The Musée d’Orsay in Paris, which houses the world’s largest collection of impressionist and post-impressionist art, has inaugurated a new room dedicated to works of art stolen by the Nazis during World War II and never reclaimed. And there are so many of them: this is because during the Second World War, for all the years in which the Nazi party was in power in Germany, the so-called “Nazi spoliations”, that is, the systematic theft of works of art, were perpetrated in all the countries of Europe. In rotation, the museum will display the 225 works it holds as part of the exhibition “Who do these works belong to?”.
According to the Jewish Claims Conference, the Nazis seized approximately 650,000 works of art and religious objects belonging to Jews and other victims. Of these, more than 30,000 works are still missing: some may have been destroyed, others just hidden. Among the works never found again there are some very precious ones: Italy, for example, has yet to recover over a thousand works of art from Germany, including paintings by Michelangelo, Perugino, Marco Ricci, Titian, Raphael, Canaletto, Greek and Roman sculptures, Stradivari violins, furniture, manuscripts.
The history of the “Monuments Men and Women”
The Allied forces attempted to oppose the systematic theft of works of art: in particular, there was a group of approximately 345 men and women of 13 different nationalities, mostly intellectuals or artists recruited from museum directors, librarians, art scholars, and architects, who were part of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program (whose exploits inspired the 2014 film Monuments Men). These “agents” recovered many European art treasures stolen by the Nazis during World War II.
Among the works they managed to save is the famous painting In the greenhouse by Édouard Manet, which depicts a woman with a blue dress and an umbrella closed in her lap, relaxing on a bench in a park, a very famous Self-portrait by Rembrandt, the portrait of Doctor Paul Gachet by Vincent van Gogh, and The art of painting by Jan Vermeer, a work purchased personally by Adolf Hitler in 1940 and recovered by the Allied forces in 1945.
The gallery of works stolen by the Nazis at the Musée d’Orsay
France, for its part, did a great job in the years following the war to track down the owners of the works collected by the Nazis on its territory. According to a report published by a working group established by the French government in 1997, around 100,000 works of art were looted during the war in France alone: around 60,000 of these were recovered in Germany and Austria at the end of the war, and three-quarters were returned to their legitimate owners (or their descendants); around 15 thousand works were never returned because it was not possible to ascertain the identity of the original owners and heirs.
The gallery of the French museum is now hosting an exhibition entitled “Who do these works belong to?”: it will present a rotating selection of the 225 works currently held by the museum. Twelve paintings and one sculpture are currently on display, including a work by Edgar Degas, and the museum has commissioned a team of researchers specializing in the provenance of artworks to reconstruct the history of these unclaimed works, with the aim of returning them to their rightful owners.
The new hall of the Musée d’Orsay is conceived as a dynamic and non-permanent exhibition space, designed to highlight a selection of works currently classified as unattributed or awaiting restitution. The exhibition does not follow a chronological or stylistic logic, but a documentary structure: each work is presented as a single case, accompanied by information on its known provenance, on the gaps in its history and on any attempts to identify the owners. In fact, the objective is not only expository, but also informative, with digital and archival media that allow access to additional information on the provenance of the works, on known changes in ownership and on data still missing, with continuous updating of the information, in line with the idea that the collection is not static but subject to revisions as new evidence emerges, open to possible future developments.
