Museumgoers can read the labels on the backs of the paintings, which may provide clues about each work's provenance. Musée d'Orsay Here’s what scholars know about The Dinner at the Ball: Painted by Edgar Degas in 1879, the scene depicts a crowd dressed to the nines beneath lavish chandeliers. The French artist owned the piece until his death in 1917. Two years later, a Jewish art collector named Fernand Ochsé purchased it.
After that, the provenance is hazy. The artwork eventually passed to a man known as Mr. Coutot, who entrusted it to a gallery in Paris in 1941. It then traveled to a museum in Germany. After World War II, The Dinner at the Ball returned to Paris, where it’s now housed at the Musée d’Orsay.
But why, exactly, did Ochsé, who died at Auschwitz in 1944, part with the painting?
“What we don’t know is how it goes from Mr. Ochsé to Mr. Coutot,” François Blanchetière, a curator in charge of sculpture at the Musée d’Orsay, tells the New York Times’ Ségolène Le Stradic. “Was it a forced sale?”
These kinds of mysteries are at the heart of a new permanent display at the French national museum. The one-room exhibition—titled “Who Owns These Works?”—is dedicated to artworks that may have been looted or sold under suspicious circumstances during World War II.
The Musée d’Orsay, which holds the world’s largest collection of Impressionist art, is home to thousands of paintings by the likes of Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Mary Cassatt, Camille Pissarro, Berthe Morisot and Gustave Caillebotte. But among this sprawling collection are 225 artworks that don’t belong to the state. Many of these pieces were separated from their rightful owners during the war, and their descendants have never been identified.
The new room showcases 13 of those 225 works, which the museum plans to display on a rotating basis. Some of them are suspended between panels of glass, allowing visitors to see each work’s front and back—including any labels that may help trace the piece’s journey through war-torn Europe.
The Germans invaded France on May 10, 1940. Weeks later, France was divided into an occupied zone in the north and west and an unoccupied zone in the south. The French government in this supposedly sovereign area, which was based in the city of Vichy, generally cooperated with the Germans.
“The moment the Nazis arrived in occupied territory, they had enormous buying power. They threw themselves at the market,” Ines Rotermund-Reynard, the Musée d’Orsay’s head of provenance research, tells the Associated Press’ Thomas Adamson. “There was an enormous thirst both for the possessions of Jewish collectors and for acquisitions to expand the German museums.”
In the exhibition, visitors will see an 1891 portrait by the Belgian artist Alfred Stevens, which a German dealer purchased “for Hitler” in 1942, according to a statement from the museum. The dealer likely intended for it to go on display at the Führer’s planned museum in Linz, Austria. The painting was later sold to Hitler’s secretary Martin Bormann.
Also on view is a landscape attributed to Paul Cézanne, which was purchased by a dealer associated with Hitler in 1942. This painting, which depicts Mont Sainte-Victoire, was never looted, but when it returned to France after the war, a curator at the Louvre questioned its authenticity. Now, however, experts think it may be the real deal.
During the war, more than 100,000 cultural artifacts were looted from France. Roughly 60,000 were recovered, and around 45,000 were returned to their rightful owners. In the 1950s, the French state sold all but some 2,200 of the remaining 15,000.
Only a few of those 2,200 works were returned in the decades after the war. But in recent years, amid increasing public pressure, institutions around the world—including the Smithsonian—have implemented new policies for managing stolen artifacts in their collections. The Louvre, for instance, opened two rooms dedicated to Nazi-looted artworks in 2018.
In Europe, as countries like France reckon with their role in the Holocaust, governments are also devoting more resources to restitution. In some cases, families have successfully recovered their ancestors’ possessions.
“For a long time, the administration merely waited for the beneficiaries to claim a given work of art,” Thierry Bajou, a curator at France’s culture ministry, told the Times’ Aurelien Breeden in 2018. “Now, we try to study the origin of the works and to identify who was despoiled at the time.”
Over the past three decades, the Musée d’Orsay has returned 15 pieces. The most recent restitution occurred in 2024, when officials handed over two looted masterpieces to the heirs of Grégoire Schusterman, a Jewish dealer who fled the Nazis. He had sold some of his artworks to fund his escape from Paris.
Six experts are now investigating the remaining artworks. The new display will evolve as they uncover more information, providing visitors with a window into provenance research and the returns process.
“You walk past these labels your whole life and you do not read them. Now I will read them,” Daniel Lévy, a software engineer who recently visited the exhibition, tells the AP. “My grandmother lost some of her family in the camps. Some of these paintings were probably hanging in homes like hers.”
Ellen Wexler is a staff writer and special projects editor, digital, for Smithsonian magazine.
