Shortly after the Wehrmacht occupied western Ukraine in 1941, a priceless collection of illustrations from the studio of northern Renaissance master Albrecht Durer disappeared from a Lviv museum.
At war’s end, the stolen collection fell into Allied hands and would eventually be sold, piece by piece, to private collectors.
Today, pieces from the Durer collection hang in some of the West’s most prestigious museums, and Ukraine is seeking their return to Lviv’s Stefanyk museum.
Disclosures about the Durer collection’s origins has shed light on the dubious wartime history of many museum collections. The revelation that one of the collection’s most prized illustrations, The Abduction of Europa, hung in Hitler’s private residence has caused uncomfortable publicity for the British Museum.
The findings were publicized by Martin Bailey, an expert on Durer, who began to investigate the source of the collections while researching a book. A recent broadcast on the BBC’s Ukrainian Service featured an interview with Bailey, who found that the catalog for an exhibition featuring The Abduction – an engraving by Durer’s pupil Hans Baldung – had an incomplete history of its origins.
The collection traces back to a family collection held by the Lubomirski family, Polish aristocrats from Lviv. The Lubomirski family donated 24 late-15th- and early-16th-century engravings from Durer’s workshop to the Ossolinski library on the condition that the collection remain in Lviv as an intact collection.
Lviv was incorporated into Ukraine in 1940 after the Soviet Union and Germany partitioned Polish territory, and the Ossolinski library was nationalized and renamed the Stefanyk museum.
But Hitler soon broke that deal. A fanatical admirer of Durer, Hitler dispatched a special sentry of officers from the Reich’s commission on art in the occupied territories to confiscate Durer’s works soon after Galicia fell to his army in 1941.
According to an account published in the Times of London, the Nazis put the Stefanyk museum’s director under torture so he would disclose where the collection had been hidden after the Red Army’s retreat.
In the BBC report, Bailey said that, after the Lubomirski collection was confiscated, German Marshal Hermann Goering ordered their transport to Germany and personally presented them to Hitler.
According to Bailey, Hitler was so fond of the collection that he brought it along on his visits to the eastern front, saying he wanted to stay close to his favorite artist.
As more information comes to light on the whereabouts of the Lubomirski collection, the Ukrainian government has become more vocal in its efforts to restore the collection to the Stefanyk museum. Ukraine’s state committee for the return of cultural artifacts has begun negotiations with museums and institutes in the United States and the Netherlands, but with the collection dispersed through Europe and North America, the task of restoring the collection in its entirety is a daunting one.
‘We are trying to arrange the return of these works of art using all the means at our disposal, and we are seeking redress through several channels – legal, diplomatic, and otherwise’ said Valentyna Vrublevska, the deputy director of the restoration committee.
‘However, the story became even more convoluted after the war, and restitution is complicated by the fact that they were transferred to a new owner after the war in violation of international norms,’ she said.
Detective work in the National Archive in Washington as well as interviews with former U.S. Army personnel helped Bailey to trace the collection back to its discovery at the end of the war.
Hidden just before the end of the war in an Austrian salt mine, the collection was confiscated by the Americans and warehoused in Germany. Despite agreements between the Allies to arrange for repatriation of Germany’s spoils of war, the collection was handed over to a descendent of the Lubomirski family.
Whether by bureaucratic error or by some act of conspiracy, as some British journalists have insinuated, the handover to Count Lubomirski greatly complicated matters.
The count auctioned off the Durer works one at a time, putting them in the hands of private collectors who were confident that they were buying works that had been rightfully obtained by the dealer.
Julia Bartrum, a curator at the British Museum, told the BBC the museum acquired The Abduction of Europa last year as a legacy from the Schilling family. Edmund Schilling, she said, knew that the illustration originated from the Lviv collection, but had bought it in the 1950s from the Lubomirski family, fully believing that they were the legal owners.
‘The whole affair is complicated by the fact that many of these museums paid enormous sums of money to add these works to their collection,’ Vrublevska said. ‘It’s not as simple as demanding their return to Lviv.’
At a conference in Washington last week on issues of restitution, a delegation led by Oleksandr Fedoruk planned to press actively for the return of works of art held in the United States, where most of the 24-piece collection is now located.
Employees of the Stefanyk library said parts of the collection are in the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington. The United States and Ukraine previously set up a joint commission on cultural heritage, and the Ukrainian government has lobbied the United States on the basis of an agreement between the USSR and Western allies in 1943 that promised the return of cultural treasures.
Taras Poslavsky, deputy director of the Stefanyk library, said the museum’s director, Laryssa Krushelnytska, was in Kyiv this week and is helping to prepare appeals.
‘Dialogue is already under way with the Dutch and the Americans – letters are going back and forth – but the British Museum is just beginning to examine this,’ he said. Vrublevska expressed impatience with the British Museum.
‘I wouldn’t say that our contact with the British Museum is on an adequate level yet,’ she said. ‘It’s a very long and painful process.’
With plunder from innumerable wars hanging in galleries throughout the world, restitution of the collection is by no means certain. Poland also lays claim to the Lubomirski collection, and the British Museum has stressed the systematic nature of Nazi looting as another barrier to full restitution.
Bartrum told the BBC that experts estimate that no less than 100,000 works stolen under Nazi occupation are in circulation; their estimated value, she said, is 17 billion British pounds.
The Soviets were equally energetic in plundering occupied territory. Germany in particular is miffed at Russia’s refusal to return its large collection of plundered art. Experts believe much more than is on display at St. Petersburg’s Hermitage museum remains in Russia’s vaults, and Ukraine itself has large stores of art works that were confiscated during or shortly after the war, many of which have never since seen the light of day.
Moreover, the precedent of returning World War II booty could add weight to the claims of countries seeking the return of national treasures from former colonists. Such claims are especially troubling for the British Museum.
And not only art is involved. With a conference on restitution of Holocaust-era assets going on in Jerusalem this week, Avraham Burg, head of the World Jewish Restitution Organization’s delegation, told The Associated Press that the Vatican holds four tons of silver religious articles looted from Jewish communities in Galicia. He said the Vatican was refusing to discuss that and other Jewish claims.
Vrublevska said it is difficult to be optimistic about Ukraine’s appeal for return of the Durer collection.
‘Nevertheless, we have accomplished the first step,’ she said. ‘We have managed to find the whereabouts of the illustrations.’
