Poland praises Pontevedra’s “noble action” in returning stolen paintings

A diptych from the workshop of the Flemish artist Bouts, from the late Middle Ages, has returned to its home at Goluchow Castle. Two paintings, one eccehomo and one dolorosa, were returned to Poland by the Diputación-affiliated Museo de Pontevedra after the two works of art were identified as coming from the Nazi looting of Polish cultural heritage in World War II.

The director of the National Museum in Poznań, Tomasz Lecki, received this Thursday a delegation from Pontevedra, which consisted of the vice president of the Provincial Council, César Mosquera, deputies María Ortega and Carlos López Font, and the director of the Pontevedra Museum, José Manuel Rey. Lecki expressed to the Galician representatives the gratitude of all Poles for the delivery of these pictures, voluntarily and with the unanimous consent of the Provincial Council.

“We are touched.” That’s how he began the meeting with the Pontevedra delegation to explain to them what the return of the two looted paintings means for the Poles. Lecki pointed out “the relationship and the noble procedure with the return of these two paintings as soon as they found out the origin of the diptych in Pontevedra”, he added. Two paintings from the Bouts workshop were acquired in the 19th century by the Czartoryski family, great art collectors. When World War II broke out, these works of art were hidden in Warsaw, but the Nazis discovered them and kept them in a museum in the Polish capital. When Warsaw rose up against the Germans in 1944 and after the uprising was put down in blood and fire, the Nazis took the pictures and lost track of them.

A long journey to Spain

In this way, no one knew that the diptych that appeared on the Madrid art market in 1973 came from Nazi loot. Both paintings were bought by one of the great patrons of the Pontevedra Museum, Fernández López, who eventually moved his art gallery to the city of Lérez in 1981. Years later, in 1994, the Pontevedra Museum bought 313 paintings from the Fernández López collection, including the diptych. No one suspected that it was stolen art, neither its buyer nor the provincial museum.

During the shutdown, a routine inspection of museum catalogs and holdings by the Polish administration to track hundreds of thousands of stolen art managed to identify the paintings. He contacted the people of Pontevedra, and the director of the provincial institution, José Manuel Rey, said they were shocked to learn that two of his high-quality paintings from the late fifteenth century came from such murky origins. After proper checks and studies, it was possible to prove irrefutably that these two paintings were the ones the Germans took from the Czartoryski collection.

One of the difficulties was that the paintings were never distributed with the original frames, which were also kept in the Pontevedra collections. Those frames and the very characteristics of the images show that there is “unequivocal identification,” Rey emphasized. They were looted pictures.

The director of the Pontevedra museum emphasized the importance of the gesture of returning the two works. He described this act as a way to “redress the historical injustice” by handing over the diptych to a museum from which it should never have left.

Tomasz Lecki indicated in the meeting with the Pontevedra delegation that the diptych is already in Goluchow Castle, where the official ceremony of returning the diptych will be held today, Friday, with the help of representatives of Spain and the Minister of Culture of Poland. Lecki pointed out that the return of the diptych would enable the expansion of studies on Bouts and his workshop and open up new ways of cooperation between Pontevedra and Poland. Attacks blind again, now without any shadow.