News

Polish police have been trying to determine the provenance of a collection of 300 paintings worth millions of euros discovered in September 2011 in an outhouse belonging to a 92-year-old former bricklayer in the north-western city of Szczecin.

The paintings, which included works of art from the Renaissance and German Baroque periods, were found mixed up with junk and rubbish in a derelict two-storey concrete building in the bricklayer's garden. A lithograph by the Polish artist Jozef Czajkowski, which disappeared from a museum in Katowice during the Second World War, led Police to speculate that the collection was stolen at that time, maybe by the Nazis.

Found in bad condition after remaining during at least 66 years in the outhouse, the paintings have been moved to a museum in Szczecin where specialists have been trying with the help of Interpol and experts from other countries to identify them and determine from where they really came.

Investigators have however been unable to question the bricklayer, only known as Antoni M., now charged with handling stolen art, about how he came to possess the paintings but the latter could not communicate after suffering a heart attack.

In the meantime, the discovery of such a treasure aroused many speculations, notably the possibility that the bricklayer got hold of it when the Germans retreated from Poland in a hurry to escape the advancing Red Army at the end of World War Two.

Between 1940 and 1944, the Germans looted many art collections from museums and private individuals, notably Jewish, in occupied Europe and though a large number of pieces of art seized by the Nazis were recovered at the end of the war many remained unaccounted for.

According to another theory, the bricklayer's house formerly belonged to an art dealer who disappeared during the war after leaving his collection behind him but the presence of the lithograph stolen from the Katowice museum tended to suggest that Antoni M. in fact discovered crates of looted art abandoned by the Germans when they left Poland hastily and that he kept them without informing the authorities.

One thing is for sure, the works were stolen during World War Two, probably by the Nazis. Then, most of these pieces might have been looted from Jewish-owned collections.