The Musées Nationaux Récupération [National Recuperation Museum]

The Musées Nationaux Récupération [National Recuperation Museum]

Today, I’ll be in the Denon wing for The Musées Nationaux Récupération [National Museum Recuperation].

In the Galerie d’Étude, a kind of cul-de-sac adjoining the northern European sculptures, far from the beaten track, three showcases contain a hodgepodge of works of various sizes and from various periods (Denon, room 167). One finds here a nineteenth-century Saint George next to a fifteenth-century Saint John, an eighteenth-century Woman with Roses baring her breast beside a sixteenth-century Madonna and Child. These are the “MNR,” as they are called, the Musées Nationaux Récupération [National Museum Recuperation]—or République Française Récupération for the sculptures—works recovered from Germany at the end of WWII and still waiting to be returned to their rightful owners. I hadn’t noticed that similar vitrines for MNR works held at the Louvre exist throughout the other departments. They are all indexed in the Rose-Valland Database of looted cultural property, named after the curator who spied on the German depot at the Musée du Jeu de Paume. With this in mind, it did not escape my attention the other day at the Musée Calvet in Avignon that Hubert Robert’s magnificent Four Seasons are MNR works on loan from the Louvre since 1953, and that they are a fine complement to the collections of the museum itself. (Later, during a visit of the Louvre’s Flemish paintings, I happened upon two small rooms that gather the MNR paintings that didn’t fit among their own periods and schools [Richelieu, rooms 804-805]).