Kherson's museums now display shattered cases and missing treasures

A smashed display case at the regional history museum in Kherson, Ukraine, on Sunday Nov. 20, 2022. The museum is another cultural institution ransacked and looted by Russian forces before they withdrew from the city in defeat. (Lynsey Addario/The New York Times) by Lynsey Addario

KHERSON, UKRAINE.- The principal artist designing the exhibitions at Kherson’s regional history museum, Anatoliy Gryaznov, was near tears. The collection to which he had dedicated a lifetime was mostly gone, he said, another cultural institution ransacked and looted by Russian forces before they withdrew from the city in defeat.

Glass display cases were smashed. Deep gouges in the floor marked the paths along which Russian soldiers had dragged tombstones and other heavy objects.

“I spent my whole life working in this museum,” Gryaznov said. “And now it is all gone. Twenty years of my life — gone.”

According to the head of the culture department at its City Council, Svitlana Dumynska, Kherson had “one of the most impressive collections of regional museums in Ukraine.” They are now in ruins. At the regional history museum, the section on guns and weapons was decimated, the Russians taking everything they could carry. A few heavier objects remained, alongside the whole of the nature exhibit.

At the nearby Kherson Art Museum, local officials said, religious paintings from the 17th and 20th centuries were torn from the walls. Ukrainian art from the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries was missing, along with contemporary art from the last 100 years. The Kherson police have opened a criminal investigation, classifying looting as a war crime.

Ukraine’s minister of culture, Oleksandr Tkachenko, said about 80% of the museums’ collections were gone: “Mostly the most valuable things were stolen.” The deputy governor of the Kherson region, Serhii Khlan, told journalists on Monday that there were reports that a second branch of the regional history museum — in Kakhova, east of the Dnieper River, near an important hydroelectric plant — had also been robbed.

The Russians also cleared out the entire section of Kherson’s history museum that was dedicated to World War II, including the identification documents and medals of a Nazi soldier bearing Hitler’s signature. They seem to have done little to conceal what they were taking.

Days after their soldiers fled the city, images circulated on Ukrainian social media that appeared to show objects from the Kherson Art Museum being unloaded at a museum in Crimea, the peninsula that Russia unlawfully annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

Museum experts identified several works of art in the pictures, including paintings by Ukrainian modernists Ivan Pokhitonov and Mykhailo Andrienko-Nechitaylo.

In an interview this month with the news outlet The Moscow Times, the Crimean museum’s director, Andrei Malgin, confirmed that the artworks had come to his institution, the Central Museum of Taurida in Simferopol. “I have been instructed to take the exhibits of the Kherson Art Museum for temporary storage and ensure their safety until they are returned to their rightful owner,” he said.

https://artdaily.cc/news/152010/Kherson-s-museums-now-display-shattered-cases-and-missing-treasures#.Y3--D3bMKUk
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Finland Seized $46 Million Worth of Art en Route to Russian Museums, Including a Titian and a Picasso, Enforcing E.U. Sanctions

The sanctions prevent the transport of luxury goods, including art
Sarah Cascone, April 6, 2022

Finnish customs officers seized these crates loaded with works of art in transit back to Russia. Photo courtesy of Finnish Customs.

Finnish customs officials have impounded artworks valued by insurance at over €42 million ($46 million), preventing them from returning to Russia, under European Union sanctions imposed in response to President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Finland intercepted three shipments of art at the Vaalimaa border crossing between Finland and Russia last weekend, impounding one vessel. The Finnish Heritage Agency will oversee the storage of the confiscated items until the sanctions are lifted, according to Reuters. The artworks are still Russian property, and are being held as evidence.

A spokesperson for the Russian foreign ministry, Maria Zakharova, confirmed that on April 5, diplomats from the Russian embassy in Finland accompanied the works’ transfer to facilities at the Ateneum state museum in Helsinki. They advised Finnish authorities that breaking the seals on the packaging was “unacceptable.”

“Professionals have been consulted in the moving and storage of the goods,” customs enforcement director Hannu Sinkkonen said at a press conference, reports Agence France-Presse. “We are not going to open the packages.”

The shipments “include works which cannot be valued; they are priceless,” he added..

Giovanni Cariani, Giovane donna con vecchio di profilo (ca. 1516–18). Collection of the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia.

E.U. sanctions introduced in mid-March prohibit the sale, supply, transfer, or export of luxury goods—including artworks—to Russia, due to the invasion. Authorities say there are 10 people suspected of having violated the sanctions to transport the art.

The works, which include paintings, statues, and antiques, had been on loan to Italy from the collections of the Hermitage and Tsarskoye Selo state museums in St. Petersburg and the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, the Russian ministry of culture told the Russian news agency Moskva. The artworks returning from Japan belong to Moscow’s Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts.

“The enforcement of sanctions is part of our normal operations and we always direct our controls based on risks. The shipments that have now come under criminal investigation were detected as part of our customary enforcement work,” Sami Rakshit, head of the enforcement department of Finnish Customs, said in a statement.

Titian, Young Woman with Feather Hat (ca. 1536). Collection of the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia.

In early March, the Hermitage had requested that three Italian institutions return loaned works ahead of schedule. At that time, the Gallerie d’Italia in Milan was exhibiting Antonio Canova’s Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss (1787–93); the Palazzo Reale, also in Milan, had displays of Titian’s Young Woman with Feather Hat (ca. 1536) and Giovanni Cariani’s Giovane donna con vecchio di profilo (1515–16); and Rome’s Fondazione Fendi had Young Woman (1909) by Pablo Picasso on view.

Finland has been strict in enforcing sanctions against Russia, also prohibiting 21 luxury yachts from departing Finnish waters last month amid suspicions that the vessels belong to sanctioned individuals.

“As for the arrested paintings, they will return and pay a penalty,” the Russian State Duma Speaker, Vyacheslav Volodin, said in a statement. “Those who did this in Finland probably do not remember their history well.”

Zakharova, of the Russian foreign ministry, told Artnet News: “Basically, the situation can be described as legal anarchy. We are talking about the seizure, in violation of international law, of artwork owned by the Russian Federation that temporarily was on display abroad under the governmental guarantees of the countries where these items were exhibited on a nonprofit basis and in cooperation with our museums. We are waiting for the Finnish authorities to act with due haste to ensure that all these works are returned to the Russian Federation.”

This week, France agreed to return 200 paintings on loan to Paris’s Fondation Louis Vuitton for the show “The Morozov Collection: Icons of Modern Art” to Russia, despite calls to confiscate the works.

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