The Fate of the Antiquities Collection of Izabela Działyńska (neé Czartoryska)

Inga Głuszek and Michał Krueger

Abstract
The collection of antiquities displayed at Gołuchów castle in Poland by Izabela Działyńska was one of the largest private collections in Europe of ancient works of art from the Middle East, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Ancient pottery, stelae from Cyprus, fragments of Roman marble sculpture, and a large collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts were exhibited in the Greek Vases Hall, the Antiquities Hall, and the Egyptian Hall. The invasion of Poland by Nazi troops on 1 September 1939 and the attack of Soviet troops on 17 September started a two-front war in Poland. On 28 September 1939, the German-Soviet Frontier and Friendship Treaty was signed, marking the border between the two aggressors on Polish lands along the line of the rivers San-Bug-Narew-Pisa. This division of Poland continued until the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941. As a result of these wartime events, the collection of Izabela Działyńska was dispersed. Many of the objects are now in various museums in Poland, but some, including ancient artefacts and other valuable works of art, are considered lost. It cannot be ruled out that some were destroyed.

Introduction

[1] The Gołuchów collection—as the artifacts in the castle located in the small village of Gołuchów near the Polish city of Kalisz were often described—is associated primarily with Izabela Działyńska (née Czartoryska) and the Czartoryski noble family. The designation is indeed most appropriate. Izabela Działyńska (14 December 1830 – 18 March 1899), the daughter of Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski (14 January 1770 – 15 July 1861), was an expert collector of works of art and gathered her collections representing the achievements of antiquity through the Middle Ages to the Renaissance period in Gołuchów castle, which was rebuilt on her initiative (Fig. 1)¹. Before her death, she transformed her estate into a “fee tail”, a land trust with restrictions on its transfer, termed an ordynacja in Polish and a majorat in Prussian law. The main goals of Izabela Działyńska, as written in the fee tail document, were to keep the collection together and make it available to those interested in the study of art; these goals also became paramount to her successors.

Fig. 1. The castle in Gołuchów, dating back to the 16th century and thoroughly rebuilt from 1875–1885 (photo courtesy of Michał Pisz)

[2] The resolutions made by Izabela Działyńska and secured by her last will, however, could not protect the collection from the dramatic events of World War II: the Gołuchów collection was dispersed. Now, not only are the objects split between several museums in Poland, but some, including ancient artifacts and other valuable works of art, are presumed lost. It cannot be ruled out that some of them were destroyed. Among the most famous works of art from this collection that are feared lost forever are Limoges enamels, including plaques and decorative reliefs².

Izabela Działyńska, collector of ancient art

[3] In the case of the antiquities collection, Izabela’s husband, Jan Działyński, played a significant role in its creation, and it was also he that made Izabela the owner of the Gołuchów castle³. The history of the couple (Figs. 2, 3) and the collection are intertwined with the history of Poland in the 19th and 20th centuries. Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, Izabela’s father, was forced to leave Poland with his family after the November Uprising (1830–1831)⁴. The Czartoryski family first went to England and eventually took up residence at the Hôtel Lambert on the Île Saint-Louis in Paris. Young Izabela Czartoryska grew up in the heart of 19th-century Europe and, as a daughter of a prominent aristocratic family, received an appropriate education⁵. Her first collection purchases are confirmed by bills in 1849. At that time, the young woman was mainly interested in drawings by Albrecht Dürer and Lucas van Leyden and 16th-century sculptures from Lower Rhine workshops⁶.

Fig. 2. Countess Izabela Działyńska née Czartoryska, ca. 1860 (photo: National Museum in Poznań Archive; photographer unknown)

Fig. 3. Count Jan Kanty Działyński, ca. 1857 (photo: National Museum in Poznań Archive; photographer unknown)

[4] The later life of Izabela Czartoryska was influenced by events related to her husband, Count Jan Kanty Działyński (28 September 1829 – 30 March 1880), whom she married on 21 February 1857 in Paris. The fate of the collector and her art collections became tied to Polish soil as the young couple moved to the castle in Gołuchów, then owned by Jan⁷. Izabela developed an interest in ancient art around the year 1865; the first bills confirming purchases of ancient pottery date to that time⁸. She was probably encouraged to expand her collecting interests to ancient art through her husband’s activity in this field. Jan, during his time in Italy (1865–1868), mainly in Naples and Capua, purchased a large group of ancient Greek vases. This assemblage became the core of Izabela’s ancient ceramics collection, which would later be known as the Gołuchów vases⁹. Comparing the activities of the Działyński couple, it seems that one of the two differences in their collecting practices was their methods of acquiring artifacts. Jan often obtained them directly from archaeological excavations—from amateurs exploring sites around Naples or from intermediaries in contact with these archaeological pioneers. Izabela, on the other hand, relied on purchases in antique shops, buying objects that had previously been in private collections¹⁰. The acquisition of artifacts from the archaeological research of Fr. Alfred Louis Delattre (1850–1932) in Carthage was an exception in Izabela’s practice¹¹. The second significant difference is that Jan gave up his passion for collecting ancient artifacts while his wife continued to develop this area until the 1890s, ensuring, as was the case with other parts of her collection, that her antiquities collection was as complete and representative of the achievements of various ancient cultures as possible¹².

