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Fernand Ochs\u00e9Alamy<\/p>\nThe scion of wealthy Jewish merchants, Fernand Ochs\u00e9 hosted literary salons that exemplified the elegance of Paris\u2019s beau monde in the years between the First and Second World Wars.<\/p>\n
A passionate art collector, he bought Edgar Degas\u2019s\u00a0Dinner at the Ball\u00a0in 1919. The impressionist\u2019s depiction of a glittering 19th-century Parisian ball, with revellers dissolved into shimmering colour and light beneath grand chandeliers, would have resonated with Ochs\u00e9.<\/p>\n
Fernand Ochs\u00e9Alamy<\/p>\n
By 1941, three years before Ochs\u00e9 and his wife, Louise, were deported to Auschwitz and murdered there, the painting had passed into the collection of Maurice Coutot, a Parisian genealogist, in circumstances that remain unclear.<\/p>\n
Coutot consigned it to Galerie Brame in Paris, where it was sold to Kurt Martin, the Nazi-appointed director of the state art museum in Karlsruhe.<\/p>\n
Dinner at the Ball\u00a0was among more than 100,000 artworks identified after the war as having been plundered by the Nazis or forcibly sold to France<\/a>\u2019s wartime occupiers.<\/p>\n It is now on display at the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Orsay in Paris in a room, to be inaugurated on Tuesday, that is devoted exclusively to art suspected of having been looted or acquired under duress by the Nazis.<\/p>\n France recovered about 60,000 of the artworks looted during the war. Three quarters of them were restituted to the owners or their heirs, but the owners of about 15,000 works could not be identified.<\/p>\n Most of them were sold by the French state in the Fifties, except for about 2,200 paintings, sculptures and objects judged to be of particular artistic or historical importance. These were entrusted to national museums as \u201cMNR works\u201d, Mus\u00e9es nationaux r\u00e9cup\u00e9ration, while researchers tried to trace their provenance.<\/p>\n Investigations have so far failed to identify the original owners of the 12 paintings and one sculpture exhibited in Orsay\u2019s new gallery, which is called To Whom Do These Works Belong?<\/p>\n The museum has assembled a team of six provenance investigators, who will spend the next three years trying to identify the families who once owned the works.<\/p>\n In all, the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Orsay holds 225 artworks that may have been looted by the Nazis. Those normally kept in the museum\u2019s storerooms will be rotated with those in the new gallery to give them greater public exposure in the hope that the descendants of the original owners may come forward.<\/p>\n Eight decades after the war ended, it seems a faint hope. <\/p>\n In\u00e8s Rotermund-Reynard, a provenance researcher at the museum, said: \u201cMany families never returned from the concentration camps.\u201d<\/p>\n Even so, David Zivie, who heads the French culture ministry\u2019s mission for the research and restitution of art looted between 1933 and 1945, said it was still possible to identify some of the families concerned.<\/p>\n \u201cThanks to digitised records and online tools, we\u2019ve made a lot of progress in the past 15 years,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have 30 cases pending that will probably lead to restitutions.\u201d<\/p>\n The gallery and the investigations team are funded by a \u20ac1 million donation from the American Friends of the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Orsay.\u00a0<\/p>\n Elizabeth Kehler, chair of the organisation\u2019s board, said: \u201cIt\u2019s never too late to find the descendants of the original owners. Americans are very excited about this project and we\u2019re hoping for more restitutions.\u201d<\/p>\n Annick Lemoine, the director of the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Orsay, said any works proven to have been looted and whose original owners could be identified would be returned to their heirs.<\/p>\n \u201cThis new room is intended to exhibit these works and also to make public the questions they raise and the current investigations, revealing their uncertainties as well as the progress made,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Many artworks were returned to their rightful owners or their heirs in the Forties and Fifties, but another wave of restitutions followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. A reunified Germany returned artworks plundered from France that had been held for decades in communist East Germany.<\/p>\n One of the most striking paintings in the Orsay exhibition is Pierre-Auguste Renoir<\/a>\u2019s 1876 portrait\u00a0Madame Alphonse Daudet. Julia Daudet, a poet and the wife of the novelist Alphonse Daudet, died in 1940. The following year the painting was sold to the Cologne Museum by the Paris art gallery Renou et Colle. Its earlier ownership has not been established.<\/p>\n![\"Two](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/3fd050b5-5715-4677-bb1e-86a96e27f503.jpg\")
Musee d\u2019Orsay<\/p>\n![\"Illustration](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/0acee34a-fd9a-4e28-92d0-6476a4f0aff1.jpg\")
Renoir\u2019s Madame Alphonse DaudetAlamy<\/p>\n
![\"Painting](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/90723470-0950-4fdf-8b0f-17e39c3fe94f.jpg\")
La Montagne Sainte-VictoireMusee d\u2019Orsay<\/p>\n