Exhibition turns up trove of looted Nazi art in Louvre

A new exhibition has uncovered a hoard of art looted from a Jewish family almost wiped out by the Nazis in the Louvre and other leading French museums. The show about the booming art market in occupied Paris, when more than two million objects went under the hammer in a frenzy of forced sales and looting, has turned up works by Delacroix and Forain taken from the family by the collaborationist French Vichy authorities. Curator Emmanuelle Polack discovered that the Louvre bought a dozen works seized from the Dorvilles while researching a new book on how Jewish families and some of the most important dealers in modern art were plundered. The paintings are still in the French national collection, with three loaned to the Shoah Memorial museum in Paris for the show. Three more works taken from the family — most of whom perished in Auschwitz — have turned up in the Gurlitt hoard of 1,500 Old Masters, Impressionist and Cubist works found in a Munich apartment in 2011.