Emmanuelle Polack (born Saint-Germain-en-Laye, 1965) is a French art historian and author who investigates provenance of works of art in the Louvre as director of research there.
Emmanuelle Polack grew up in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a western suburb of Paris.[1] Her maternal grandmother perished in the Buchenwald concentration camp, and her paternal grandfather had been held as a prisoner of war by the Nazis.[2]
She studied art history at the University of Paris, then doing master's degree work with Anne Grynberg and with André Kaspi at the Sorbonne. In 1993 she attended the University of Montréal. Between masters and PhD studies, she taught history and geography in a high school.
She worked as a research assistant at the Musée des Monuments français in the department of the Cité de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine, and from 2012 to 2017, at the Institut national d'histoire de l'art (INHA),[3] working on exhibitions and monument conservation and restoration. She leads research into the works of art seized by the Nazis in France during the occupation from 1940 to 1944. She compiled and published the working diaries and inventories of Rose Valland from the Musée du Jeu de Paume from 1940 to 1945. In 2017 Polack curated an exhibition in Paris about the art market during the period of the Vichy regime. From 2015 to 2016, she participated in the team conducting research on the works of art held by the firm of Cornelius Gurlitt, an art dealer closely associated with the Nazi government.[4]
Between 2011 and 2017, Polack wrote her doctoral dissertation[5] under the direction of Philippe Dagen. It was published as a book in 2019.
In 2019, she curated an exhibition at the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris[6] about the art market during the German occupation of France.[7]
In 2020, she was hired by Jean-Luc Martinez, director of the Musée du Louvre to verify the provenance of objects with a history of transactions that would have occurred between 1933 et 1945.[8]
Polack also writes children’s and young adult books, including one about Sophie Scholl.[9]