France Reckons with Nazi-Looted Art in New Paris Museum Gallery
The first permanent display of its kind in the museum shows 13 unclaimed works and their provenance marks as France traces possible heirs.
- On Tuesday, the Musée d'Orsay opened a new gallery displaying 13 Nazi-looted artworks, marking the first time the Paris museum has dedicated space to these orphaned masterpieces.
- France's reckoning stems from Vichy-era cooperation with Nazis, during which about 100,000 cultural objects were looted; 2,200 artworks, known as National Museums Recovery , were retrieved from Germany and Austria after 1945.
- Visitors can now view the backs of paintings, where labels and inventory marks trace how pieces moved from private Jewish homes into Nazi hands. The gallery features works by Edward Degas and Alfred Stevens.
- The Orsay recently launched a research unit led by Ines Rotermund-Reynard, the museum's head of provenance research, to trace rightful heirs. The museum holds 225 such pieces but has returned only 15 since 1994.
- For Rotermund-Reynard, these works remain inseparable from the Shoah, the Nazi attempt to erase Jewish life. The effort coincides with rising antisemitism in France, where 1,320 acts were reported in 2025 following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.
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Nearly a century later, finding their owners is “increasingly difficult”
Renoir, Degas or even Eugène-Louis Boudin. The Orsay Museum in Paris is opening an exhibition space dedicated to works found in Germany at the end of the Second World War. Objective: to transmit the memory of this period during which 100,000 cultural objects were declared plundered to Jewish collectors.
The art historian Ines Rotermund-Reynard is in charge of research from the Orsay Museum, which has just opened a room for paintings stolen by the Nazis. She is doing research to find the origin of these works.
The Musée d’Orsay in Paris is opening a new exhibition space dedicated to works of art looted by the Nazis during World War II, with the aim of raising awareness of the issues surrounding their provenance and restitution. The new space, titled “To Whom Do These Works Belong?”, will feature works discovered in post-war Germany, some of which […] Source
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