The Kherson Art Museum in Ukraine recently revealed that Russian soldiers and troops supposedly stole 100 paintings. But, there are also nearly 15,000 additional items, allegedly pilfered during the conflict in Ukraine. Where did the pieces go, and how was Ukraine able to determine the status of these pieces?
Pieces Recognized Because of a Propaganda Video
“Looters document their crimes with their own hands, and this allows us to determine the whereabouts of at least some of the stolen art”, the cultural institution said on social media. Ninety-nine of the one hundred paintings that were properly identified ended up in Crimea. This is a Black Sea peninsula that Russia forcibly seized in 2014 as part of the preparations for the current conflict.
Ukraine and its supporters view Crimea as Ukrainian territory occupied by Russia. According to the Kherson Art Museum, the identification of the pieces possibly happened because of a Russian television broadcast of a “propaganda video”, that was recorded at the Central Museum of Tavrida in Crimea in September 2023.
Ukraine also linked Henichesk with an additional sculpture. This is Phaeton in Sevastopol by Konstantin Korovin. This city is a port city along the Sea of Azov in the Kherson oblast, though its exact location remains unknown. Amongst the pieces highlighted is also Ivan Shulha’s Fishermen On The Seashore (1932). He created the Soviet Union’s Socialist Realism style, which exalted the working class.
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Not Properly Wrapped
Other examples are Venera Takaieva’s 1967 work Daughter of Guzel and Yefrem Zverkov’s 1967 oil painting, credited with founding the “strict style” tendency within Socialist Realism. The video filmed at the Central Museum of Tavrida also showed three additional oil paintings by Ksenia Stetsenko, Anatolii Platonov, and Antonin Fomintsev. Ukraine previously spoke about the stolen pieces.
“Every painting, every graphic work, every piece of artwork, everything we identify, is indisputable proof that the stolen works (at least these) are in the hands of Russian art looters. And to prevent the criminals from saying that ‘they weren’t there’, as is their habit, we are recording everything we see in the photos and videos from Crimea and Henichesk”, the museum said.
The artworks, taken from the museum in November 2022, were reported at the time to have been “wrapped in some kind of rag”, rather than proper packing supplies and loaded on trucks and buses to be transferred to Simferopol in Crimea. Some works looted from the Kherson Art Museum and other institutions have since appeared on the black market.
