Van Gogh’s Looted Drawing of 'Starry Night' Is Almost Certainly Being Held By the Russian Government In Moscow

From The Art Newspaper, 27th August 2018:

Starry Night is held by Russian government
Van Gogh drawing had been folded in half in 1945 to fit inside a suitcase

As the first outsider to see Van Gogh’s looted drawing of Starry Night I was initially horrified to find a crease down the middle. When I discovered the reason I was relieved: the large drawing had been neatly folded in half to fit inside a suitcase—almost certainly saving it from destruction. 

Vincent had made the drawing in 1889 in the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole to send to Theo in Paris, to give his brother an idea of his painting of Starry Night, which he had just completed. The painting of the swirling night sky is now among the greatest treasures of New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Van Gogh, Starry Night (painting), June 1889, Museum of Modern Art, New York Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA / Bridgeman Images

The drawing done for Theo had been donated to the Kunsthalle Bremen in 1918, but it was lost during the chaos of the Second World War. It was seized at a German castle by Victor Baldin, a Red Army officer who took it back to the Soviet Union on a tractor. For decades it remained hidden away and was recorded in the Van Gogh catalogue raisonné as “lost”. I can report that it is now almost certainly in a secret Russian government storage facility in Moscow.

Last month the director of the Kunsthalle, Christoph Grunenberg, told me that he still hopes that Starry Night and the rest of the gallery’s missing drawings “will eventually return to Bremen—or at least be available for display”.

Tracking down the loot

I saw the Starry Night drawing in St Petersburg in 1992, when I was first developing an interest in Van Gogh. Then a reporter for The Observer, I was on the trail of artworks looted during the war, an issue which was just beginning to gain international attention. Among the largest losses were 1,700 drawings and several thousand prints belonging the Kunsthalle Bremen which had been evacuated to a remote castle—and then disappeared.

 Van Gogh, Starry Night (drawing), June 1889, Bremen Kunsthalle, now in Moscow

By 1992 there were unconfirmed rumours that some of the most important Bremen works were secreted away in the vaults of the State Hermitage Museum. I travelled to St Petersburg to meet Mikhail Piotrovsky, who had just taken over as the director. I wanted to discover whether they had been saved and thought the best tactic would be to ask to see just one—so I chose Starry Night.

From his tapestry-lined office Piotrovsky escorted me to the Hall of Twelve Columns, then closed to visitors. We ascended to its mezzanine, where after much clanging of keys a portfolio was brought out. Van Gogh’s Starry Night was then extracted and placed on a stand....MUCH MORE