ince Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, it has repeatedly bombed the southern city of Odesa, reducing many of its historic buildings to rubble. But now, thanks to the work of museum employees, some of the Black Sea port city’s cultural artifacts that were evacuated to safety are now on display in Berlin.
Shortly after the invasion, the staff of the century-old Odesa Museum of Western and Eastern Art moved many of its most valuable artworks to a storage facility for safekeeping. The following year, workers sent 74 items to Germany, where they were cleaned and restored.
Now, most of those pieces are on display at Gemäldegalerie, an art museum in Berlin. The exhibition, titled “From Odesa to Berlin: European Painting From the 16th to the 19th Century,” opened late last month.
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“Odesa’s beautiful old town, where the Museum of Western and Eastern Art is situated, has been attacked by missiles time and again,” German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said at the show’s opening, per the Art Newspaper’s Catherine Hickley. “In countless Ukrainian towns and cities, listed buildings continue to be damaged, cultural institutions destroyed and works of art stolen. The attacks against museums, theaters, operas and libraries are intended to wipe out Ukraine’s cultural memory.”
The exhibition features works from the Odesa museum’s European paintings collection, including pieces by the Italian artist Bernardo Strozzi and the Dutch artists Frans Hals and Cornelis de Heem. The paintings came to Germany from a storage facility in Lviv, Ukraine, where “thousands of artworks were piled up in overcrowded depots,” reports Deutsche Welle’s Stefan Dege.
Igor Poronyk, director of the Odesa museum, tells Margarete Kreuzer of the German broadcaster Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (RBB) that the storage conditions were “not optimal,” per a translation by Deutsche Welle. Officials feared the paintings would be destroyed by mold, so they asked the Berlin museum for help.
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In late 2023, a truck carried 74 paintings—many of them without frames—to Berlin, according to a statement from the Berlin State Museums. Two conservators cleaned the paintings and placed them in newly cut frames. “From Odesa to Berlin” includes 60 major artworks from the Ukrainian museum alongside 25 pieces from the Berlin museum’s collection.
The collaborative exhibition is an “important sign of solidarity,” as Gemäldegalerie director Dagmar Hirschfelder tells RBB. “Cultural assets, Ukrainian cultural assets, are being actively destroyed and annihilated. And making a contribution here is very important to us.”
The exhibition is divided into nine chapters highlighting different genres of European painting, which reflect the “multifaceted nature of the Ukrainian collection, which has hitherto been little known in Western Europe,” per the statement.
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“I hope that this exhibition will be seen by many people from Germany, Europe and around the world,” Steinmeier said at the opening. “I hope that Ukrainians who have found refuge here in Germany will find a piece of home in the paintings.” Most importantly, the president added, he hopes the paintings will be returned to the Odesa museum in a “free and independent Ukraine.”
“It gives us hope when people come to the museum and see that paper and canvas have lasted for so many years and experienced so much,” Poronyk tells RBB. “Evil is fleeting, but art lasts forever.”
Credit: Smithsonia
