Last year, I reconnected with a man in Canada whose parents had purchased a bundle of Moshe’s paintings from a Polish farmer shortly after the end of the war. His parents had been partisans fighting the German army in Russia, and encountered the farmer while returning home. He said his parents had given away many of the paintings from the original bundle to different friends and family. As a result he didn’t know where all the pieces from the bundle were, but he had a few, and his aunt in Israel had several more. About a year ago, he sent four pictures of paintings in his possession, and just a week ago, I received an email with photographs of eight more paintings from his aunt.
It’s a truly ineffable feeling to see paintings I’ve never seen before- just amazing and tremendous. I get a huge emotional lift. My grandfather George (Moshe’s son) always said that the vast majority of his father’s works had been destroyed in the war. And yet over the years I keep seeing paintings that survived that I haven’t seen before. These 8 new photographs were of paintings that had taken a journey I could barely comprehend…Poland…Canada…Israel (and maybe some other countries in between) and the pieces had hung on the walls of people’s homes – people who had also suffered during the war and proudly display them in their homes. It’s not really fair to call the paintings “lost,” because the paintings themselves were not really lost, but rather were just not in my family’s possession and we just didn’t know they’d survived the war or where they were located. But that’s how I think about it – they paintings were separated from my family and we’d lost track of them and now they were “found.” Seeing a lost Moshe Rynecki painting for the first time is a stunning thing for me. I always look at the style, the setting, and the signature to confirm that it is my great-grandfather’s work, but I must admit that having grown up with Moshe’s paintings, I always feel like I just know if Moshe painted a work in the moment I see it.
Below are photographs of the eight paintings I received in an email earlier this week. It’s so hard to tell details from these photographs. The glass creates reflections and then there is the camera’s date stamp that gets a bit in the way. But honestly, I don’t really care. I’d take any photos of Moshe Rynecki paintings I’ve never seen before any day- in fact, I have gotten excited over descriptions of works I haven’t yet seen! Many of the scenes are hard to decipher, although they look like typical life scenes that Moshe tended to paint. The one that is a portrait of a girl is absolutely amazing to me because it looks very much like another painting that my family DOES have. Several people have told me I resemble the girl, so I wonder if she was family.
The thrill of discovery and the way each discovery is in a way a piece of a giant historical tapestry- never complete, but always wanting for completion- it’s ecstatic and longing all at the same time. So I keep searching, blogging, posting on Facebook, and tweeting (@erynecki). My experience is that the more connections I create, the more likely that some of my great-grandfather’s paintings will reappear.
