The Musée d'Orsay opens a room dedicated to works looted by the Nazis.

Since May 5, the Musée d'Orsay has been hosting a new exhibition space dedicated to works of art recovered in Germany after the Second World War, some of which were stolen from Jewish owners under the Nazi regime. Entitled "To Whom Do These Works Belong?", this room presents paintings by Renoir, Degas, and Boudin, as well as works by artists less known to the general public. "Behind this simple question lies a sometimes painful inquiry, one that evokes memory, investigation, and the hope for justice," Annick Lemoine, president of the museum, told AFP at the room's presentation on May 4.

225 works still without an identified owner; the investigation continues.

The Musée d'Orsay currently holds 225 of the approximately 2,200 works entrusted to French museums under the MNR (National Museums Recovery) program. These are the pieces that have not yet been claimed from among the roughly 100,000 cultural assets declared looted from Jews or purchased in France during the Occupation. Sixty thousand of these were recovered and returned at the end of the war, while the State ceded some of the others in the early 1950s. "More than 80 years after the end of the war, locating the owners is becoming increasingly difficult," admits François Blanchetière, chief curator of sculpture at the museum. Nevertheless, the work of tracing these works continues, with the help of the internet and artificial intelligence, with some thirty cases currently under review in France. “It’s a real investigative process, sometimes very complex,” emphasizes expert Inès Rotermund-Reynard, in charge of the case at the Musée d’Orsay—as evidenced by the research surrounding Edgar Degas’s Supper at the Ball, a painting bought by a Jewish collector deported to Auschwitz, resold at an unknown date, and then acquired by a German museum. This initiative comes amid a renewed focus on restitution: in early April, the New York State Supreme Court ordered the return to a French farmer of a Modigliani painting looted during the war from a British Jewish art dealer.