Musée d’Orsay opens gallery dedicated to still-unclaimed works stolen by Nazis in WWII

The works on display in the new space at the Musée d'Orsay include this landscape thought to have been painted by Paul Cézanne. (Thibault Camus/AP via CNN Newsource)

Artworks by Renoir, Degas and Rodin that are believed to have been looted by the Nazis from their Jewish owners have gone on display at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

The museum, home to the world’s largest collection of impressionist and post-impressionist art, has this week taken a significant step in France’s effort to reckon with its dark past, opening a permanent space for work thought to have been looted by the Nazis, but whose rightful owners have not been identified.

The exhibition, titled “Who owns these works?,” is to feature a rotating selection of the 225 such pieces that are currently housed by the museum. Twelve paintings and one sculpture are currently on display.

Northern France was directly occupied by Nazi Germany during World War II, while much of the south fell under the Vichy regime, which collaborated with the Nazis and participated in the deportation of Jews to concentration camps.

Roughly 100,000 artworks were looted in France during the war, according to a report published by the Working Party on the Spoliation of Jews in France, set up by the French government in 1997.

Around 60,000 of these were recovered in Germany and Austria at the end of the war and three-quarters were returned to their rightful owners or descendants. However, some 15,000 of these pieces were not returned because their original owners’ and heirs’ identities could not be established.

Most of the works were sold off by the French state during the 1950s, according to the Musée d’Orsay’s website, but 2,200 were held back for safekeeping by the country’s national museums. As such they became the responsibility of the MNR (“Musées Nationaux Récupération” — National Museums Recovery), the museum said. Over the past 30 years, 15 MNR works held at the Musée d’Orsay have been returned to their rightful owners.

The museum has engaged a team of provenance researchers to look into the history of the unclaimed artworks, with a view to ultimately being able to restore some of them to their rightful owners.

Among the works on display is a painting by Belgian artist Alfred Stevens of his niece and nephew. According to provenance details from the museum, it was acquired “for Hitler” at a public auction in 1942 by a German art dealer. Its original owner has not been established.

Another work in the exhibition, a ballroom scene by Edgar Degas, is said to have been acquired in 1919 by Fernand Ochsé, a Jewish collector who was later deported to Auschwitz, where he was murdered.

The Musée d’Orsay’s president, Annick Lemoine, said in a press release announcing the creation of the new space that the issue of art looted by the Nazis is a “priority focus” for museums in France and is “more relevant than ever.”

“Today, by dedicating a room to these works, the museum hopes to both highlight the specific issues related to them and convey to the public the memory of this dark period,” she said. “For behind each painting, each object, often lie shattered lives, lives disrupted, even destroyed, by the violence of the Nazi regime.”

Visitors to the new gallery will not only get to see the artworks on display, but will also learn about efforts to establish their provenance and return them to their owners.

One person who knows what it means to discover a looted family heirloom is Antony Easton, a British man who is the subject of a BBC podcast, “The House at Number 48,” which tells the story of his decade-long search to uncover the truth about his father’s family history. His father arrived in Britain with his parents as refugees from Germany in the late 1930s, having been forced to leave behind a vast fortune created by his great-grandfather, a billionaire steel tycoon.

Easton, whose father changed his name from Eisner when he joined the British Army in 1943, estimates that the family came to Britain with just 1% of its net wealth, having left multiple properties, numerous artworks and various other assets behind.

Through his extensive research, he discovered one of the family’s paintings hanging in a German museum. The museum has since agreed to return it to Easton. He has not yet taken delivery of this work, but he does have another painting hanging in his house that was returned to him last year.

This work, “Still life with peacock and heron” by Austrian artist Ludwig Adam Kunz, was bought by Easton’s great-grandfather and inherited by his great-uncle, Paul Eisner, whose entire estate was looted by the Gestapo. It was subsequently sold at a reduced price to Hitler’s art dealer and was destined for the Führer Museum in Linz, Austria.

After the war, the painting was discovered by the so-called Monuments Men and then shipped to Israel, where it was kept unseen in storage at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. It was finally returned to Easton in 2024 after it was listed on the Lost Art Database, a German site that documents cultural property expropriated as a result of Nazi persecution

“What I’ve been investigating is a lost world,” he told CNN. “When you get back something like a painting, it’s like a cipher straight back to the world that was lost. It’s a straight line from the past to the present.”

“And I think that’s what art has over money. I mean, I wouldn’t mind if someone gave me and my sister back the money they owe us but there’s something very special about having tactile objects,” Easton said.

“When you know that things were loved and cherished, it’s a big step because it covers years of pain and all of these things, and it brings people back. I always feel that when you remember someone, you bring them back to life.”

He welcomed the move by the Musée d’Orsay to showcase the looted artworks, saying: “I think it’s great that it’s going on display and it’s going to be an actual room set aside for art that is stolen.”

“The French have a lot of reckoning to do when it comes to the Second World War and if this helps with that dialogue I think that’s good.”

By Lianne Kolirin, CNN