Paris’s Musée D’Orsay Grapples With Art and Auschwitz by Displaying Masterpieces Orphaned in the Holocaust

PARIS — A gallery chartered this spring at the Musée D’Orsay asks a simple question whose answer opens into an abyss: “To Whom Do These Works Belong”? The short version is that these works belong to French Jews who were murdered or exiled during the Holocaust. The viciousness of Vichy was marked last week on the anniversary of the Vél d’Hiv roundup, when 13,000 Jews were deported, mostly to Auschwitz, from the City of Light.The D’Orsay notes that behind the oil and canvases lie “stories of shattered careers and lives disrupted or even destroyed by the Nazi regime’s violence” between 1933 and 1945. The scale of the Nazi theft is staggering — by war’s end, more than 100,000 items of cultural property were considered stolen. Some 15,000 remain ownerless, with the D’Orsay holding onto 225. “To Whom These Works Belong” spotlights 13, all of them paintings save a sculpture.‘Madame Alphonse Daudet’ by Pierre Auguste Renoir, 1876. Via Musée D’OrsayThe Left Bank museum, housed in a former Beaux-Arts railway station, is the sixth most visited art museum in the world and is the premier site for Impressionist and post-Impressionist works. So lustful were the Nazis for the treasures gathered by Jewish collectors and dealers that they convened an organization focused on looting, the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce. It was led by the chief ideologue of National Socialism, the Estonian fanatic Alfred Rosenberg.“To Whom Do These Works Belong” is an unusual exhibition because it displays not only the front of the paintings but also their backs, which are tattooed with stamps that resemble the branded pages of long ago passports. Some of these document the moment the work fell into Nazi hands — others testify to tangled chains of custody now gone extinct. Each of these works is a “cold case,” and the D’Orsay hopes that a break lurks in these backsides. Rarely has the Belle Époque been captured as successfully as in Edgar Degas’s “The Supper at the Ball,” from 1879. The dangling chandelier is a splendid showstopper. The gold and crystal accentuates the buzz, gossip, and flirtation that is undoubtedly circulating among the well dressed Parisians lucky and chic enough to secure an invitation to the ball. So crowded is the room that Degas captures the crowd with smudges of paint.Degas was so fond of this painting that he kept it until his death in 1917 — he outlived the Belle Époque by three years — and in 1919 it was purchased by a Jewish composer and art collector, Fernand Ochsé. So omnipresent was Ochsé in the demimonde that Marcel Proust exclaimed “Ochsé reigns.” His many talents, though, offered no protection when he and his wife Louise were captured at Cannes, deported to Drancy, and murdered at Auschwitz.Degas’s painting passed to German museums, where the trail of title goes cold. “Brother and Sister by the Sea at Honfleur,” by the Belgian artist Alfred Stevens, took a different path to the D’Orsay. It was acquired at auction at Munich in 1942 “for Hitler,” and was intended to adorn the planned “Führermuseum” at Linz hometown. By 1943 it was sold to Hitler’s secretary, Martin Bormann, who accompanied Hitler to the Führerbunker.Bormann witnessed and signed Hitler’s last will and testament. Hitler called Bormann “my most faithful Party comrade,” and Bormann and a few others were tasked with burning the tyrant’s body at the garden of the Reich Chancellery. Before that macabre duty, though, Bormann managed the art collection at Hitler’s residence at Bavaria. “Brother and Sister by the Sea,” painted in an almost photorealist style, has never been claimed.‘The Supper at the Ball’ by Edgar Degas, 1879. Via Musée D’OrsayA similarly troubled past haunts“Norman Women Spreading Their Washing on a Beach,” by the French landscape painter Eugène Louis Boudin. He was so accomplished that another painter, Camille Corot, called him “King of the Skies.” This serene work came into the hands of Martin Fabiani, a relatively unknown figure whose role, the D’Orsay reckons, “rings an alarm bell” because of his connection to Hermann Göring, Hitler’s Reichsmarschall.So avaricious was Göring, who was sentenced to death at Nuremberg, that by war’s end he had amassed some 1,375 works, most stolen from Jews. His purloined collection was so extensive that it has earned its own catalogue. The New Yorker calls the horde “a twisted treasure map, a guide to looting and pillaging and gift-giving among the Nazi brass, and a tracking mechanism for the Nazi occupation of Europe.” A new exhibition at Paris’s Shoah Memorial, 20 minutes by Metro from the D’Orsay, provides a different vantage point on the crimes of the Third Reich and its French collaborators. On display are 98 Nazi propaganda photographs taken during the first roundup of Jews in France on May 14, 1941. Some 3,700 Jews were deported in an operation organized by one of Adolf Eichmann’s henchmen. Some 3,000 were sent to Auschwitz. Vanishingly few returned.

Paris’s Musée D’Orsay Grapples With Art and Auschwitz by Displaying Masterpieces Orphaned in the Holocaust

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