Wednesday October 22nd
We’ve been pushing hard for a week, and the drive seems to have caught up with me a bit in the form of a cold. So today I’ve decided to just post a montage of photos with a few brief labels.
Street scenes in Warsaw taken from our cab on our way to the National Museum of Warsaw (MNW)
The National Museum in Warsaw has two of my great-grandfather’s paintings in its collection. These are some behind the scenes shots of hallways not normally accessible to the public as well as conservator and storage spaces. The two paintings were prepared and waiting for me on a table. You can see me pull off the covering sheet and looking at the two pieces below.
When a museum takes in a piece of art into its collection, it records the item into its log book. The log contains a description of the painting (e.g. four men sitting on a park bench, three holding canes, behind them are trees, etc….), information about the condition of the work, and the name of the person who either sold or donated the work. In the MNW log book, these two Rynecki paintings are shown to have been sold by a Mr. J. Zebrowski to the museum in 1963 for 2,000 zloty. I wish I knew more about this person, but I haven’t a clue. If you’ve got ideas of how to find him or his heirs to learn more about the history of how they came to have the pieces, please email me: [elizabeth@rynecki.org]
A few miscellaneous shots from our time at MNW. Our bags, two shots out front (in one Slawomir is filming me walking) and the last photo is a poster for a Holocaust Era Looted Art conference happening in November in Krakow.
We caught a 6pm train out of the central train station in Warsaw towards Lublin. One shot here is me in line buying tickets, the rest are from the train and views outside the station at Lublin. It started to rain last night and between the clacking of the train wheels along the track, the cold, and the wet, I started to get quite emotional.
In Lublin there is a sort of passage way called Grodzka Gate. This is what actually separated the town in the interwar years into a Jewish and non-Jewish side of town. It was dark and rainy when we arrived so I couldn’t see a lot, but the streets have old European style bricks and the buildings are all close together. We walked to a Mandragora, a restaurant which has positioned itself as a Jewish themed restaurant. Given that I was feeling sick, the chicken soup with dumplings tasted awfully good. The latkes were quite delicious as well, although I could have used some applesauce…
