A driven woman in pursuit of art for heart’s sake
Chasing Portraits: A Great Granddaughter’s Quest For Her lost Art Legacy By Elizabeth Rynecki Random House NAL, £19.99 Reviewed by Hester Abrams
MOSHE RYNECKI was a talented professional artist in early 20th-century Poland. He painted what he saw, wedding dances, death-beds, men in Torah study. His style was expressive and colourful, with a definition that barely contained the vibrancy of the people he recorded. He was an acute observer of a Jewish life that was to vanish.
Under early German bombing in 1939, Rynecki set about saving his work. In a frantic few days, he and his wife Perla pulled canvases out of frames, bundled up sketches and prints and carried more than 800 artworks to safety around Warsaw.
The family was split up. Wife, son and family escaped the Warsaw ghetto. Moshe stayed there until after the 1943 uprising and was last heard of in Majdanek.
Rynecki’s is not a well-known story and it is hard to tell how important a figure he was. There must have been many artists whose creative work turned to rubble, with remnant pieces of sentimental value hanging in private homes, or unexplained in minor museums.
Elizabeth Rynecki only grasped how unusual her great-grandfather’s work was, and how precious to her, when she read a memoir written by his son — her grandfather — who died in California in the 1990s.
The notes explained the provenance of pieces that had been in her family as long as she could remember. Moshe’s wife had returned to Warsaw hoping to retrieve his artworks. By 1945, many of the hiding places were gone. In the relatively unscathed Praga district, Perla had broken into an abandoned cellar and spotted on the floor a portrait of herself. One of 120 of her husband’s paintings.
Where were the rest? This question has become Elizabeth’s life-work, connecting her in unexpected ways to her own Jewish identity. What else did Moshe paint?
records Rynecki’s emergence from only child of a survivor family to international art sleuth. She finds works for sale on auction sites and sizeable collections in Polish institutions. She sets up a website, makes a documentary, takes speaking engagements. She’s thrilled to receive any information (www.rynecki.org).
Advised by lawyers not to pursue the return of works to the family, she calls herself a historian, not a claimant. This gamble doesn’t always pay off. As long as they do not think she is after the works, she thinks, she can persuade museums to open the collections to view. But they must have sensed their value rising the moment her email landed.
This, ultimately, is the weakness of Elizabeth’s story. I didn’t always believe her when she asserted a moral impera- tive to recover the pictures for the Jewish people, and to restore Moshe to history. The way she records detailed conversations with family and supporters, her elation when she finally sees a painting for herself and dejection when she realises she has to leave it behind make this is a very personal story.
From her own experience, Elizabeth Rynecki has opened a fascinating portal into one artist’s work and legacy. Moshe Rynecki deserves to be better known. Perhaps more works will come to light.
But it is the art itself and the family’s miraculous story of survival that will last for me, more than the ins and outs of the attempted tracking down of a collection by a sometimes naive descendant. Hester Abrams is Project Development Manager for the Willesden Cemetery Heritage Project and a former Director of Jewish Book Week