The Musée d’Orsay in Paris on Tuesday opened its first permanent gallery given over entirely to the artwork the Nazis stole from Europe’s Jews. The centerpiece is an 1891 seascape by Belgian painter Alfred Stevens, a portrait of two children on the Normandy coast, which was acquired for Adolf Hitler in 1942 and is now one of 13 orphaned masterpieces hung in the new room.
For the first time at a major French museum, visitors can read the backs of the paintings — the stamps, labels and inventory numbers that document each object’s path from a private home into Nazi hands. The Stevens work was originally earmarked for Hitler’s planned museum in Linz, Austria, then reassigned in 1943 to his Bavarian mountain retreat. Neither museum was built. Allied Monuments Men recovered the painting after the war, but no heir ever came forward.
It belongs to a class of 2,200 artistic orphans known in France as MNR — Musées Nationaux Récupération, or National Museums Recovery. These objects were retrieved from Germany and Austria after 1945 and entrusted to French national museums in the early 1950s. The state does not own them; it holds them in trust for heirs who may yet appear. The Musée d’Orsay itself holds 225 MNR works, of which 13 now fill the new gallery.
France’s effort to account for the plunder has been painfully slow. Of the roughly 100,000 cultural objects declared looted from France during the war, about 60,000 were recovered. Some 45,000 returned to their families. The remaining 15,000 had no identified owner, and the 2,200 MNR works were chosen from that remainder. Between 1954 and 1993, France returned exactly four.
The reckoning turned in July 1995, when President Jacques Chirac stood at the site of the Vél d’Hiv roundup — the 1942 mass arrest of Jews in Paris — and became the first French head of state to say the state itself bore responsibility. In 1997 France launched a national inquiry into the looting of Jewish-owned art. The Musée d’Orsay has returned 15 MNR works since 1994, including the most recent restitutions — a Sisley and a Renoir handed back to the heirs of collector Grégoire Schusterman in 2024.
Inside the new gallery, the histories hang on the wall. A copy by Edgar Degas of a Berlin ballroom scene, bought in 1919 by Jewish collector Fernand Ochsé, who was deported to Auschwitz and killed. A Renoir portrait of the wife of writer Alphonse Daudet, sold to a Cologne museum in November 1941 — no record names the seller. A Cézanne dismissed as a fake in the 1950s that recent study suggests may be genuine.
“You walk past these labels your whole life and you do not read them. Now I will read them,” said Daniel Lévy, a software engineer visiting from Strasbourg. “My grandmother lost some of her family in the camps. Some of these paintings were probably hanging in homes like hers.” Marie Duboisse, a retired teacher from Lyon, told the Associated Press she had long noticed the letters M, N, R at the Louvre without understanding their meaning. “I thought it was a donor,” she said.
The museum last month launched its first dedicated provenance research unit, a team of six Franco-German researchers led by Ines Rotermund-Reynard, the Orsay’s head of provenance research. “The most important art market in Europe was concentrated in Paris,” she said. “The moment the Nazis arrived in occupied territory, they had enormous buying power. They threw themselves at the market.”
Almost every museum in Nazi Germany dispatched buyers to Paris, she noted, drawing on a market thick with looted and forced-sale property. Hitler’s deputy, Hermann Göring, visited the city at least 21 times during the occupation to help himself to works taken from Jewish collectors. “There was an enormous thirst, both for the possessions of Jewish collectors and for acquisitions to expand the German museums,” Rotermund-Reynard said.
The provenance researcher insisted that the art and the genocide cannot be separated. “All of this is part of the history of the Shoah,” she said, using the Hebrew word for the Holocaust. “When you try to understand this drive to take from Jewish families, it is part of the terrifying Nazi ideology to erase Jewish life.”
France remains home to Europe’s largest Jewish community and continues to grapple with antisemitism. The French Interior Ministry logged 1,320 antisemitic acts in 2025, a near-record level that followed a sharp surge after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel. The new gallery was not conceived as an instrument to fight antisemitism, said François Blanchetière, the Orsay’s chief sculpture curator and co-curator of the gallery. But the consequences of the Holocaust must be repaired, he said. “There is no statute of limitations on these crimes.”