Musée d'Orsay Opens Gallery for Nazi-Looted Art

PARIS A long-lost painting by Belgian artist Alfred Stevens, acquired for Adolf Hitler in 1942 amid the Nazi plunder of Jewish-owned art in Europe, went on permanent display Tuesday in a dedicated gallery at the Musée d'Orsay, marking France's latest effort to address artwork looted during World War II.

The 1891 canvas depicts a girl in a bonnet and her younger brother gazing across the Normandy coast. Originally destined for Hitler's planned museum in Linz, Austria, it was reassigned in 1943 to his residence in Bavaria, Germany. Allied forces, including the Monuments Men recovery teams, retrieved it after Germany's defeat. No heirs have claimed it, and its pre-1942 owner remains unknown. The new gallery, the first in the museum's history for such "orphaned" Nazi-era masterpieces, displays 13 works hung to reveal their backsides, bearing stamps, labels and marks tracing their paths from private collections into Nazi hands.

The Stevens painting belongs to France's collection of about 2,200 unclaimed artworks known as MNR, for Musées Nationaux Récupération, or National Museums Recovery. Recovered from Germany and Austria after 1945 and placed in national museums in the early...