Louvre displays art looted by Nazis – in an attempt to find the owners
The two small rooms are hidden off to the side, far from the crowds that surge through France’s most famous museum in search of the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo.
At first, it is unclear what unites the 31 paintings now on permanent display in those rooms – among them works from Renaissance Italy, the Dutch Golden Age and prerevolutionary France. Nevertheless, the Louvre museum has billed the modest display as a major development in its history.
For the first time since 1945, the Louvre has formally dedicated an area in which to present – together in the same space – some of the Nazi-looted artworks in its collection, in what curators are calling a restitution effort.
The idea, the museum says, is to encourage the descendants of the works’ original owners, many of whom were probably Jewish victims of Nazi persecution, to come forward and reclaim what is rightfully theirs.
‘‘Our objective is very clearly to restitute everything we can,’’ says Sebastien Allard, the Louvre’s chief curator of paintings. ‘‘It’s very important that we present the MNR works in a separate space,’’ he added, using the French acronym for Musees Nationaux Recuperation, the roughly 61,000 stolen artworks that were returned to France after World War II. Of those, the government quickly returned some 45,000 works to survivors and heirs, but sold thousands more to replenish its postwar coffers.
For decades, French museums – the Louvre included – have willingly displayed
2143 works.
According to the Louvre’s statistics, it still holds 1752 MNR works, 807 of which are paintings. Of those paintings, 296 are held in the museum’s sprawling Paris headquarters, while the rest are on display in affiliated museums across France. Outside the two new rooms, other MNR holdings remain scattered throughout the museum’s permanent collection.
Restitution lawyers and activists have applauded the new display, which opened in December, but dispute the assertion that its animating motive is in fact restitution.
Since 1951, the Louvre has returned only about 50 of the MNR paintings in its collection, according to the museum’s statistics. Some say that launching this project now, more than 70 years after the remaining the war, means that even fewer descendants are likely to come forward.
‘‘This is half-hearted,’’ said Christopher Marinello, a restitution lawyer in London who has overseen some of the highest-profile recoveries of Nazi-looted art.
‘‘This is the type of thing that should have been done in the late 1990s,’’ Marinello said. ‘‘The fact that this comes 20 years after the Washington Declaration is completely pathetic, especially for a museum with the funding and the stature that the Louvre has.’’
At a 1998 conference in the United States capital, the Washington Declaration established international protocols for the identification and return of stolen art.
In France especially, the late 1990s also represented a turning point in a national narrative that had long avoided acknowledging the state’s wartime collaboration with Nazi Germany.
In July 1995, then-president Jacques Chirac publicly apologised for France’s role in the Holocaust, and his government began examining a dark, complicated legacy in which the question of stolen art was central.
Two years later, the government launched a task force known as the Matteoli Commission, which investigated the provenance of the MNR works in French museums and spurred the creation of a staterun enterprise charged with researching the claims of potential victims. But some say actual progress has been slow.
Allard says he hopes descendants will come forward, but that they need to provide sufficient proof of ownership.