[5] The final act proving the extraordinary importance of Gołuchów for Izabela was the establishment of a fee tail, whose purpose was to provide appropriate funds to maintain the good condition of the estate and the collection. Countess Izabela established the Fee Tail of the Princes Czartoryski in Gołuchów, adopted and announced on 20 May 1893 at the Royal Higher National Court. The entailed estates could not be sold, donated, or inherited by several heirs. A fee tail would normally require that an estate be inherited by the eldest son in the family; the Gołuchów fee tail differed because it conditioned that only a male descendant who was not the main heir of the family could become the holder of Gołuchów. This condition, as understood by its founder, guaranteed that the collection would be associated with the Czartoryski family¹³.

[6] Before the collection was brought to Gołuchów, it already had an established position in the world of Parisian collectors, antiquarians, and specialists. The first complete catalog of the Czartoryski family collection, Description des collections d’antiquités conservées à l’Hôtel Lambert, had been prepared in Paris in 1886 by Jean de Witte while it was still in the Hôtel Lambert. After Izabela’s part of the collection was transferred to Gołuchów, its cataloging and publication began. Wilhelm Froehner, former curator at the Louvre (1867–1871), undertook this task. The first two volumes of the Collections du Château de Gołuchów were published in 1897 and 1899¹⁴. Émile Molinier, who worked as a curator in the Département des Objets d’art at the Louvre, continued the work in 1903 with a volume on the medieval and Renaissance art objects¹⁵. The first Polish guide to the museum in Gołuchów, compiled by Dr. Nikodem Pajzderski and published in 1913 and 1929, was a fitting complement to the detailed descriptions of the artifacts¹⁶. In 1927 John D. Beazley, British classical archaeologist and foremost 20th-century expert on Greek ceramics, came to Gołuchów at the invitation of Adam Ludwik Czartoryski to study the Greek vase collection¹⁷. In Greek Vases in Poland, Beazley assessed the Czartoryski vase collection and identified their painters, establishing a new artist named the Painter of Gołuchów¹⁸. In 1931 the Gołuchów vase collection was published by Kazimierz Bulas as part of the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum (CVA) series¹⁹.

The collection of Gołuchów

[7] The antiquities gathered at the Gołuchów castle by Izabela Działyńska constituted one of the largest private collections in Europe—and, certainly, in Poland in the 19th century—of works of art from ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, and the Middle East. As already mentioned, as a result of wartime events, the collection was dispersed, and some objects were lost. The main source of information about the collection as well as the interior design of the castle is the guidebook by Dr. Nikodem Pajzderski, with photos taken at the beginning of the 20th century by Antoni Pawlikowski, allowing us to locate the described objects in their settings. In the so-called Greek Vases Hall (Fig. 4), in addition to the pottery collected by Izabela Działyńska, stelae from Cyprus with Greek inscriptions and fragmentary Roman marble sculptures were exhibited. One of these marble objects, which is well visible in the photograph, is a male head placed in front of the right side support of a monumental fireplace²⁰ (Fig. 5).

Fig. 4. Greek Vases Hall in Gołuchów Castle (photo: National Museum in Poznań Archive, MNP R-25/4; photographer: Antoni Pawlikowski, 1905)

Fig. 5. Marble sculpture from the Gołuchów collection, the so-called Menelaos, Roman copy (Hadrian or Trajan period) of the Hellenistic bronze original known as Menelaos Carrying the Body of Patroclus. National Museum in Warsaw, 143405MNW (photo: Archiwum Wojewódzkiego Konserwatora Zabytków w Poznaniu = AWKZ Poznań, 1020-50; photographer: Roman Stefan Ulatowski, before 1932)

Along the walls of the hall were showcases rising to the ceiling in which ancient vessels were placed. The guide lists seven showcases with 39 vessels described in detail, including vessels from Cyprus, Attica, and cities of Southern Italy, in both black- and red-figure technique. In one of the showcases, terracotta artifacts were exhibited; 18 terracottas were described in the guidebook, often mentioning the Tanagra workshop in Boeotia as their manufacturing site, a common attribution during the early 20th century. Freestanding objects were placed between the showcases, including Roman busts, a portrait of the emperor Hadrian, a marble sarcophagus, and a polychrome Etruscan urn of alabaster²¹.

