New gallery at Paris museum reckons with French role in Nazi art looting |
PARIS (AP) — The painting shows a girl in a bonnet and her younger brother staring across the Normandy coast toward an unknown horizon.
The artwork itself faced an unknown future in 1942, when it was acquired in Paris for Adolf Hitler, one of countless works swept up in the Nazi plunder of European Jews.
On Tuesday, it went on permanent display in a new room at the city’s Musée d’Orsay as part of France’s long-delayed reckoning with Nazi-era looting. The gallery is the first in the museum’s history given over to the orphaned masterpieces of the Nazi era.
It is also the first such display in France where the paintings are hung so visitors can read the backs. The stamps, labels and inventory marks map how each piece of art moved from private homes into Nazi hands.
The painting by Belgian artist Alfred Stevens was originally earmarked for the Führer’s planned museum in Linz, Austria. But by 1943, it was reassigned to Hitler’s mountain home in the Bavaria region of Germany. The museum was never built following Germany’s defeat.
Allied recovery teams — the Monuments Men made famous by the 2014 George Clooney film — finally found the painting after the war.
No heir came forward, and no one knows who owned it before 1942.
A collection of unclaimed art
The 1891 Stevens painting is not unique. It is one of 2,200 such artistic orphans in France — known as MNR, short for Musées Nationaux Récupération, or National Museums Recovery. These artworks were retrieved from Germany and Austria after 1945 and entrusted to French national museums in the early 1950s.
They were never claimed. The state does not own them but holds them in trust for heirs who may yet appear. The Musée d’Orsay holds 225 such pieces.
Marie Duboisse, a retired schoolteacher from Lyon, paused Tuesday in front of the Stevens painting.
“I have seen those three letters — M, N, R — at the Louvre. I never knew what they meant. I thought it was a donor,” she said.
Last month, the museum launched its first research unit dedicated to tracing the orphans’ rightful heirs, file by file. The effort involves six Franco-German researchers led by Ines........