Musée d’Orsay in Paris Displays Renoir and Degas Works Looted by Nazis During WW2 in a New Gallery Called To Whom Do These Works Belong?

I never need an excuse to visit ​​Musée d’Orsay in Paris, but it seems I have one anyway. During the occupation of France in World War II, thousands of Jewish-owned artworks were plundered and stolen from museums and homes throughout the country.  And now, Musée d’Orsay is displaying some of the recovered art in a new gallery called To Whom Do These Works Belong? 

If you’ve ever watched the movie Monuments Men, with George Clooney, it shows the Allies tracking down and attempting to recover some of these stolen works. And one of the paintings by Belgian artist Alfred Stevens was among those they recovered and will be part of the exhibition.

So many paintings the world thought were lost have been recovered in the 80 years since the end of the war. Now, some will be the stars of the show, where visitors can see the back of the paintings and understand how they went from private homes into Nazi hands.

The New Gallery at Musée d’Orsay

The gallery opened on May 6, 2026, and it is unlike anything the Orsay has done before. It is the first room in the museum’s history dedicated entirely to what are being called orphaned masterpieces, works recovered after World War II whose ownership remains uncertain. The gallery’s name says it all: To Whom Do These Works Belong?

Thirteen paintings and sculptures are currently on display. What makes this exhibition different from anything you might have seen elsewhere is that the paintings are hung so visitors can read the backs. 

The stamps, inventory codes, and transit labels on the reverse of each canvas are the physical record of where these works traveled and who handled them along the way. 

What Are MNR Works?

MNR stands for Musées Nationaux Récupération, or National Museums Recovery. These are works retrieved from Germany and Austria after the war and entrusted to French national museums in the early 1950s because no owner could be traced. France holds around 2,200 of them in total. The state does not own them. It holds them in trust, on the chance that heirs will one day come forward.

The Orsay holds 225 of these works. Most are kept in storage. The new gallery puts 13 of them on permanent public display, and the plan is to rotate others through over time. The logic is simple: if a descendant is ever going to recognize something that belonged to their family, the painting needs to be visible.

The gallery is permanent, not a temporary exhibition, so there is no deadline for visiting.

The Paintings on Display and the Stories Behind Them

Each of the 13 works in the gallery comes with a provenance record that is part documented, part missing. Those gaps are where the theft happened.

Fernand Ochsé was the son of wealthy Jewish merchants who hosted literary salons in Paris between the wars. He bought Edgar Degas’s Dinner at the Ball in 1919. The painting shows a glittering 19th-century Parisian ballroom, figures dissolved into shimmering light beneath grand chandeliers. 

By 1941, three years before Ochsé and his wife were deported to Auschwitz and killed, the painting had passed to a Parisian genealogist named Maurice Coutot. How it got there is unclear. Coutot then sold it through a Paris gallery to Kurt Martin, the Nazi-appointed director of the state art museum in Karlsruhe. 

The Renoir portrait Madame Alphonse Daudet was painted in 1876. It depicts Julia Daudet, wife of the novelist Alphonse Daudet and a poet in her own right. She died in 1940. The following year, the painting was sold to a museum in Cologne. No record names the seller. 

Alfred Stevens’s 1891 painting Frère et soeur devant la mer à Honfleur shows a girl in a bonnet and her younger brother staring toward the Normandy coast. It was acquired in Paris in 1942 for Adolf Hitler, earmarked for the Führermuseum he planned to build in Linz, the Austrian city where he grew up. Germany’s defeat meant that museum was never built. The Monuments Men found the painting after the war. No heir has ever come forward.

Then there is the Cézanne with a question mark. La Montagne Sainte-Victoire was sold at auction in Paris in 1942 to a German art dealer for five million francs. It was recovered after the war, but a Louvre curator decided it was a forgery and ruled that it should not re-enter the art market. 

Recent studies suggest he may have been wrong. Cézanne painted the Montagne Sainte-Victoire around 80 times in oil and watercolor. This one hangs at the Orsay, listed as “Cézanne?” 

How the Looting Actually Worked

The scale of what happened to art in France during the occupation is staggering. Around 100,000 cultural objects were declared looted from France during the war. That number is the result of a systematic, organized, ideologically driven operation.

The main vehicle for it was the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, known as the ERR. It was a Nazi task force headed by Hitler’s chief ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg, established in Paris in the summer of 1940. By November of that year, Göring had assigned the ERR formal responsibility for confiscating Jewish art collections, and Hitler ordered that all confiscated works be brought to Germany and placed at his personal disposal.

The ERR set up its Paris base at the Jeu de Paume, the small museum in the Tuileries Gardens. Stolen art was brought there, cataloged, photographed, and packed for transport east. Between April 1941 and July 1944, 29 separate convoys carried goods seized in Paris to Neuschwanstein Castle in Germany.

