The Musée d’Orsay Still Holds 225 Paintings Stolen From Jewish Families
Walk through the Musée d’Orsay on any given afternoon and you’ll pass hundreds of small metal labels. Most people read the artist’s name, maybe the date, and move on.
A lot of them have three more letters: M, N, R.
The letters stand for Musées Nationaux Récupération – National Museums Recovery. They mark paintings stolen from Jewish families during the Nazi occupation of France that were never returned to their owners.
When Germany occupied France in June 1940, Paris was the richest art market in Western Europe. That was the point.
A Nazi task force called the ERR – the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg – set up its western headquarters in Paris almost immediately.
Its clearing house was the Jeu de Paume museum, just off the Place de la Concorde, where stolen paintings were inventoried, photographed, and dispatched east.
By 1942, the ERR had processed over 21,000 artworks seized from France alone, according to research by the ERR Project database.
Jewish collections were the primary target. Under “aryanization” decrees issued in autumn 1940, Jewish property rights were simply cancelled.
Drouot, Paris’s main auction house, barred Jewish people from its rooms entirely starting July 1941, according to the Shoah Memorial’s exhibition on the wartime art market.
One French curator secretly fought back. Rose Valland, working at the Jeu de Paume, spent four years covertly recording where the Nazis were sending the stolen works.
After liberation, her records became the treasure map that guided American Monuments Men, the Allied specialists made famous by the 2014 George Clooney film, to major repositories.
These included Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria, where thousands of works from French Jewish families were stacked in crates.
About 60,000 of the roughly 100,000 looted objects were recovered. Around 45,000 went back to their owners. The remaining 15,000 had no identified owner.
From that pool, 2,200 works were selected and handed to French national museums in the early 1950s – pending the arrival of heirs.
The Silence That Followed
The heirs mostly didn’t come. Many had been killed. Others had scattered. And France, for its part, was in no hurry to look.
Between 1955 and 1993, exactly four MNR works were returned. What historians now call the “trente silencieuses” (the silent thirty years) was a long national refusal to confront what Vichy France had enabled.
The museums held the paintings. The files gathered dust.
It took a book – journalist Hector Feliciano’s “The Lost Museum,” published in 1995 – to blow the story open, the same year President Chirac stood at the Vél d’Hiv roundup site and acknowledged, for the first time, that the French state itself bore responsibility.
A national inquiry into plundered Jewish art followed in 1997. A dedicated restitution commission was created in 1999.
Progress since then has been real but slow. In a 2023 ARTnews investigation, researchers noted that Germany’s art restitution foundation had earmarked €5.3 million for that year’s work. France’s equivalent commission received €220,000.
The New Gallery
The Musée d’Orsay this week opened its first permanent room dedicated entirely to its 225 MNR holdings – displaying 13 of them.
It is the first gallery in France where these paintings are hung so visitors can read the backs: the stamps, labels, and inventory marks that show exactly how each one traveled from a private home into Nazi hands.
One of them, a Degas, was bought by a Jewish collector named Fernand Ochsé in 1919. Ochsé was later deported to Auschwitz and killed.
A Renoir portrait was sold to a German museum in November 1941 – no record names the seller. A Cézanne dismissed as a fake by the Louvre in the 1950s may turn out to be real.
Last month, the museum launched its first dedicated research unit – six Franco-German researchers working file by file under provenance specialist Ines Rotermund-Reynard – to trace the remaining heirs.
The Orsay has returned 15 works since 1994. The most recent, paintings by Sisley and Renoir, went to the heirs of Grégoire Schusterman in 2024.
The other 210 are still waiting.
“There is no statute of limitations on these crimes,” said François Blanchetière, the gallery’s co-curator.
The three letters are still on the wall. Now, at least, you know what they mean.