What happened to all the art that Nazis looted? This Jewish Museum exhibit tells the story of several masterworks

Great works of art often become so present in our everyday lives - the "Mona Lisa" on a mug, "The Starry Night" on a sweater, Basquiat in Beyoncé and Jay-Z's Tiffany campaign - that it's easy to forget how fragile the originals are. These images that populate our collective consciousness all started as a single destructible canvas. But most museums don't highlight the life these artworks have had as physical objects - often because that history is wrapped up in colonialism and theft.

At the new Jewish Museum exhibition "Afterlives: Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art," which opened last...