“A real piece of investigative work”: at the Musée d’Orsay, a room dedicated to works looted by the Nazis

Paintings by Renoir, Degas or Boudin… All these works took place inside the Musée d’Orsay (7th arrondissement of Paris) in a room entitled “Who do these works belong to?” “.

Accompanied by other paintings by more unknown artists, these paintings make up the museum’s new exhibition space, dedicated to works found in Germany at the end of the Second World War, part of which was looted, in order to transmit the memory of this period.

“Behind this simple question stands a sometimes painful question, which calls upon memory, investigation and the hope of justice,” explained Monday, presenting the room, Annick Lemoine, the president of the museum specializing in the 19th century.

Orsay still retains 225 of the approximately 2,200 works entrusted to French museums as part of the MNR program (“Musées Nationals Récupération”). These are those which have not been recovered by their owners among the approximately 100,000 cultural property declared stolen from Jews or purchased in France during the Occupation. 60,000 of them were found at the end of the conflict and returned, while the state sold some of the others in the early 1950s.

“Locating owners is becoming more and more difficult”

“More than 80 years after the end of the war, locating owners is increasingly difficult,” explains François Blanchetière, chief curator for sculpture at the museum.

But the process of traceability of works continues, in particular via the Internet and with artificial intelligence, with around thirty files being examined in France.

“It’s real investigative work, sometimes very complex,” underlines expert Inès Rotermund-Reynard, in charge of the file at Orsay. As evidenced by research to determine the provenance of “Supper at the Ball”, a painting by Edgar Degas purchased by a Jewish collector who was deported to Auschwitz, but resold on an unknown date then acquired by a German museum.