[8] No photo of the Antiquities Hall (or the Egyptian Hall) or other description of this room has survived; only a glimpse of it is visible through the doorway of another documented room (Fig. 6). Detailed identification is possible only for very characteristic artifacts, such as the Carthaginian objects published in the CVA, with further descriptions in the preserved correspondence of Izabela Działyńska²². We learn that in the Antiquities Hall there was another showcase with terracottas, with seven artifacts described, and in the remaining showcases bronze figurines and vessels were exhibited. The collection also included a bronze mirror lid and two complete Etruscan bronze mirrors decorated with figural scenes. Altogether, 14 items in this showcase were described. In the next showcase there were probably white-ground lekythoi and other vessels; the next presented Egyptian items, with amulets and glass paste figurines, jewelry, bronze figurines depicting Egyptian gods, and terracotta figurines of the Hellenistic period from Egypt, all as suggested in the guide. The last showcase presented glass artifacts, so-called Phoenician vessels, flasks, and bottles, as well as the bottoms of glass vessels with golden inlay²³.

Fig. 6. Gołuchów Castle, Duchess Margaret’s bedroom with the Antiquities Hall visible in the passage (photo: National Museum in Poznań, Archive, MNP R-25/3b; photographer: Antoni Pawlikowski, 1905)

[9] While Pajzderski’s guide and Pawlikowski’s photos give some idea of the visual concept of the collection and provide data on selected artifacts, 20th-century catalogs are the irreplaceable completion of this knowledge. They provide, above all, more or less detailed descriptions of objects and iconographic representations of selected artifacts. In conjunction with prewar publications (e.g., the CVA series), they constitute the starting point for the identification and assessment of the Countess Działyńska neé Czartoryska antiquities collection in Gołuchów, which encompassed about 1,000 items from the cultures of the ancient world, starting with Predynastic Egypt, through the civilizations of Greece and Rome, to the Early Middle Ages²⁴.

1939 — Gołuchów — Land of Warta (Reichsgau Wartheland) — General Government

[10] The invasion of Poland by Nazi troops on 1 September 1939 and the attack of the Soviet troops that followed on 17 September started a two-front war in Poland. As a result of the aggression by the “Third Reich” and the USSR, Poland became occupied, and part of its territory was incorporated into the structures of the Reich. On 28 September 1939, the German-Soviet Frontier and Friendship Treaty was signed, marking the border between the two aggressors on Polish lands along the line of the rivers San–Bug–Narew–Pisa (Fig. 7). This division of Poland between the two invaders continued until the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941²⁵.

Fig. 7. The territory of the Republic of Poland under the occupation of the “Third Reich” and the USSR (map adapted by the authors, based on “Ucieczki Z Kl Auschwitz”, http://lekcja.auschwitz.org/pl_15_ucieczki [accessed 5 August 2020])

[11] The territorial and organizational character of the German occupation was determined by two of Hitler’s decrees. Pursuant to the first decree, issued on 8 October 1939, the so-called Eastern Incorporated Lands (Eingegliederte Ostgebiete) were formed out of the northwest provinces of the Republic of Poland, becoming part of the German Reich. Two new territorial administrative units were established there: the Reich District of Gdańsk–West Prussia (Reichsgau Danzig–Westpreußen), which comprised Pomerania together with the Free City of Gdańsk, and the Reich District of Poznań (Reichsgau Posen), which absorbed Greater Poland with part of the Łódź, Masovia, and Pomerania provinces. (Later, pursuant to a decree of 29 January 1940, the latter district was renamed the Reich District of Warta [Reichsgau Wartheland]²⁶.) Pursuant to Hitler’s second decree, issued on 12 October 1939, the General Government for the Occupied Polish Territories (Generalgouvernement für die besetzten polnischen Gebiete) was established from the territory of the Republic of Poland that had not yet been incorporated into the “Third Reich”²⁷.

[12] On 26 October 1939, Hans Frank was appointed governor general. Upon the entry of the Wehrmacht into Poland, Nazi authorities started implementing plans to loot works of art and cultural property. Measures to “secure” scientific collections and libraries, archival materials, archaeological artifacts, and various other works of art in the territory of Poland were prepared and initially supervised by “Das Ahnenerbe e.V.”, the Nazi research organization founded by Heinrich Himmler ²⁸. In addition to Frank and Himmler, Hermann Göring influenced the fate of many cultural objects and works of art in the occupied territories. On 19 October 1939, he issued a decree under which the Main Trustee Office for the East (Haupttreuhandstelle Ost [HTO]) was established, headed by Dr. Max Winkler²⁹. The HTO was granted, in the interests of Nazi Germany, the right of confiscation and administration of Polish state and private property. On 1 December 1939, the HTO issued an order regarding the confiscation of works of art, which concerned both the lands incorporated into the Reich and those of the General Government. Hugo Ratzmann became the director of the HTO in Poznań and was replaced at the beginning of 1941 by SS-Untersturmführer Dr. Ernst Petersen³⁰.

