 Deutsch marks.

That missing painting is part of the Tate Gallery's intriguing exhibition “The Gallery of Lost Art,” a chronicle of works by 40 artists that were destroyed, discarded, rejected, erased or stolen. Given that the works are missing, the exhibition is only available online. It mixes photographs, newspaper clippings and the last known images of the vanished works.

The Tate, of course, has suffered firsthand. It owns Lucian Freud's missing portrait of Francis Bacon but never accepted insurance money for the work in the hope that one day it would surface. Another painting by Lucian Freud, which the Tate exhibited on loan from the Triton Foundation in the spring, was stolen last week with six other paintings from the Kunsthal museum in Rotterdam.

The Tate also endured the 1994 theft of two biblical paintings by J.M.W. Turner that were on loan to a Frankfurt museum. They were recovered after a torturous series of negotiations and a "5 million payment to a German lawyer in 2002 with contacts “on the other side,” as museu m officials referred to the criminals in possession of the paintings.

“'The Gallery of Lost Art' feels to me like a ghost museum in that everything is a trace, not the actual work of art, but evidence - whether a newspaper report or grainy black and white last image,” said Jane Burton, creative director for Tate Media, who helped organize the exhibition. The show will itself vanish by next summer, just as a conventional museum exhibition would end. “I thought it would be great to create an exhibit that could not be in a gallery. It started with stolen works and then quickly became much more interesting as we explored the way art is lost through decay, deliberate acts or through natural disaster.”

The online exhibition explores Nazi plunder and includes a short film about a family reunited with a missing painting. Each week, a new work is listed; tales include those of the still-missing five paintings stolen from the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris, includi ng a Picasso and a Modigliani. Also included are the rare acts of self-destruction such as John Baldessari's Cremation Project, which consisted of burning all his paintings between 1953 and 1966 and then baking the ashes into cookies.

Since its opening in July, “The Gallery of Lost Art” has attracted more than 40,000 online visits, according to Ms. Burton. “We all know that however wonderful the digital version, it's not the same as standing in front of that amazing painting and feeling the paint. But this project is a reminder that there are significant art works that we aren't seeing that have a place in our history.”