Rose Valland was an art curator who had been an unpaid volunteer assistant at the Jeu de Paume since 1932. When the Nazis requisitioned the museum in late 1940, the director of the French national museums ordered her to stay at her post at all costs. She spoke German fluently, a fact she kept entirely hidden from the Germans for four years.

Every day, she recorded what arrived, what left, and where it was headed. She noted the railcar numbers on shipment logs. She smuggled photographic negatives out of the building at night, had prints made, and returned them before morning. The penalty for being caught was imprisonment in a concentration camp or death. 

Nazi officers tried to remove her from the building so many times that it became, in the words of a Monuments Men officer who later worked with her, almost comic. She simply came back each time.

She was there when Göring made his personal visits, 12 trips to Paris in total, to help himself to the collections. She watched in July 1943 as 500 to 600 paintings by Picasso, Miró, Klee, and others were piled in the museum’s courtyard and set on fire. Works deemed degenerate by Nazi standards were not worth shipping east. They were destroyed.

After Paris was liberated in 1944, Valland handed her records to the Monuments Men and directed them toward the repositories in Germany where the art had been sent, most importantly Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria. She oversaw the return of 1,400 crates of artwork from the castle directly to the Jeu de Paume, and later testified against Göring at the Nuremberg trials.

Much of what made postwar restitution possible at all traces back to her. You might also recognize her story from the Monuments Men film, where she is the character played by Cate Blanchett. I read about her in a book called The Riviera House, which is split between two time zones and features Rose and a young girl called Éliane, her protegée at the museum.

To make this legally presentable, the Nazi decree declared French Jews “stateless.” People with no legal status have no property rights. So in their own framing, the ERR was not stealing anything, but safeguarding ownerless goods.

It was not only paintings that were taken. The ERR also stripped Jewish homes of furniture, books, religious objects, and everyday items. From 1942, a dedicated operation removed furniture from the apartments of Jewish families who had fled or been deported. The most valuable pieces went to the Jeu de Paume. The victims could reclaim their belongings only by producing a certificate proving they were not Jewish.

The Role of the Paris Art Market

This is the part of the story that France spent decades avoiding.

The Hôtel Drouot, Paris’s main auction house, reopened in autumn 1940 and ran without interruption throughout the occupation. French dealers were active participants in that market. German museum buyers were there too, working from acquisition lists funded by the Reich. From July 1941, Jews were formally barred from the auction rooms by police directive.

Over two million items changed hands between 1941 and 1942 alone. Art was seen as a safe investment during a period of severe shortages, and the supply of goods confiscated from Jewish families kept the market well stocked. 

As Inès Rotermund-Reynard, who heads the Orsay’s new provenance research unit, described it: “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 sent buyers to Paris. Hitler’s plan for a Führermuseum in Linz drove enormous demand. Göring wanted pieces for his own collection. The appetite was insatiable.

The French dealers and auctioneers who profited from all of this faced almost no consequences after the war. Most simply resumed their careers.

France’s Long Silence and What Changed

Between 1954 and 1993, France returned exactly four works from the entire MNR collection. Four, in four decades, and it wasn’t due to lack of information, but a choice to look away. 

Starting in the late 1960s, historians and documentary filmmakers began naming what the Vichy government had actually done, including helping to deport 80,000 Jews from France to their deaths and presiding over an art market that grew rich on stolen property.

The real turning point came in July 1995. President Jacques Chirac stood at the site of the Vél d’Hiv roundup, the mass arrest of more than 13,000 Parisian Jews in July 1942 who were handed over to the Nazis and deported, and said for the first time that the French state itself bore responsibility. Two years later, France launched a national inquiry into the plundering of Jewish-owned art.

Since 1994, the Orsay has returned 15 works. The most recent, a Sisley and a Renoir, went to the heirs of Grégoire Schusterman in 2024.

Is There Still Hope of Finding Heirs?

Honestly, it’s complicated.

Many families never came back from the camps. Entire family lines ended. There is nobody left to claim what was taken. Rotermund-Reynard said plainly: “Many families never returned from the concentration camps.”

Even so, the work continues. The Orsay has assembled a team of six Franco-German provenance researchers who will spend the next three years working through the files, funded by a one-million-euro donation from the American Friends of the Musée d’Orsay. 

Digital archives and online tools have opened up avenues that simply didn’t exist a generation ago. There are currently 30 cases pending that researchers believe will lead to restitutions.

The gallery’s co-curator, François Blanchetière, was clear on the broader principle: “There is no statute of limitations on these crimes.”

If you have any reason to believe your family owned artwork lost during the occupation, the Orsay’s provenance team can be contacted through the museum’s website. 

How to Visit the Gallery

The Musée d’Orsay is at 1 Rue de la Légion d’Honneur in the 7th arrondissement, on the Left Bank of the Seine. The nearest RER stop is Musée d’Orsay on the C line. The closest Metro stations are Solférino and Assemblée Nationale, both on line 12.

Standard Orsay admission applies, and booking tickets in advance is always a good idea, particularly in summer when queues at the door can stretch a long way.