France opened a new permanent gallery at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris on Tuesday, placing Nazi-era looted artworks that were never claimed after World War II on display in a dedicated room. The exhibit forms part of the country’s long, public effort to document not only what was taken, but also the French involvement and the art-market pathways that helped enable Nazi plunder.

The museum presented the gallery as its first ever focused on the “orphaned masterpieces of the Nazi era,” works drawn from France’s National Museums Recovery collection—known as MNR. In the gallery, the paintings are hung so visitors can read the backs, where the stamps, labels and inventory marks map how each piece moved from private homes into Nazi possession. As an example, the exhibit features a painting by Belgian artist Alfred Stevens that had been acquired in Paris for Adolf Hitler in 1942.

Orsay said it opened the gallery as part of France’s delayed reckoning with Nazi-era looting—one that researchers and historians have said also involves French intermediaries who helped move property that ultimately came from murdered families. The exhibit includes 13 MNR works, including the Stevens painting, which had originally been earmarked for Hitler’s planned museum in Linz, Austria, before being reassigned to Hitler’s mountain home in Bavaria in Germany in 1943. The gallery notes that the planned museum in Linz was never built after Germany’s defeat.

The Stevens painting was ultimately recovered by Allied teams after the war, and the exhibit says no heir came forward afterward. It also points to the broader problem that the MNR collection represents: art retrieved from Germany and Austria after 1945 that was entrusted to French national museums in the early 1950s, but then largely remained unclaimed for decades. Orsay holds 225 such pieces, and the collection in France totals 2,200 works.

During the opening, Marie Duboisse, a retired schoolteacher from Lyon, stopped in front of the Stevens work and said she had seen the letters “M, N, R” at the Louvre, but had not known what they meant. She said she “thought it was a donor,” describing how the labels in the newly opened Orsay gallery prompted a shift from curiosity to understanding.

Orsay’s provenance work is now being organized with new staffing and research structure, including a research unit launched last month that focuses on tracing the orphans’ rightful heirs. The effort involves six Franco-German researchers and is led by Ines Rotermund-Reynard, Orsay’s head of provenance research, with work described as file-by-file tracing intended to identify owners who might still be found.

The gallery’s broader historical framing links the fate of specific paintings to the wider mechanisms of the Nazi occupation. It cites a national inquiry into Nazi-era plunder launched in France in 1997, after President Jacques Chirac in July 1995 publicly said the French state bore responsibility. The exhibit also describes the long dormancy of the MNR file, with France returning only four such artworks between 1954 and 1993, before returning 15 since 1994.

Inside the gallery, multiple works are presented alongside documented histories that the museum says cannot be separated from the genocide. The gallery includes an Edgar Degas work that Orsay says was bought in 1919 by Fernand Ochsé, who was deported to Auschwitz and killed, and a Renoir portrait sold to a Cologne museum in November 1941, with the exhibit saying no record names the seller. It also includes a painting attributed to Paul Cézanne that was dismissed as a fake by a Louvre curator in the 1950s, but where recent study has suggested it may be real.

The exhibit’s organizers also tie the art-market surge in occupied Europe to Nazi acquisition priorities. Rotermund-Reynard described Paris as the most important art market in Europe, saying that once the Nazis arrived in occupied territory, “they had enormous buying power” and “threw themselves at the market.” The gallery’s account says Germans were eager buyers, with Hermann Göring traveling 21 times to Paris during the occupation, and also depicts how French dealers reopened and operated during the Nazi occupation through the Hôtel Drouot auction house.

Rotermund-Reynard said the works cannot be separated from the genocide, and she described them as part of the history of the Shoah. Orsay’s chief sculpture curator and co-curator François Blanchetière said the gallery was not built to fight antisemitism, but that the consequences of the Holocaust must be repaired, adding that “there is no statute of limitations on these crimes.” The exhibit opened with an explicit focus on visitors reading the evidence already on the artworks themselves—turning labels and stamps into a direct, public trail rather than information kept out of view.