Art Lost: The Search for Moshe Rynecki
September 4, 2014

Elizabeth Rynecki spoke about her great-grandfather’s work as an artist as well
as her ongoing search and struggles to locate and document his artwork. In
1939, Polish artist Moshe Rynecki set about to safeguard his oeuvre of nearly
800 paintings and sculptures, carefully dividing his artwork—documents of
everyday life in Poland—into eight bundles that he entrusted with friends in and
around Warsaw. He gave lists of the hiding places to family members, hoping to
reunite his works after the war. Rynecki perished in the Majdanek concentration
camp. In the aftermath of the war, his family was able to recover only one bundle
of approximately 100 paintings. For years, they believed these were the only
surviving works. Over the last decade, however, Elizabeth Rynecki, Moshe’s
great-granddaughter, has successfully located works in institutions and private
collections in Poland, Israel, the United States, and Canada. She shared his
story, images of his work, and described the results of her search during this
evening program.

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