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![\"Italy's](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/9330a8d2632e7457a0dd724607bbd1ba_APTOPIX_Cyprus_EU_Summit__7456.jpg.webp\")
<\/p>\nItaly’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, center, waits for the start of a roundtable of the EU Summit in Nicosia, Cyprus, Friday, April 24, 2026. (AP Photo\/Petros Karadjias)<\/p>\n
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Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni arrives for a meeting of the European Political Community in Yerevan, Armenia, Monday, May 4, 2026. (AP Photo\/Anthony Pizzoferrato)<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, left, speaks with Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides as she arrives for the EU Summit in Nicosia, Cyprus, Friday, April 24, 2026. (Yves Herman, Pool Photo via AP)<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n PARIS (AP) \u2014 The painting shows a girl in a bonnet and her younger brother staring across the Normandy coast toward an unknown horizon.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n On Tuesday, it went on permanent display in a new room at the city’s Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Orsay as part of France\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The painting by Belgian artist Alfred Stevens was originally earmarked for the F\u00fchrer\u2019s planned museum in Linz, Austria. But by 1943, it was reassigned to Hitler\u2019s mountain home in the Bavaria region of Germany. The museum was never built following Germany’s defeat.<\/p>\n Allied recovery teams \u2014 the Monuments Men made famous by the 2014 George Clooney film \u2014 finally found the painting after the war.<\/p>\n No heir came forward, and no one knows who owned it before 1942.<\/p>\n The 1891 Stevens painting is not unique. It is one of 2,200 such artistic orphans in France \u2014 known as MNR, short for Mus\u00e9es Nationaux R\u00e9cup\u00e9ration, or National Museums Recovery. These artworks were retrieved from Germany and Austria after 1945 and entrusted to French national museums in the early 1950s.<\/p>\n They were never claimed. The state does not own them but holds them in trust for heirs who may yet appear. The Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Orsay holds 225 such pieces.<\/p>\n Marie Duboisse, a retired schoolteacher from Lyon, paused Tuesday in front of the Stevens painting.<\/p>\n \u201cI have seen those three letters \u2014 M, N, R \u2014 at the Louvre. I never knew what they meant. I thought it was a donor,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Last month, the museum launched its first research unit dedicated to tracing the orphans\u2019 rightful heirs, file by file. The effort involves six Franco-German researchers led by Ines Rotermund-Reynard, the Orsay\u2019s head of provenance research.<\/p>\n The new gallery displays 13 such works.<\/p>\n France is reckoning, in plain sight, with one of the longest silences in its postwar memory: the looted, sold and lost art of the Nazi era \u2014 and the French hands that helped move it.<\/p>\n Starting in the late 1960s, documentaries and historians began naming what France had done under the Vichy government that cooperated with the Nazis, including helping to send 80,000 Jews from France to their deaths and presiding over a Paris art market that grew rich on the property of the dead.<\/p>\n In July 1995, President Jacques Chirac stood at the site of the V\u00e9l d\u2019Hiv roundup \u2014 the 1942 mass arrest in Paris of Jews who were then deported to Nazi camps \u2014 and said, for the first time, that the French state itself bore responsibility. In 1997, France launched a national inquiry into the plundering of artwork from Jews.<\/p>\n About 100,000 cultural objects were declared looted from France during the war. Some 60,000 were recovered. About 45,000 went home.<\/p>\n Roughly 15,000 had no identified owner. The 2,200 MNR artworks were chosen from that remainder.<\/p>\n For four decades, they were largely a dormant file. Between 1954 and 1993, France returned only four.<\/p>\n Chirac\u2019s mea culpa, and the country\u2019s slow reckoning with its own role, changed that.<\/p>\n The Orsay has returned 15 since 1994.<\/p>\n The most recent pieces of art to be returned \u2014 by Alfred Sisley and Auguste Renoir, given to the heirs of Gr\u00e9goire Schusterman \u2014 went home in 2024.<\/p>\n Inside the new gallery, the histories hang on the wall.<\/p>\n There is a piece by Edgar Degas, a copy he made of a Berlin ballroom scene around 1879. The Jewish collector Fernand Ochs\u00e9 bought it in 1919. Ochs\u00e9 was deported to Auschwitz and killed.<\/p>\n There is another Renoir, a portrait of the writer Alphonse Daudet\u2019s wife, sold to a Cologne museum in November 1941. No record names the seller.<\/p>\n There is also a painting by Paul C\u00e9zanne that was dismissed as a fake by a Louvre curator in the 1950s. Recent study suggests it may be real.<\/p>\n Daniel L\u00e9vy, a software engineer visiting from Strasbourg, stood at the C\u00e9zanne, looking at its back.<\/p>\n \u201cYou walk past these labels your whole life and you do not read them. Now I will read them,” he said. “My grandmother lost some of her family in the camps. Some of these paintings were probably hanging in homes like hers.\u201d<\/p>\n Paris was Western Europe’s richest art hub in the early 20th century.<\/p>\n The H\u00f4tel Drouot, the city\u2019s main auction house, reopened in autumn 1940 and ran briskly through the Nazi occupation.<\/p>\n French dealers were among the conduits. German museums sent buyers, and Hitler\u2019s agents took the best.<\/p>\n \u201cThe most important art market in Europe was concentrated in Paris,\u201d Rotermund-Reynard said. \u201cThe moment the Nazis arrived in occupied territory, they had enormous buying power. They threw themselves at the market.\u201d<\/p>\n Almost every museum in Nazi Germany, Rotermund-Reynard said, sent buyers to Paris to expand its collections. Those buyers drew on a market thick with looted and forced-sale property.<\/p>\n \u201cHitler himself wanted to build the world\u2019s largest museum, in Linz, the city in Austria where he grew up,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Hermann G\u00f6ring, Hitler\u2019s deputy, traveled 21 times to Paris during the occupation to help himself to works taken from Jewish collectors.<\/p>\n \u201cThere was an enormous thirst,\u201d Rotermund-Reynard said, \u201cboth for the possessions of Jewish collectors, and for acquisitions to expand the German museums.\u201d<\/p>\n For Rotermund-Reynard, the works cannot be separated from the genocide.<\/p>\n \u201cAll of this is part of the history of the Shoah,\u201d she said, using the Hebrew word for the Holocaust. \u201cWhen you try to understand this drive to take from Jewish families, it is part of the terrifying Nazi ideology to erase Jewish life.\u201d<\/p>\n Antisemitic acts in France \u2014 home to Europe\u2019s largest Jewish community \u2014 hit 1,320 in 2025, according to the French Interior Ministry. Those near-record levels followed a sharp surge after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.<\/p>\n The gallery was not built to fight antisemitism, said Fran\u00e7ois Blancheti\u00e8re, the Orsay\u2019s chief sculpture curator and co-curator of the gallery. But the consequences of the Holocaust must be repaired, he said.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is no statute of limitations on these crimes,” he said.<\/p>\n A previous version of this story had the wrong first name for Degas.<\/p>\n
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