The Diplomat
Two paintings that had been plundered by the Nazis during the Second World War and which were in the Pontevedra Museum have been handed over to Poland, in a ceremony held at the Public Museum of the Goluchow Castle.
The handover took place last Friday in the presence of the Polish Minister of Culture, Piotr Glinsk; the Spanish Ambassador in Warsaw, Ramiro Fernández Bachiller; and representatives of the Ministry of Culture and the Provincial Council of Pontevedra.
The paintings –a diptych of the Ecce Homo and a Dolorosa from the school of Dieric Bouts– belonged to the Goluchow Museum, from where they were stolen by the Nazis.
The Polish government thanked the “example” of the Museum of Pontevedra and stressed that it will use it to put pressure on other countries to return the heritage stolen during the Second World War, according to the Minister of Culture.
Piotr Glinsk valued Spain’s gesture and highlighted the values of “justice, solidarity and respect for tradition and heritage” shared with the Pontevedra Provincial Council. He explained that, in the last eight years, Poland has managed to recover 600 works, while another 150 are in the pipeline, not without multiple “problems” to move forward the files with countries such as Germany or the United Kingdom.
“We use positive examples of restitution frequently. Often positive restitutions are produced by forcing the countries and institutions of origin, but in this case (Pontevedra) this is not the case. Sometimes works from a house in London or Berlin, we are informed that they are on our war loss lists, they are withdrawn from exhibitions, but they disappear,” lamented the minister.
For his part, the Spanish ambassador said that at last both works “are now at home”, and explained that the collaboration in this return is due to the fact that “Spain is a country committed to international legality, including the punishment of war crimes and the return of stolen art”.
Fernández Bachiller regretted that Poland lost some 600,000 works of art during the Nazi occupation in the Second World War, many of which have not been recovered, but insisted on the need to continue searching for them in order to return this heritage to its rightful owners.
The vice-president of the Provincial Council of Pontevedra, César Mosquera, thanked the “hospitality” and “affection” shown in Poland and stressed that the decision to return the works was “immediate” when the circumstances of the origin of the works were known, in March 2020, even before the formal request of the country.
“Historical justice” and “political coherence” are the reasons mentioned by Mosquera for the return of this heritage, given that the government to which he belongs is working “on the restitution of historical memory”. “We would not be at peace knowing that we live with art that originated in Nazi despoilment”, insisted the vice-president of the Diputación, who said he was “extremely proud” of this decision.
In the same vein, the director of the Museum of Pontevedra, José Manuel Rey, recalled the “shock” of learning that they had works removed during the Second World War. However, so far it has not been possible to know the history of the diptych from its disappearance in 1944 until it arrived at the museum.
The head specialist of the Department for the Restitution of Cultural Property of the Polish Ministry of Culture, Marius Wisniewski, was the one who located in the museum in Pontevedra these works made in the school of Dieric Bouts. As he explained, since 2019 the Polish government has been using “market methods” to search through the Internet using old photographs. This is how they found the Pontevedra diptych, which was “the first one that raised suspicions”, on the Provincial Museum’s website and Facebook page.
In 2020, the heads of this institution sent them an entire photograph, including the frame, and that is how it was confirmed that it was the work they were looking for. “The frame itself was in the pre-war photos. It is very characteristic and later than the panels, made to measure. It has an inscription in Latin, which is wrong, which let them know that it was the work they were looking for, because the quote is not accurate,” he said.
