RECLAIMED: A Family Painting

Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles, CA
October 19, 2023–February 25, 2024

Photography by Robert Wedemeyer and Debi van Zyl

RECLAIMED: A Family Painting tells the story of the Bloch family and three generations of women who spent over eighty years trying to recover what the Nazis had stolen from their home during the Holocaust. 

The exhibition traced the provenance of a beloved 17th-century painting, Isaac Blessing Jacob, by artist Johann Carl Loth that originally hung in the Block family’s dining room. Among the other artifacts on view were family photographs, furniture, letters, clothing, and suitcases that told a dramatic story of loss, survival, and justice. While much of the Bloch family’s art collection remains lost, the reclaimed and restored painting was the centerpiece of the exhibition, displayed in a recreation of the Bloch family dining room.