According to the Minister of Culture, “the rows of loads of thousands of items lead to the Russian Federation”
Poland will officially ask Russia to return seven paintings from a Moscow museum that were looted during World War II by the Red Army, Poland’s culture minister announced.
Pyotr Gliński said some 20 previous requests to Moscow for the return of thousands of other pieces stolen during the war had fallen on deaf ears. These assets included archives from the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz, paintings by former masters such as Dürer, Holbein and Cranach and manuscripts by Polish authors.
“To date, the [Russian] government has not proven any of the claims,” Gliński told a news conference. He added that Russia is the only country among several approached that has not responded to Poland on the issue.
Poland’s traditionally tense ties with Russia reached a new low after Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine in February. Warsaw, a former satellite of the Soviet Union, supports Kyiv and is pushing for more sanctions against Moscow.
The most recent art application considers seven paintings by Italian artists that are in moscow’s Pushkin National Museum of Fine Arts. They date from the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries and come with Two Saints by Spinello Aretino and The Adoration of the Child by Lorenzo di Credi.
Before the war, they were in the collections of Czartoryski’s circle of relatives in Gołuchów, Wilanów Palace and Poznań, Wrocław and Łódź.
Gliński said it was difficult to estimate how much Polish art and culture were destroyed or looted by Nazi and Soviet troops during the war, but at the time Polish museums were thought to have lost part of their collections.
“Cargo rows of thousands of pieces lead to the Russian Federation and the former Soviet republics,” Gliński said. He added that Poland “will never prevent the search . . . of cultural property that was looted” during the war.
Since 2016, Poland has recovered more than six hundred looted cultural objects, but none of them came from Russia, he said.
Among them, the paintings The Virgin of the Christmas Tree by Lucas Cranach the Elder, which landed in Switzerland, and the Jewish woman selling oranges by the nineteenth-century Polish painter Aleksander Gierymski, who returned from Germany.