Lost and looted works of art return to National Museum in Warsaw

The National Museum in Warsaw on Tuesday organized a ceremony of presentation and handover of 11 works of art, some of which had gone missing during WWII, and other had been stolen after the war.

The Minister of Culture and National Heritage Prof. Piotr Gliński noted that Poland had lost over 500,000 works of art as a result of WWII. "Unfortunately, also in the PRL period (People's Republic of Poland - edit.) we would lose more works due to uncontrolled lending as well as many thefts. For some time we have been trying to intensively seek and recover war losses, but also the items that had gone missing in other circumstances," Gliński said.

The minister also reminded there is a special department at the ministry responsible for recovering missing items. He added that every day special internet tools were searching tons of data to find any traces of Polish losses.

Prof. Gliński also stressed these operations were based mainly on cooperation with many institutions and persons in Poland and around the world, who specialize in seeking works of art. He added that many regular citizens and private collectors come to the ministry and ask if their items could be war losses.

Three paintings, a gouache on paper, an 18th-century rummer, and a collection of six photographs - a total of 11 artworks - have been added to the museum collection.

The retrieved items are: Roman Szwojnicki's Siuprem Greenery, Andrzej Grabowski's Portrait of Leopoldyna Kuczyńska, Jan Josef Horemans the Elder's Concerto, Cossack - a gouache by Józef Brandt, an 18th-century rummer from a pre-war collection of Krasinski Library in Warsaw, as well as a group of six photographs of Tatra Mountains and Zakopane taken by Stanisław Bizański, a photographer from Kraków. The photos were part of Mieczysław Geniusz's collection, which was added to the National Museum collection in 1926.