Stolen WWII painting “Female Portrait” returned to National Art Museum of Ukraine

“Female Portrait” (1898) by Vladyslav Halymskyi is the first work from the collection of the National Art Museum of Ukraine to return to it after being illegally exported during World War II.

The painting was discovered in 2018 at a German auction in Stuttgart, where it was sold in 2013, but the buyer’s information was not disclosed.

Thanks to the persistence of the museum team and the thorough work done to collect evidence, it was confirmed that this was a work from the NAMU collection that was lost during the Second World War.

“For years, we have been looking for images for each line in the museum’s list of losses and checking all possible information. And then we saw one of the works at an auction in Stuttgart and hoped that we could somehow return it. The auctioneers were not cooperating with us, and we turned to Interpol and other organizations. But the real breakthrough came when we provided information to the Foreign Intelligence Service,” said Yuliia Lytvynets, Director General of the NAMU.

The Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine managed to establish that the painting had been taken to a European country. The FIS tracked it down and returned it to Ukraine.

“The auction was semi-legal, and the buyer was anonymous. We took a whole range of measures to establish his identity, which turned out to be very interesting. He was a citizen of Belarus who is closely connected to Lukashenko’s regime, and he knew perfectly well that he was buying a painting stolen in Ukraine. We did a lot of hard work to determine the entire path of the painting after the auction and finally found the buyer. Our negotiations with him were quite lengthy, and the result was that you can see this painting in the museum now,” said Oleh Aleksandrov, an official representative of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine.

During the Second World War, more than 65,000 items were taken from the collection of the National Art Museum of Ukraine alone, including paintings, drawings, sculptures, decorative and applied arts, library and archival collections. The museum believes that today these historical losses resonate with the reality of a new war, in which Ukraine is once again losing its cultural heritage as a result of Russian aggression. In such a situation, each artwork found and returned to Ukraine is not just an exhibit, but a symbol of struggle, victory and preservation of national memory, the museum emphasizes.

As Ukrinform reported, Ukraine is stepping up its fight against the theft of cultural property.