[13] From the outset of the occupation, Himmler and his subordinates played an important role in pillaging. As the Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Nationhood and as the Reichsführer  SS, Himmler to a large extent took control over the actions of property plunder. As a consequence, chaos and competition among the organizations under Göring and Himmler often ensued. Himmler and Winkler concluded a cooperation agreement by which the Reich Commissioner delegated a representative to the HTO: his general secretary at the Office of the Trustee General (Generalreferent für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums bei der Haupttreuhandstelle Ost), Bruno Galke³¹. On 1 December 1939, the Office of the Trustee General for the Safeguarding of German Cultural Property in the Eastern Incorporated Territories (Generaltreuhänder für die Sicherstellung deutschen Kulturgutes in den Eingegliederten Ostgebieten) was established at the HTO. The first head of the Poznań branch of this office was the SS-Hauptsturmführer Dr. Hans Schleif, a classical archaeologist and architect and professor at the University of Rostock³². In November 1939, he had organized the largest repository of plundered Polish works of art in the cathedral in Poznań, where mainly paintings and treasures of religious worship were collected. The cathedral played the role of a repository until almost the end of the occupation period³³.

[14] Today’s National Museum in Poznań, whose origins date back to 1857, was named the Wielkopolskie Muzeum (Museum of Greater Poland) during the Second Polish Republic (1918–1939). Under German occupation it was renamed the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum – a name it had already borne during the years 1902–1919, before Poland regained its statehood in 1918 and a large part of Greater Poland returned to the motherland in 1919 after the victory of the Greater Poland Uprising. Dr. Siegfried Rühle from Gdańsk was appointed the director of this museum at the end of October 1939³⁴. In turn, the director of the Museum of Greater Poland, Nikodem Pajzderski, as a representative of the Polish intelligentsia and a state official, was arrested on 1 November 1939 and executed on 6 January 1940 in Fort VII³⁵. Rühle was not appreciated by the local authorities of the district government in Poznań (Gauselbstverwaltung in Posen), and his relations with the head of the Poznań branch of the Trustee General Office, Hans Schleif, were difficult. Rühle had the support of the Land of Warta governor, Arthur Greiser (Reichsstatthalter im Wartheland), to whom he owed his position. However, the correspondence between the officials shows that he was not appreciated by Poznań authorities such as Schleif and the Gauamtsleiter Robert Schulz. The core of the conflict was the seizure of cultural treasures from the confiscated property of Polish and Jewish people and the competition to control the Gołuchów collection. The dispute also resulted from the adversaries’ struggle to gain and maintain the highest possible rank in the institutions they managed³⁶. As the preserved sources indicate, various arguments were used in this conflict. On 2 June 1940, a district representative of the Nazi Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP) threatened Rühle with disciplinary action for a “non-national socialist attitude” toward his employees. Among other things, the director was accused of employing too many Poles.³⁷

[15] In addition, a special unit of the Trustee General (Sachbearbeiter des Generaltreuhänders) was established at the headquarters of “Das Ahnenerbe”, headed by SS-Oberführer Alfred Kraut, with Theo Kommas as his deputy³⁸. Both of them were authorized to administer the property and works of art collected from the territory of Poland incorporated into the “Third Reich”. Kraut worked closely with Galke, Himmler’s plenipotentiary at the HTO.

[16] In the General Government (GG), the process of looting valuable assets was somewhat different. The policy toward Polish property resulted from the rivalry between Himmler and Frank. The latter considered himself to be the only representative of Hitler in the GG. In Kraków, on 15 November 1939, he established a Trustee Office of the General Government (Treuhandstelle für das Generalgouvernement), which was supposed to be independent of the headquarters in Berlin. On the basis of the above-mentioned act of 15 November 1939, all real property, goods, and chattels as well as associated property, both from the state treasury and private property, were confiscated. The confiscations were to be managed by the GG Trustee Office³⁹.

[17] The objects of art on Polish lands were also of interest to other institutions of the “Third Reich”. On 9 October 1939, Göring, as chairman of the Reich Protection Council and the plenipotentiary of the Four-Year Plan, appointed Dr. Kajetan Mühlmann as special plenipotentiary for the confiscation of artworks in the General Government. Confiscated works of art were deposited in the Jagiellonian Library in Kraków and in the National Museum in Warsaw. They were divided into three categories. “Wahl I” (Category I) included the most valuable works of art, which Hitler and sometimes Hans Frank had reserved for themselves. They were listed in a separate catalog for the exhibition of Sichergestellte Kunstwerke im Generalgouvernement 1940 in Berlin (521 items). “Wahl II” was a set of artworks having the character of museum collectibles, which remained in storage for Frank to decide on their disposition, perhaps for the decoration of representative government buildings or apartments of high officials. “Wahl III” comprised those works of art intended solely for decorative purposes⁴⁰.

[18] In addition to the people mentioned above, Dr. Hans Posse, director of the Dresden gallery of paintings and head of the “Sonderauftrag Linz”, was Hitler’s special envoy controlling looting campaigns in Poland. He had the priority right to select the most valuable works of art. Posse died in December 1942, and in March 1943 Hermann Voss was appointed to take over his post⁴¹.

