Paris’s Musée d’Orsay has opened a new gallery dedicated to artworks looted by the Nazis, displaying them with their reverse sides visible to reveal the stamps and labels tracing their journey from Jewish homes to Nazi hands. The gallery, the first of its kind in the museum’s history, showcases 13 of the 2,200 so-called ‘MNR’ (Musées Nationaux Récupération) works held in trust by French national museums, awaiting potential heirs.
Among the centrepieces is Alfred Stevens’ 1891 painting of a girl and her younger brother gazing across the Normandy coast. Acquired in Paris in 1942 for Adolf Hitler, it was intended for his planned museum in Linz, Austria, before being recovered by Allied ‘Monuments Men’. No heir has come forward, and its pre-1942 ownership remains unknown.
France is confronting its long silence on Nazi-era art plunder, acknowledging the Vichy government’s complicity in looting and forced sales. Of around 100,000 cultural objects looted from France, 60,000 were recovered, with 45,000 returned. The 2,200 MNR works are those with no identified owner, held in trust for potential heirs. Since President Jacques Chirac’s 1995 apology, returns have increased, with the Musée d’Orsay returning 15 pieces since 1994.
The museum launched its first research unit last month, with six Franco-German researchers tracing rightful heirs. Works on display include an Edgar Degas copy bought by Jewish collector Fernand Ochsé, who died in Auschwitz, and a Paul Cézanne painting once dismissed as a fake. Visitors like Daniel Lévy, whose grandmother lost family in the camps, said: ‘Now I will read the labels.’
