Russia Displays Masterpieces Seized From Germans, Paintings Locked Away For 50 Years
The Hermitage Museum on Wednesday unveiled a spectacular exhibit of 74 Impressionist and other French paintings that had been hidden away for 50 years, including famous works that had been believed lost forever and some masterpieces that had been entirely unknown to both specialists and the public.
Art historians, dealers and writers flocked to the czarist palace-turnedmuseum on the Neva River for their first glimpses of paintings by Renoir, Degas, Van Gogh and Gauguin that the Soviet army had seized from private collectors in Germany after the Nazi defeat in 1945. Perhaps a billion dollars worth of art on display in one elegant ballroom, all of it of disputed ownership and virtually all in pristine condition, produced a heady mixture of aesthetic excitement and commercial expectation.
“This is the last group of such highquality Impressionist works that will appear to the public in this or any other century,” said Alexei Rastorguev, a professor at Moscow State University.
For Daniela Brabner-Smith of Vero Beach, Fla., the experience was poignant in another way. BrabnerSmith, 68, was one of the few people in the room who had seen any of the paintings before - in her case, in her childhood home in Berlin.
“It’s smaller than I remembered,” she said as she gazed for the first time in 51 years at the Eugene Delacroix rendition of orange and pale yellow zinnias that had once hung in her mother’s sitting room and that her father, German industrialist Friedrich Siemens, had loved.
Then Brabner-Smith, who married an American soldier and moved to the United States in 1948, added: “I don’t think the frame they’ve used is quite right.”
The Red Army seized millions of paintings, books and archive documents from defeated Germany, partly in revenge for the destruction Nazi occupiers had wreaked here and partly to satisfy dictator Joseph Stalin’s plans for a vast museum of trophy art in Moscow.
But Stalin changed his mind and, after a few pieces were displayed in 1946, ordered the loot locked away.
xxxx ‘HIDDEN TREASURES REVEALED’ Painters whose works appear in “Hidden Treasures Revealed” at Russia’s State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg:
Paul Cezanne, Jean Baptiste Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, Honore Daumier, Edgar Degas, Eugene Delacroix, Andre Derain, Henri FantinLatour, Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh, Edouard Manet, Albert Marquet, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Camille Pissarro, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Georges Rouault, Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Alfred Sisley, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Edouard Vuillard.
Highlights of the show: Daumier, “The Burden” (“The Laundress”), 1850-53; Fantin-Latour, “Lemon, Apples and Tulips,” 1865; Degas, “Place de la Concorde” (“Viscount Lepic and His Daughters crossing the Place de la Concorde”), 1875; Renoir, “Man on a Stair” 1876, “Woman on a Stair,” 1876, “In the Garden,” 1885; Pissarro, “Town Park in Pontois,” 1873, “Still Life With Coffeepot,” 1900; Cezanne, “Bathers,” 1890-91, “Mont SainteVictoire,” 1897-98; Gauguin, “Peta Teina” (“Two Sisters”), 1892; Van Gogh, “The White House at Night,” 1890; Matisse, “Balerina,” 1927.