The Musée d’Orsay has inaugurated a new exhibition space devoted to artworks looted by the Nazis during the Second World War, highlighting the ongoing effort to restore memory, trace provenance, and pursue justice more than eighty years after the conflict.
The new gallery, entitled Who Do These Works Belong To?, presents paintings by celebrated artists such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, and Eugène Boudin, alongside works by lesser-known painters. The exhibition seeks not only to display the artworks themselves, but also to confront the painful histories behind them.
Presenting the new space, museum president Annick Lemoine explained that the seemingly simple question posed by the exhibition title conceals a far deeper and often distressing reality involving memory, investigation, and the hope of justice for families whose possessions were stolen during the Nazi occupation.
The Musée d’Orsay currently retains 225 of the approximately 2,200 artworks entrusted to French museums under the MNR programme (Musées Nationaux Récupération). These are works whose rightful owners or heirs have not yet been identified among the nearly 100,000 cultural objects declared looted from Jewish families or purchased in France during the Occupation. Following the war, around 60,000 of these items were recovered and returned, while others were sold by the French state in the early 1950s.
According to François Blanchetière, the museum’s chief sculpture curator, identifying owners has become increasingly difficult with the passing of time. Nevertheless, provenance research continues through archival investigations, online databases, and the growing use of artificial intelligence. Around thirty restitution cases are currently under examination in France.
Experts emphasise that tracing the history of these artworks often resembles detective work. Inès Rotermund-Reynard, who oversees the restitution files at Orsay, pointed to the complex investigation surrounding Souper au bal by Degas. The painting had belonged to a Jewish collector who was later deported to The Holocaust and murdered in Auschwitz concentration camp. The work was subsequently resold at an unknown date before eventually entering the collection of a German museum.
The issue of Nazi-looted art remains highly relevant internationally. In early April, the Supreme Court of the State of New York ordered the restitution of a painting by Amedeo Modigliani that had been looted during the war from a British Jewish art dealer. The artwork was returned to the dealer’s sole heir, a French farmer living in the Dordogne region.
Through this new permanent space, the Musée d’Orsay aims not only to shed light on the history of Nazi spoliation but also to ensure that the stories of the victims and their families are not forgotten.
