The Louvre’s Art Sleuth Is on the Hunt for Looted Paintings

Emmanuelle Polack is the face of the French museum’s efforts to return stolen works. But some discoveries have put her employer in an awkward situation.

PARIS — In a frenzied, four-day auction in the grand hall of the Savoy Hotel in Nice in June 1942, buyers bid on paintings, sculptures and drawings from “the cabinet of a Parisian art lover.” Among the 445 pieces for sale were works by Degas, Delacroix, Renoir and Rodin. The administrator monitoring the sale, appointed by the French collaborationist Vichy regime, and René Huyghe, a paintings curator at the Louvre, knew the real identity of the art lover: Armand Isaac Dorville, a successful Parisian lawyer. They also knew that he was Jewish. After Hitler’s armies invaded and occupied Paris in 1940, the Vichy government began to actively persecute Jews. Barred from his law practice, Dorville fled Paris to the unoccupied “free zone” in southern France. He died there of natural causes in 1941.