[19] With these extensive organizational structures dealing with the plunder of cultural goods in the conquered territories of Poland and the number of Nazi officials competing in the business of art looting, the takeover of the Gołuchów collection was only a matter of time.

The Gołuchów collection during World War II

[20] In the summer of 1939, Princess Maria Ludwika Czartoryska⁴², acting as owner of the collection on behalf of her son Władysław, left Gołuchów with her children and took the most valuable pieces with her. The archival sources suggest that the last works were carried away about a month before the war broke out. Some of the ancient artifacts were packed in 18 boxes and rolls covered with galvanized metal sheets and taken to Warsaw, where they were walled up in the basement of the princess’s tenement house at 12 Kredytowa Street⁴³. On the basis of the report on the inspection of the collection in the Gołuchów castle carried out on 27 May 1940 by Dr. Herta von Ramm-Helmsing, one can deduce which ancient artifacts were taken by Princess Czartoryska⁴⁴: from the Greek Vases Hall, all the Tanagra terracotta items (Fig. 8); from the Antiquities Hall, all the Egyptian and other figurines made of bronze, vessels related to the cultures of the Middle East (referred to as Chaldean white clay vessels), Greco-Roman glass objects (including a glass goblet attributed by Wilhelm Froehner to an ancient Cologne workshop⁴⁵ [Fig. 9]), and all the other terracotta items. According to the preserved accounts, she took only one ancient ceramic vase: the red-figure rhyton in the shape of a ram’s head by the Brygos Painter (Fig. 10), which is still lost today⁴⁶.

Fig. 8. Terracotta figurines from the Gołuchów collection. The figurine on the left is in the collection of the National Museum in Warsaw, 147032 MNW; the figurine on the right is presumed lost (photograph published in Wilhelm Froehner, Collections du Château de Gołuchów. Antiquités, Paris 1899, 116-117, no. 34, pl. XVI). Another photo of the figure on the right is available at Ministerstwo Kultury i Dziedzictwa Narodowego, http://www.dzielautracone.gov.pl/katalog-strat-wojennych/obiekt/?obid=60283 (accessed 24 September 2022)

Fig. 9. Glass goblet, vas diatretum, probably from a workshop in Roman Cologne. Current location unknown (photo: Ministerstwo Kultury i Dziedzictwa Narodowego, http://www.dzielautracone.gov.pl/katalog-strat-wojennych/obiekt/?obid=60028 [accessed 10 August 2020]; photographer: Roman Stefan Ulatowski, before 1932)

Fig. 10. Athenian red-figure rhyton by the Brygos Painter. Current location unknown (reprod. from: Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum. Pologne [hereafter: CVA. Pologne], vol. 1: Gołuchów, Musée Czartoryski, Warsow / Cracow 1931, 20, pl. 23.4 [= Beazley Archive Pottery Database, hereafter: BAPD, https://www.carc.ox.ac.uk, vase no. 204084]; see also Ministerstwo Kultury i Dziedzictwa Narodowego, http://www.dzielautracone.gov.pl/katalog-strat-wojennych/obiekt/?obid=55281 [accessed 10 August 2020]; photographer: Roman Stefan Ulatowski, before 1932)

[21] In July 1939, parts of the Czartoryski family collections from Kraków and Gołuchów, by the decision of family members, were taken to the Czartoryski estate in Sieniawa in the Carpathian foothills. These included gold objects and ornaments from Gołuchów, probably the fibulae from the Roman and Early Medieval periods, secured in 16 chests there⁴⁷. In this way, the collection was divided into three parts: the artifacts left in the castle; those hidden in Warsaw; and the collection secured in Sieniawa.

[22] In November 1939, the director general of the Staatliche Museen in Berlin informed the Reich minister of science that there were valuable archaeological objects in the Incorporated Polish lands, including those in the collection of the Czartoryski Princes located in the castle in Gołuchów. The managers of the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum in Poznań were tasked with assessing the value of the Gołuchów collection⁴⁸. In December 1939, Prof. Karl Heinz Clasen was sent to Gołuchów as a representative of the Land of Warta to inspect the collection. He noticed the absence of tapestries and Limoges items but did not notice all the other items missing from the collection. The director of the Poznań KFM brought the Gołuchów collection under his control at his museum on 11 May 1940.

[23] Numerous German institutions that dealt with the cultural heritage of the conquered territories and looted artworks and historical objects during their operations were also interested in the collection. The director of the Reich archives in Poznań, Dr. Hermann Gollub, visited Gołuchów, and Hans Schleif also became involved with the collection. In July 1940, the supervision of the Gołuchów artworks was assigned to the Poznań branch of the Trustee General’s office on Schleif’s initiative⁴⁹. The collection also sparked interest from the General Government institutions. At the initiative of Hans Frank’s administration, the aforementioned inspection and review of the collection was made by von Ramm-Helmsing, who discovered which objects were missing from the collection, including the ancient ones, and noted that a valuable collection of Greek vases remained on-site.

