Pointlessness of special importance – Newspaper Kommersant No. 226 (7427) dated 12/06/2022
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A scandal erupted on the European art market. It all started with the Berlin auction house Grisebach, where Wassily Kandinsky’s watercolor “Untitled” (1928) was sold for €387.5 thousand (including commission). However, even before the sale, the Polish Ministry of Culture notified the auction administration that the work had been stolen from the National Museum in Warsaw back in 1984. The subsequent wave of events and statements comments on Kira Dolinina.
There is more than enough evidence that a Kandinsky watercolor sold last Thursday was stolen from a Polish museum 38 years ago. Here is the catalog of the last exhibition, where the work was noted (“Concepts of Space in Contemporary Art”, Warsaw, 1984), and the theft report sent to IFAR (International Foundation for Art Research, one of the most comprehensive databases of stolen art) by Polish by the authorities immediately after the theft from the museum, and, you will not believe, for all these years, the seal of the National Museum in Warsaw that has not been etched from the cardboard. It seems that there is nothing to argue about – the thing is stolen, you can’t sell it.
But not everything is so simple, Grisebach considered, having received an official warning from Poland that the work was on the Interpol list.
The auctioneers said they had studied information from the Polish Ministry of Culture that the painting had been stolen and concluded that there were no legal obstacles to holding an auction: “Grisebach first learned of a possible theft from a Polish museum shortly before the auction from a report from the Polish Ministry of Culture. This notice was immediately taken as an opportunity to open further legal proceedings. This led to the clear conclusion that there were no legal objections to the sale of the watercolor.” Careful study of data on problematic watercolor, which indicates grisebach on its website, shows that a couple of years back and forth – and the moment of the theft somehow dissolves in the fog of several definitely “bona fide” sales, on which the decision of the auction house is based not to remove the work from the auction.
Kandinsky’s watercolor “Untitled” (1928) was acquired by the Warsaw National Museum in 1982 from a private collection at an auction. Grisebach claims that it was part of the museum’s collection from about 1965 to 1983. How then it was exhibited in the exposition of 1984 is not explained, because this particular exhibition was not indicated by the auction. But for some reason it is indicated that this work was lit up at the Sotheby’s auction in London on December 5, 1984, which could not be, because it had just been stolen in Warsaw. Grisebach briefly describes the further fate of the work: from an unknown year it was in an unnamed private collection in the United States, then (the year is also not specified) – in the Galerie Thomas in Munich, and already from this gallery was bought in 1988 by collectors from Hamburg Werner and Maren Otto. The last name is the name of the seller of Kandinsky’s watercolor at the auction on December 1, 2022.
According to Grisebach, Maren Otto is a bona fide buyer who bought the work from the gallery. And if you believe the words of the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Poland Arkadiusz Mulyarchik, then the situation is in any case a dead end: “German law allows such sales, since after 30 years the work is not considered stolen.” At the same time, Polish officials do not intend to give up their Kandinsky. “The German auction house acted like a buyer of stolen goods,” Polish Culture Minister Piotr Glinski tweeted. “They sold the Kandinsky painting knowing it was stolen from a Polish museum.” Under pressure from the rising scandal, Grisebach suspended the completion of the sale. The auction house has contacted shippers and buyers and will now “make efforts to conduct additional legal due diligence in court to obtain the required clarifications,” a spokesman said.
This story seems to end with the fair return of the work to the Warsaw museum. However, the noise around her reflects a much more complex situation in German-Polish artistic relations.
Even when talking about the 1984 theft, Polish officials immediately jump to talking about the crimes of World War II: Deputy Foreign Minister Mulyarchik said the sale reflected Germany’s broader reluctance to return stolen property to Poland. “I see this situation as a big problem, because we see that the German government and Germany in general have a problem with compensation and cultural property stolen from Poland. Many of them are now in Germany,” he said, sharply expanding the context.
It was Mulyarchik who headed the parliamentary commission, which calculated the losses of Poland from Nazi Germany in 1939-1945 in the amount of 6.22 trillion zlotys ($1.4 trillion). In October 2022, the Polish government sent a diplomatic note to Berlin demanding compensation. This situation has so far been a dead end: the German government considers the issue of war reparations closed due to the 1953 agreement between the USSR and East Germany, according to which the Polish communist authorities renounced further claims. Today’s Poland argues that this agreement is invalid, since at that time the country was dependent on Soviet influence. The timing for resuming this conversation is perfect.
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