Louvre puts Evacuated Treasures from Ukraine on Display

 
David Klein, 'Protected from Russian Looting, the Louvre puts Treasures from Ukraine on Display' OCCRP 21 June 2023

The Louvre has revealed that it has been working closely with colleagues in Kyiv for months to remove treasured pieces of Ukraine's artistic and cultural heritage from the country to safety. [...] , since December 2022, Louvre staff have collaborated with their counterparts at the Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko National Museum of Arts in Kyiv to facilitate the transfer of sixteen of the most iconic works from the Ukrainian national collections to France in complete secrecy. At the beginning of the war, the Khanenko Museum, which had already survived the first and second world wars, hid its collection but suffered damage when a missile struck just 40 meters from its walls. Now, five of its works will be publicly displayed in Paris in an exhibition titled "The Origins of the Sacred Image". As the Khanenko Museum specializes in Byzantine and Asian art, the artworks include four wooden icons created in St. Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai in Egypt in the 6th and 7th centuries CE, as well as a mosaic from 13th-century Constantinople.

Not a word here how collectors Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko obtained these works to build what once was among the best private collections of arts and antiques in the Russian Empire (1870s-1917).