[24] In the months after the Office of the Trustee General in Poznań took over the Gołuchów collection’s supervision, pieces were successively transported to the district’s capital. Initially, in 1940, they were deposited in the American-Polish hall at the Poznań Trade Fair; in 1941 they were transported to Poznań cathedral⁵⁰. In addition to the castle’s furniture and fittings, paintings and antique vases were removed⁵¹. Apparently, thefts took place, first during the initial transport from Gołuchów to Poznań and then later in Poznań itself. No inventory of the objects left in Poznań cathedral has been found; it seems unlikely that none was written. It is much more likely that it was destroyed on purpose to conceal the thefts. Schleif, together with Günter Thärigen, who supervised the transport from Goluchow to Poznań, evidently stole many items from the collection: Thärigen gathered the stolen artifacts in Baranów near Poznań, where they were partially recovered in 1945 by Polish archaeologist Józef Kostrzewski. Schleif dispatched the appropriated works of art to Berlin⁵². However, at the end of 1941, the collection of Greek vases became the subject of recovery efforts by the National Prehistoric Office in Poznań, which made an offer to the Office of the Trustee General whereby the collection would be replaced with another set of objects⁵³.

[25] The director of the Poznań Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum, Rühle, undertook various efforts to recover the artifacts taken to Berlin⁵⁴. To this end Rühle started talks with Hans Posse, Hitler’s plenipotentiary for the creation of the Linz collection⁵⁵. He also began cooperating with the headquarters of the Office of the Trustee General in Berlin and SS-Oberführer Alfred Kraut⁵⁶. At the turn of 1940–1941, the collection was again taken over by the KFM in Poznań. However, it is difficult to establish the exact date when the collection was placed under its supervision: Before the end of November 1940, Rühle wrote to A. Greiser about the management of the Gołuchów collection by the HTO⁵⁷, whereas, as confirmed by the letter of 7 February 1941 from the Trustee General in Berlin, A. Kraut, to K. H. Clasen requesting expert evaluation of the collection, at least part of it was kept in the museum⁵⁸. At the turn of 1940–1941, the Czartoryski collection was reviewed by Prof. Otto Kletzl, head of the Art History Institute of Reichsuniversität Posen⁵⁹. In 1942, a formal takeover took placeand the procedures for transferring objects to the museum were established. However, despite these official provisions, each relocation of the collection seems to have depended on the individual decision of the Reich governor for the Land of Warta. Hitler probably postponed any decision to consolidate the collection until the end of hostilities⁶⁰.

[26] After bombing began in 1943, the collections of the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum in Poznań, including part of the Gołuchów collection, were transported to air-raid shelters outside the city⁶¹. According to the available information, the collections of antiquities, which were stored in the Poznań cathedral, are believed to have been transported deep into the Reich, to the salt mine in Grasleben (Lower Saxony)⁶². However, according to Rühl’s account, over the years 1942–1944, the most valuable works were transported to bunkers located in the border area near Kalau (now Kaława), Zielenzig (now Sulęcin), Meseritz (now Międzyrzecz), and further into the Reich⁶³. Two hundred fifty-four vessels, including 140 Greek vases and Egyptian, Cypriot, and Italic vessels, were placed there. According to Rühl, the remaining part of the collection never reached Grasleben due to difficulties in transport, and many items from Gołuchów were taken by Schleif. The fate of the latter objects is unknown to the authors of this paper.The objects carried away by the Germans were found by the Soviet army in 1945 and mostly sent to Leningrad (St. Petersburg)⁶⁴. According to available archival sources, on 22 July 1956, an exhibition of Polish works of art “recovered” by the Red Army was officially opened in the Hermitage in Leningrad. The exhibition did not include the Gołuchów collections due to their poor condition. Those artifacts were supposed to be in Moscow, subject to preliminary conservation treatments. Fear of damaging the fragile items again prevented the organizers from bringing them to Leningrad. In the light of this information, it is difficult to determine whether the ancient artifacts from the Gołuchów collection were taken to Moscow just after the Soviet Army found them on the territory of the German Reich or went first to Leningrad and then to Moscow for conservation purposes⁶⁵. A significant part of this war loss was returned to Poland in 1956⁶⁶.

[27] The boxes hidden in 1939 in the tenement house at 12 Kredytowa Street in Warsaw were found by the Germans on 2 December 1941. According to preserved documents, the Nazi authorities of the General Government had suspected since summer 1940 that Princess Maria Ludwika had removed part of the collection before the war and could have hidden some artifacts in Warsaw. An SS unit “secured” a number of art objects from the collection, including ancient artifacts, nine chests made of zinc sheet, six tubes made of zinc sheet containing tapestries, twelve wooden chests, and a chest with paintings⁶⁷. The items were transferred to the National Museum in Warsaw, whence they were to be taken into the Reich. Before the planned shipment, an inventory of the confiscated Gołuchów objects was made⁶⁸.

