CMC Professor Takes a Break; Insider Takes a Trip

Claremont McKenna College history professor Jonathan Petropoulos is apparently taking a break from his teaching duties next fall. No word yet on how Professor Petropoulos will be spending his time.

Readers will recall that Petropoulos had been attracting a great deal of unwanted attention in the past few months after news of his attempted restitution of a Camille Pissarro painting that had been stolen from a Jewish family in Austria in 1938.

Last month, Petropoulos stepped down from his director's position at CMC's Center for the Study of Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights.

The painting at the center of this story, Pissarro's Le Quai Malaquais, Printemps (1903), has a compelling backstory, and we'd like to take a closer look at some of the painting's travels in the past quarter century.

Join us later this week as we step into the Insider's Time Travel Machine (patent pending) to take a trip back to 1984 to an art exhibit at the Fondation de l'Hermitage in Lausanne, Switzerland, where the Pissarro and several other paintings from the secret vault of Nazi-art looter Bruno Lohse made appearances at the Fondation's inaugural exhibit.