Hundreds of valuable pieces of art, including a painting by Renoir and a collection of Russian icons, are stored in museum warehouses.
Every year, Polish customs officials and police seize more and more contraband pieces of art but it takes years until the precious paintings and icons find their way from museum warehouses to exhibition rooms.
In 2002, twenty 18th and 19th century Russian icons were discovered in a luggage room at the Frederic Chopin Airport in Warsaw. The icons, which spent ten years at the airport, are worth 22,000-70,000 zloty (5,360-17,000 euro). In 2003, the icons were placed on deposit in the National Museum in Warsaw but they cannot be exhibited because the State Treasury still has not taken a decision to repossess them. Police have not managed to find out who the icons belonged to and why the owner did not collect them from the airport.
“In the 1990s, a lot of icons were smuggled from Ukraine, Russia and Greece to Western Europe. Poland was just a transit country,” says the owner of an antique shop in Krakow. The icons discovered at the Frederic Chopin Airport in Warsaw could have been stolen in Ukraine or Russia because none of them are registered with the Culture Ministry’s ledger of stolen art works.
The Russian icons from the Warsaw airport are not the only pieces of art deposited in the National Museum.
“We’ve got 463 pieces of art on deposit. Most of them are icons, oriental art, Baroque paintings and sculptures,” says Roman Olkowski, curator of the National Museum. Usually, the works of art are held in the museum’s deposit for 10-15 years, but some have been here for even 40 years, like a portrait of Jerzy Radziwill acquired in 1969,” adds Olkowski. The museum is also obliged to store paintings or sculptures which have little artistic value but their legal status is not clear.
Among the most valuable pieces of art deposited in the National Museum are paintings by Jacek Malczewski, Julian Falat, Jerzy and Wojciech Kossak, Ferdynand Ruszczyc.
Last year, the National Bank of Poland seized a collection of valuable pieces of art from the infamous art dealers, Art-B, including “La collation” by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, drawings by Pablo Picasso and ten paintings by Jacek Malczewski. (mg/mmj)
Source: Rzeczpospolita
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