[28] After the territory of Poland was overrun by the occupying troops, the National Museum in Warsaw was closed to visitors, but, as already mentioned, it served as a repository for the authorities of the General Government, where all pillaged works of art were gathered. Polish employees of the museum supervised by German authorities prepared the art for further transport. In many cases, Polish employees, led by Stanisław Lorentz, attempted to delay the removal of artifacts under the pretext of necessary conservation or cataloging, at the same time hiding the most valuable objects in remote museum warehouses⁶⁹. In the end, the transport of these artifacts did not come to pass due to the Warsaw Uprising in the summer of 1944. German soldiers began the uncontrolled destruction and robbery of valuable items kept in the museum. Certain items from the Gołuchów collection were transported in 1944 by Dr. W. Kudlich, director of the museum in Opawa, to Kraków⁷⁰. Because of insufficient archival data, it is difficult to determine which items were taken to Kraków from Warsaw, especially since there are suppositions that some objects (graphic art) were transported to Kraków from Gołuchów before the war and that the collection could have contained other ancient artifacts. The remaining artifacts deposited at the National Museum in Warsaw were packed on 9 October and taken to the Fischhorn Castle in Austria in November 1944⁷¹. There, the objects were found in June 1945 by Emeryk Hutten-Czapski, who on 7 September 1944 had been delegated by the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in exile to the Polish Mission at the Supreme Command of the Allied Expeditionary Forces to represent Polish interests. Hutten-Czapski mentions at least one ancient vessel in his account of the on-site inspection of the collection, but there are no grounds to believe that it was part of the Gołuchów collection⁷². Information about artifacts belonging to Polish collections in the Fischhorn Castle also emerged in the account given by Bohdan T. Urbanowicz, a delegate of the Polish Minister of Culture and Arts, on 3 September 1945 at the National Museum in Warsaw. After Urbanowicz visited Austria and consulted with Karol Estreicher, the leading expert in the restitution of looted artworks to Poland, and deputy minister Leon Kruczkowski, actions were taken to recover the artworks, which were then transported from Salzburg to Warsaw in April 1946⁷³.

[29] As already mentioned, part of the collection of the Czartoryski Princes was carried away to and hidden in the Sieniawa estate. Among the valuable objects were artworks from the Czartoryski Museum in Kraków as well as from Gołuchów⁷⁴. There were no Greek vases, but there were examples of late antique jewelry, currently identified on the basis of engravings from Froehner’s catalog as fibulae and other elements of costume from the Roman period and Early Middle Ages. The items were most likely purchased at auctions, but they originally came from archaeological excavations. The collections in Sieniawa were quickly discovered by the Germans, but a large part of them had already been stolen before they were cataloged by Nazi officials. The remaining objects were transported by members of the Czartoryski family and with the knowledge of the occupation authorities to the Czartoryski estate in Pełkiny, and from there to Rzeszów on 23 October 1939. However, by order of Kajetan Mühlmann, Göring’s plenipotentiary for securing works of art, the cargo was seized in Rzeszów on 31 October 1939 and returned to Kraków. The artifacts were placed in the Jagiellonian Library⁷⁵. In the summer of 1944, the objects were transported to the castle in Sichów in Lower Silesia, and in January 1945 Hans Frank took them while escaping the approaching Allied army. By the end of the war, the recovered art collections from Poland, including the Czartoryski collection, were gathered by the Allied forces in Central Collecting Points in, among other locations, Munich, Frankfurt, and Coburg. A year later, in 1946, they were handed over to a representative of the Polish Ministry of Culture and Art and gradually returned to Poland, among others to the Czartoryski collections in Kraków⁷⁶.

War losses and objects recovered from the Gołuchów collection

[30] Like most Polish collections⁷⁷, both state and private, the Gołuchów collection suffered heavy losses due to occupation, warfare, and events occurring just after the end of the war (Fig. 11). What was left of the collection was only partially returned to its original place of display, the castle in Gołuchów.

Fig. 11. Athenian red-figure cup by the Sotades Painter, considered lost (photograph published in CVA. Pologne, vol. 1: Gołuchów, Musée Czartoryski, 25, pl. 35.1 [= BAPD 209464]; see also Ministerstwo Kultury i Dziedzictwa Narodowego, http://www.dzielautracone.gov.pl/katalog-strat-wojennych/obiekt/?obid=55282 [accessed 10 August 2020]; photographer: Roman Stefan Ulatowski, before 1932)

[31] The surviving Greek vases, Egyptian artifacts, and glass vessels seized by the Red Army in the liberated areas were returned in 1956⁷⁸. In 1945, these objects, as well as other pieces of art discovered in German repositories, had been shipped to the USSR, to Moscow and Leningrad. The collections, however, were not returned to their former owners and their heirs. By virtue of the expropriation decree passed by the Polish communist authorities, the estates of landed nobility were abolished. The castle in Gołuchów, its surviving furnishings, and the artifacts from the collection were taken over by state authorities. Under the agreement on the revindication of cultural property concluded between the USSR and the Polish government, some of the artifacts from Gołuchów, including the antiquities collection, were given to the Polish state and entrusted to the National Museum in Warsaw (Fig. 12).

