The Bremen drawings held in Moscow

In the summer of 1945, in the cellar of Schloss Karnzow, a castle near Kyritz in Brandenburg, Soviet soldiers were opening boxes of drawings. The day is disputed. The Art Newspaper, using the account of Viktor Baldin, gives 5 July. A Geneva case note, citing ARTnews, gives 30 July. The Los Angeles Times says June. Baldin was a Soviet army captain and an engineer with art training. By his own account, he recognised the names on the sheets: Dürer, Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Gogh.

The drawings belonged to the Kunsthalle Bremen, the art museum of the Bremen Kunstverein, an art society. A fire bomb damaged the building in early September 1942, and in 1943 the museum sent its most valuable works on paper to Karnzow, home of Count Königsmarck. The German Lost Art Foundation records 50 small paintings, 1,715 drawings and about 3,000 prints stored there, with the best pieces walled into a cellar vault. The Kunsthalle says the works from its three other storage places came back undamaged. Only Karnzow was plundered, by Soviet soldiers and local people in May and June 1945.

Baldin took 362 drawings and two small paintings. Two sources say 364 drawings. They included a June 1889 reed-pen drawing by Van Gogh after The Starry Night. Time reports that he cut the sheets from their mounts and packed them in a suitcase. The Art Newspaper, from Baldin, adds that the Van Gogh was folded in half. The Art Newspaper writes that Baldin might first appear to have been a looter, but that his motive proved altruistic. Kommersant says that under the formal procedure he would count as a marauder. No source reports a charge against him.

The sheets then disappeared for decades. Time says Baldin gave them to restoration workshops in January 1946. The Art Newspaper, from Baldin, says he kept them at home for about three years. He placed them in the Shchusev State Museum of Architecture in Moscow, in 1947 or 1948 depending on the source. He became its director in 1963. In autumn 1989 he travelled to Bremen and told the Kunsthalle he had the sheets. A German-Soviet treaty of November 1990 said unlawfully moved art would be returned to its owners. In 1991 the sheets were taken to the Hermitage. The Geneva note, citing Kommersant, says the last Soviet culture minister ordered it. The Art Newspaper says the KGB did. Baldin died in 1997.

Part of Karnzow did come home. In 2000 a separate group of 101 sheets returned, and the Kunsthalle says about 270 works have returned by other routes, some torn and water-damaged. The Baldin sheets did not. In 2003 Russia agreed a return, and its culture ministry ordered the collection out of the museum fund. On 17 March 2003 a Deputy Prosecutor General told the culture minister that the collection could not leave Russia. A ceremony planned in Bremen for 29 March did not take place. In February 2004 the culture minister said, “This collection should be returned, and we will return it.” It was not.

In 2018 the director of the Kunsthalle told The Art Newspaper he still hoped the Van Gogh and the other missing sheets would return. The sources disagree on where they are. The Lost Art record gives the Hermitage. The Art Newspaper says a culture ministry store in Moscow. On 9 June 2023 the paper reported that Russia had refused to return the Van Gogh drawing and that it remained in that store.