The Russian army has a long history of plundering art. During WWII the Red Army set up ‘trophy brigades’ to seize important artworks and artefacts and bring them back to Moscow.
Near the end of the war, they discovered three Silesian mansions where The Akademie der Künste had stashed their collections for safekeeping. Apart from the occasional canvas spied in Moscow’s Pushkin Museum, the majority of those artworks were never seen again. Just over 70 years later, as Russian tanks stormed through Ukraine in 2022, The Museum of Western and Eastern Art in Odesa scrambled to protect and preserve its most precious paintings. With the backing of high-ranking figures – including German Culture Minister Claudia Roth – the decision was made to send them to Berlin.
The 74 salvaged artworks form the core of the exhibition From Odesa to Berlin: European Painting of the 16th to 19th Century, displayed in dialogue with paintings from Berlin’s own collections – often by the same artists. As you might expect, it is a lively but scatterbrained selection, jamming Eugen Kampf’s sultry, summer landscapes with still lifes by father and son Jan Davidsz. de Heem and Cornelis de Heem– both dominated by a slimy, pinkish-red lobster. There are portraits too, including a Johann Baptist Lampi the Elder’s canvas of his wife breastfeeding their son. Her expression alone is a stunning achievement, one of weary yet proud resignation, as the baby briefly pauses before inevitably reattaching to her bare nipple.
The general thrown-togetherness gives the exhibition a sense of urgency – you can almost feel the haste of the paintings’ removal, the pain of yanking them from their home. A small photo section at the entrance shows men stacking white, pathetically small sandbags around the museum in Odesa, which was formerly a 19th-century palace. We see images of gutted art storage rooms and empty rectangular frames still hanging on a wall like the aftermath of a robbery. This also explains why many of the canvases at the Berlin exhibition have simple, quickly assembled wooden frames, contrasting with the lavishness of the painting within.
One of these is the ‘swagger portrait’ Count Mikhail Semyonovich Vorontsov (1821) by the British painter Thomas Lawrence. Vorontsov, a Russian nobleman and field-marshal, gazes off to one side, his sword close at hand, chest heaving with gold epaulettes and medals like Christmas decorations. Despite the controversy surrounding him – leading brutal campaigns against Muslim tribes in the Caucasus – his tenure as governor general was pivotal in solidifying Russia’s control over the region. With their aim for cultural as well as geographic domination over Ukraine, it’s an artwork the Russians would no doubt be eager to get their hands on.
German restorers have buffed up the paintings ahead of the exhibition, giving many an incredible lustre, as though they’d been painted yesterday. You can see it in Roelant Savery’s Paradise (1618), its foreground teeming with exquisitely painted animals: dromedary camels, a reclining stag, even a tiger, partially hidden. In the background, so small it’s almost incidental, we see a clothed Adam and Eve in front of the Tree of Knowledge – the Fall of Man playing out in a beatific bluish hue. Paired with it, the Gemäldegalerie’s own Savery painting, Landscape with Orpheus and the Animals (1611), echoes the compositional trick. As Orpheus plays, distant rays of blue light illuminate cavorting horses and two ugly, half broken trees that seem entirely out of place.
That sense of dislocation deepens in Jules-Alexis Meunier’s The Coachmen’s Quarrel (1893), where an appalling act of violence unfolds amid the shimmering French landscape. One man, knife in hand, looms over another lying on the ground, blood leaking from his neck. Yet, for all its drama, it’s the light on the hills, the Cézanne-like luminosity of the rural scene that stays with you. Its brutality doesn’t belong here. This exhibition doesn’t belong here either. And it’s impossible to view these works without the intrusion of war and the ongoing threat to Ukrainians. A reminder that is, of course, entirely the point.
- Gemäldegalerie, Johanna und Eduard Arnhold Platz, Tiergarten, through Jun 22, details.
