The Musée d’Orsay in Paris has opened a new gallery dedicated exclusively to artworks suspected of being looted or forcibly sold during the Nazi occupation of France. Among the 13 works on display is Edgar Degas's *Dinner at the Ball* (1919), originally owned by Jewish collector Fernand Ochsé, who was deported to Auschwitz with his wife in 1941. The painting passed through multiple hands before being identified as one of over 100,000 artworks plundered by the Nazis. The museum has assembled a team of six provenance researchers to spend three years tracing the original owners of these works, which are part of the "MNR" (Musées nationaux récupération) collection—some 2,200 pieces deemed too important to sell but whose owners remain unknown.
This initiative matters because it represents a renewed institutional commitment to Holocaust-era restitution, even eight decades after the war. The gallery, titled *To Whom Do These Works Belong?*, not only displays the art but also publicly invites descendants of original owners to come forward. The project is funded by a €1 million donation from the American Friends of the Musée d’Orsay, and the French culture ministry reports 30 pending restitution cases. By rotating stored works into the gallery, the museum increases visibility and pressure for resolution, highlighting that provenance research—aided by digitized records—can still yield results for families whose histories were erased by the Nazis.