Fig. 12. Athenian hydria by the Sappho Painter, Six’s technique, from the Gołuchów collection. National Museum in Warsaw, 142333 MNW (photograph [public domain] published in CVA. Pologne, vol. 1: Gołuchów, Musée Czartoryski, 17, pl. 6.3 [= BAPD 510]; see also https://cyfrowe.mnw.art.pl/pl/katalog/607805 [accessed 24 September 2022])

[32] The Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum in Poznań was renamed the National Museum in Poznań after the liberation, and in 1951 the castle in Gołuchów became a branch of this museum. Since then, many items have returned to the castle, including 25 vases delivered in 1962 and another 30 transported from the National Museum in Warsaw in 1984 and 1985. In 2016, the Polish government concluded a settlement with the heirs of the Czartoryski family, under which the estates in Kraków and Gołuchów and the artifacts from the collection of the Czartoryski Princes under the protection of Polish museums were purchased from the legal owners⁷⁹.

[33] In the 1950s, after the ban on the sale of artworks in Germany imposed by the American government was lifted, outstanding artifacts began to flow from Poland to German museums. Thus, in 1955, the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg bought an Etruscan mirror whose provenance was given as the Castellani Collection in Rome⁸⁰. However, this artifact had been purchased at an auction by Izabela Działyńska in 1866. On the basis of descriptions in 19th century catalogs, the mirror was identified as part of the Gołuchów collection that had been carried away to Fischhorn⁸¹. Poland made a claim for it in 1995, and in 2002 the mirror returned to Gołuchów (Fig. 13).

Fig. 13. Etruscan mirror, returned in 2002 to the Gołuchów Castle Museum, a branch of the National Museum in Poznań, MNP A 914/1-2 (photograph: National Museum in Poznań Archive; photographer: Jakub Błaszczyński)

[34] Other artifacts from Gołuchów that were difficult to identify traveled from Fischhorn Castle to Vienna. It is not known how many of them were relocated, but two medallions from the bottoms of late antique gold-glass vessels with Jewish motifs, dated to around the fourth century AD, were bought in Vienna by a collector of Judaica⁸². A third glass artifact, a medallion fragment with a dove or duck motif, also originating in the Gołuchów collection, was purchased from the same source. In the 1960s all three medallions were acquired by the new Israel Museum in Jerusalem. In 2004, the heirs of the Gołuchów collection made efforts to recover these relics. As a result of an agreement signed with the family in 2008, one of the glass artifacts was returned to the family, and the two with Jewish symbols were retained by the Israel Museum⁸³.

Conclusions

[35] Comparing the items described in Froehner’s catalog with items from the Gołuchów collection identified in Polish museums, researchers have estimated that about 50 percent of the collection was lost during World War II, including many items of Egyptian art, such as statues of Egyptian deities made of stone, gold, and lapis lazuli (about 88 artifacts); Greek figurines, including Tanagra figurines (39); many gold, or gilded and silver-plated, jewelry items such as earrings, tiaras, and rings (about 143 items in total); Egyptian, Greek, and Roman ceramic vessels (88 items, including the rhyton of the Brygos Painter in the shape of a ram’s head [Fig. 10]); and glass and glass paste vessels, ornaments, and other objects, including a rare Roman reticulated cup (Fig. 9) (about 54 vessels in total).

[36] The art collections of Izabela Działyńska and her heirs in Gołuchów encompassed one of the most important private collections of ancient art in Poland and throughout Europe. The items representing important Mediterranean civilizations had both a collector’s and a scientific value, which was appreciated by Polish and foreign researchers. World War II brought an end to the collection as it had been shaped by Izabela Działyńska; the predatory policies of the Nazi occupiers caused the collection to be dispersed and many objects to be lost. The export of some artifacts to the Soviet Union further dissolved the original collection, just as the postwar centralization policy resulted in the relocation of the surviving objects to Warsaw. The current exhibition of ancient artifacts in Gołuchów is only a shadow of Izabela Działyńska’s painstakingly created collection.

Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the National Museum in Poznań for providing the archival photographs used in this paper and the anonymous reviewers whose assessments have contributed to the paper’s development.

Special Issue
Irene Bald Romano, ed., The Fate of Antiquities in the Nazi Era, in: RIHA Journal 0282-0294 (15 September 2023), DOI: https://doi.org/10.11588/riha.2022.2.

License
The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0