The ceremony took place in the Polish capital on Tuesday, state news agency PAP reported.
Deputy Prime Minister and Culture Minister Piotr Gliński told a news conference at the National Museum: “Today we are handing over 11 different artworks, most of which were lost during World War II. They reflect the diversity of the art that has been lost and that we are continuing to search for.”
Gliński said: “This batch includes three canvas paintings and a wonderful gouache piece by Józef Brandt, depicting a Cossack or a rider, found by accident in the rubble of a house after the war.”
He added that the recovered artworks also included a series of photographs of Poland’s Tatra Mountains, stolen from the National Museum after World War II, and “a unique 18th-century glass tumbler.”
Recovering Poland’s lost art
Gliński told reporters that Poland had lost “more than half a million works of art” as a consequence of World War II, while in the communist era “more art was lost through uncontrolled loans and robberies.”
He noted that his culture ministry had a special department dedicated to recovering lost art.
Gliński declared: “We are making an intense effort to search for and recover the art that was lost in World War II, but also in other circumstances.”
He said the ministry’s custom web-search software was trawling through “billions of information pieces a day” in search of clues that “something somewhere in the world could be an art object that Poland lost during World War II.”
Gliński added that the Polish government was working together with “many institutions and individuals, in Poland and abroad, that specialise in searching for lost art,” as well as with “members of the public and art owners who suspect some of their possessions may have come from wartime looting.”
He told the news conference: “We are currently pursuing some 150 restitution cases in 15 countries ... Step by step, we are overcoming successive barriers, ensuring that Poland recovers more and more works of art.”
Looted artworks return to Warsaw’s National Museum
The artworks returned to Warsaw’s National Museum on Tuesday include pieces lost during World War II and others stolen in the second half of the 20th century, according to officials.
They comprise three canvases, including A House Concert by Jan Josef Horemans the Elder (1764), Józef Brandt’s gouache piece Cossack, an 18th-century glass tumbler, and a set of six photographs of the Tatra Mountains by Stanisław Bizański, which were stolen from Warsaw’s National Museum after the war, the PAP news agency reported.
(pm/gs)
Source: IAR, PAP, gov.pl