M O S C O W - Passport magazine

Hunt for painted
prisoners of war
Helen Womack
In 1992, the hunt was on for so-called
“Trophy Art”, paintings and other artifacts
that Soviet forces looted from Berlin
at the end of World War II. Had the
treasures all been German, the scandal
might not have been so great. But many
were European masterpieces that the
Nazis had grabbed from collections in
occupied countries, such as Holland.
The West hoped that newly independent
Russia would come clean about
the hidden pictures and return them to
their rightful owners.
Two art historians, Konstantin Akinsha
and Grigory Kozlov, first blew the whistle
on Russian museums that were holding
the treasures in dark vaults, keeping them
from public view. The authorities flatly denied
that thousands of priceless works by
artists from Durer and Rembrandt to Goya
and Manet were in Russia, having been
taken from Berlin by Stalin’s special confiscation
squads, as well as ordinary soldiers
helping themselves to “souvenirs”.
I got a tip-off that the long-lost Koenigs
Collection of Old Master drawings,
sold under duress to the Nazis by a
Rotterdam museum, was being kept at
Glebov’s House, home to the Pushkin
Museum’s department of graphics.
“Oh yes, they’re here, they’re definitely
here,” a young curator told me pleasantly.
“I’ll just fetch the Dutch expert for you.”
Two minutes later, the woman returned
with a stony face and said: “No, there’s
nothing here. You misunderstood.”
I felt the thrill of the chase.
The story developed when a video
came to light, showing 17th and 18th century
French paintings hanging at Uzkoye,
a sanatorium on the edge of Moscow enjoyed
by scientists from the Academy of
Sciences. I went to the estate, which had
once belonged to Prince Trubetskoy, and
pretended an interest in the Russian aristocracy.
The manager wouldn’t let me in,
for fear of disturbing the scientists, but
she did walk with me in the grounds.
She volunteered the information that
the local church contained rare books
from German libraries. “Oh really,” I
said, “and I’ve heard that you also have
French paintings in the main house.”
She was aghast. “Where did you get that
information from? I don’t like the look of
1992
this. There’s too much interest in those
pictures. I won’t tell you anything.”
That really whetted my appetite.
Then Akinsha and Kozlov came up with
documentary proof that ancient gold, excavated
from the site of Troy by the 19th
century German archaeologist Heinrich
Schliemann and before the war exhibited
in Berlin, was among the plundered treasures
in Moscow. They gave me access
to the inventory that accompanied the
crates of gold from Germany and a paper
confirming receipt in Moscow, signed by
a certain Lapin on 9 July 1945.
This was dynamite. And still the authorities
were denying everything. Of
course, I was desperate to find some
trophy art myself.
By chance, I attended a wedding. It
was a fashionable affair and the bride
and groom, film makers with an eye for
Soviet kitsch, had hired a Palace of Culture
in the countryside outside Moscow
for their reception.
The guests mingled among potted
palms or played billiards in what was effectively
a country club. I wandered into
a ground floor sitting room and saw two
fine landscapes hanging on the wall.
I didn’t recognise the pictures but
asked the director, a cheerful old Communist
called Vladimir Davidov, where
they came from. “Oh, that’s trophy art,
taken from Germany at the end of the
war,” he said without batting an eyelid.
“I got them from Uzkoye when this club
was built in 1954 and we needed something
to decorate the walls.”
He allowed me back to photograph
the paintings, which were later identified
by experts as Vespasian’s Temple in
Rome and The Narni Valley by Wilhelm
Schirmer, a German romantic artist who
lived in Italy in the 19th century.
It was becoming difficult for the Russian
authorities to stonewall any longer.
And they had their point of view,
too. The Nazis had destroyed much of
Russian cultural heritage during their
occupation of Soviet territory. Russian
treasures, such as icons, that had found
their way to Germany had been sold
on the open market, making it virtually
impossible that they would ever be
returned. Surely Russia deserved some
compensation, they said.
The Way It Was
In October 1992, the Russian Culture
Minister, Yevgeny Sidorov, admitted the
existence of the trophy art and invited
the Dutch ambassador, Joris Vos, to see
the Koenigs Collection.
It would be another three years before
the Pushkin Museum put on an
exhibition of trophy art entitled Saved
Twice Over. Director Irina Antonova
said the world should be grateful to the
confiscation squads who “saved” the
paintings from the ruins of Berlin, handing
them over to museum staff, who
“saved” them again through painstaking
restoration.
Did the trophy art then go back to
Western Europe? In fact, not; most of it
is still in Russia. In 2004 Ukraine, which
was holding half of the Koenigs Collection,
did return its drawings to The
Netherlands but the rest remain in the
Pushkin Museum in Moscow, their fate
still “under consideration” by a very
slow-moving Russia. P
January 2011
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