Tracing Looted Artworks within the Louvre Collection

Dr. Emmanuelle Polack, project manager in the Research and Collections Department of the Louvre Museum, will join us to give a talk titled "Tracing Looted Artworks within the Louvre Collection" on Thursday, October 3, from 12pm - 1:15pm.

As the specter of Nazi Germany loomed over Europe, Jacques Jaujard, the visionary director of France's national museums, orchestrated an audacious plan to safeguard the Louvre's priceless collections. Upon the declaration of war in 1939, Jaujard swiftly closed the museum's doors and initiated an operation. In the shadowy confines of the Louvre's basement, he oversaw the meticulous packing of the world's most renowned masterpieces—including the 'Mona Lisa', the timeless 'Venus de Milo', and the ancient 'Crouching Scribe'—their safeguarding veiled in absolute secrecy. These treasures were initially sent away to the Château de Chambord. As the Nazi occupation of France became imminent in June-July 1940, Jaujard expanded his efforts, coordinating the evacuation of nearly 4,000 artworks to various undisclosed locations in the free zone of southern France. While Jaujard fought to protect France's cultural patrimony, the German occupiers, in collaboration with the Vichy regime, systematically plundered the artistic heritage of Jewish families across France. This looting extended beyond paintings and sculptures to encompass entire libraries, rare manuscripts, and even musical instruments like pianos. The pillaging commenced in the summer of 1940 under the direction of the German Embassy in Paris. By September of that year, the operation had been formalized under the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), a Nazi agency tasked with confiscating Jewish cultural property throughout occupied territories. The scale of this cultural genocide was staggering—it's estimated that the ERR alone seized around 100,000 cultural objects from French Jewish collectors and art dealers.

In recognition of this dark chapter and in an effort to right historical wrongs, the Louvre Museum has, for the past five years, dedicated a specialized team tasked to conduct thorough provenance research. Their mission is to scrutinize the museum's vast holdings, focusing particularly on works that may have been looted from Jewish families during the Nazi era.

Emmanuelle Polack, who holds a doctorate in art history from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, is currently a project manager within the Research and Collections Department of the Louvre Museum. In 2009, she curated the exhibition "Rose Valland on the Art Front" at the Center for the History of Resistance and Deportation in Lyon. In 2011, she co-authored the book "The Notebooks of Rose Valland" with Philippe Dagen. From 2012 to 2017, she was a researcher at the National Institute of Art History (INHA) and a French expert associated with the Schwabinger Kunstfund Taskforce and the Gurlitt Provenance Research Project. In 2018, her doctoral thesis in art history received the Berthe Weill Prize for research. In 2019, she was the scientific curator of the exhibition "The Art Market under the Occupation" at the Shoah Memorial. Her book of the same name won the Ernest and Claire Heilbronn Foundation Prize and the Arts Prize awarded by the National Academy of Sciences, Literature and Arts of Bordeaux. She is co-author of the documentary film "The Art Market under the Occupation" directed by Vassili Silovic for the ARTE channel, 2021. She received the Chevalier award of the National Order of Merit by decree of the President of the Republic on November 29, 2023.

Image credit: © 1945 Musée du Louvre / Pierre Jahan.

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