Poland: The hunt for stolen art

On January 8th a collection of 80 stunning paintings and drawings, which were among the thousands stolen by the Nazi occupier from the national museum in 1944 in the aftermath of the Warsaw uprising, were returned to the museum’s current director Agnieska Morawinska.

The  Polish embassy in Vienna had been alerted to the existence of the collection by Bertrand Perz, an Austrian art historian. It appears that the collection had been stored in Fischhorn, an Austrian castle, until the end of the war, at which point it somehow fell into the private ownership of a resident in a nearby town. According to the foreign ministry, the Austrian collector, who returned the works, wishes to remain anonymous.

There is an inventory of approximately 60,000 works of art, listed as stolen from Poland by Nazi forces during the Second World War, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. Immediately after the war, Polish authorities estimated that roughly half a million works of art had been stolen or destroyed.

During the second world war, Nazi Germany maintained over 500 storage depots, hoarding stolen art from all over occupied Europe. Even so, not all of the missing Polish art was transported across the Oder by retreating Nazi forces. Soviet authorities also removed a large haul of Polish art in 1945 and 1946. And although Moscow returned large amounts of art to Poland in 1956, a lot of the masterpiece hauled off east was never seen again. Mr Kowalski says that gaining access to Russian archives that might shed light on the fate of such works remains “difficult”.

It is worth noting that a major part of the lost and missing works had been taken from homes of private owners, since there was little docuumentation, identifying these objects is difficult as is documenting a claim to them by the family's descendants. There is much more hope when the object had been housed in a museum with a proper catalogue. This argument is seldom considered by those that argue for scattered curation of the heritage in private hands.

LN, 'Poland The hunt for stolen art', The Economist Jan 9th 2014.