Exhibit showcases looted Courbet

For decades, art lovers believed the painting was lost, maybe even destroyed, a casualty of Red Army or Nazi looting in Hungary during World War II. But unlike so many other tales of plundered treasures, this one has a happy ending.

Gustave Courbet’s sensuous “Nude Woman Reclining” -- showing a tousle-haired, sleeping woman in white stockings and little else -- is on exhibit starting today at the Grand Palais.

It is Paris’ first retrospective on the convention-smashing, 19th century realist master in 30 years. The show heads to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in February.

During World War II, the 1862 Courbet nude belonged to great Hungarian collector Baron Ferenc Hatvany. But it was stolen and could not be traced. Two years ago, a Slovakian family approached an auction house with the painting. It had been given to one of its relatives as a gift many years earlier.

After negotiations -- and a $706,000 reward for the family -- the painting was returned to the baron’s heirs, who lent it for the Paris exhibit, said Charles Goldstein, a lawyer for the Commission for Art Recovery, founded by the World Jewish Congress. He estimated the painting’s worth at around $15 million.