Western European Paintings in Ukrainian Museums - During The Great Patriotic War

During The Great Patriotic War

On June 29, 1941, most pieces from Kiev Museum of Western and Oriental Art started being evacuated to Penza and Saratov. But it appeared impossible to move the whole collection. When the Germans came, they started plundering the collection, a process that was put the brakes on for some time only by Dietrich Roskamp who was the keeper of the museum at that time. He protested against the misappropriation of the artistic objects and moving the collection to Germany. But it was hardly possible to fully stop it, and in 1943, due to the Red Army’s advance, the invaders organised the exportation of the collection to Germany. They did it methodically at first, listing and carefully packing the objects, and later hastily and chaotically. Altogether, the Nazi took 474 pictures, 10 sculptures and about 25,000 prints from the museum. Luckily, a few valuable works had managed to be hidden, among them Perugino’s Archangel and Marco Palmezzano’s Madonna with a Saint.

225 works of art were plundered from Lvov Art Gallery during the German invasion, many of them were destroyed. Among them was the unique collection of Dürer’s paintings.

In Kharkov Art Museum, only five thousand pieces survived.

Before the war, the collection of Poltava Art Museum numbered about 30,000 pieces. The exposition failed to be evacuated and was almost all destroyed. Among the losses was the priceless Western European collection with unique works by Giambattista Tiepolo, Rubens, Melchior d'Hondecoeter, Adriaen van Ostade, Vigée-LeBrun and others.

The major part of the objects from Sevastopol Art Gallery was evacuated and preserved by its director Mikhail Kroshitsky. After the war, the works of art from Sevastopol Gallery were on display in Simferopol for some time, because Sevastopol lay in ruins and the house of the museum had been burnt down.

Only eleven objects of all the pre-war treasures survived in the Art Museum in Donetsk (at that period the name of the city was Stalino).