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Chasing portraits : a great-granddaughter's quest for her lost art legacy / Elizabeth Rynecki.

by Rynecki, Elizabeth.

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NAL, New American Library, c2016.

Rynecki, Moshe, 1881-1943.

Rynecki, Moshe, 1881-1943 -- Appreciation.

Jewish artists -- Poland -- Biography.

Art, Polish -- 20th century.

9781101987667 (hardback)

1101987669 (hardback)

viii, 385 p. ; 24 cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 375-385).

A Jewish girl should know -- The trouble with Moshe -- Paintings -- Defying Hitler -- Displaced -- Italy -- Legacy -- Cultural assets--lost art -- A loan request -- Gifting Moshe's paintings -- Serendipity -- Toronto, Canada -- University of Toronto -- Schneid Archive -- Poland -- The Jewish Historical Institute -- A tour of POLIN -- Majdanek -- Kazimierz Dolny -- Playing ball -- Roadblocks -- A shared heritage -- Looking forward.

The memoir of one woman's emotional quest to find the art of her Polish-Jewish great-grandfather, lost during World War II. Moshe Rynecki's body of work reached close to eight hundred paintings and sculptures before his life came to a tragic end. It was his great-granddaughter Elizabeth who sought to rediscover his legacy, setting upon a journey to seek out what had been lost but never forgotten.

I am uniquely situated to tell the Chasing Portraits story. I grew up surrounded by my great-grandfather's paintings. I studied his art and learned to discern his ethnographic and impressionistic documentation style of Polish-Jewish life from a young age. For more than fifteen years I have researched and written about Moshe's work to make the archival information, history, and narrative connections come alive. Over the past several years, there has been a lot of publicity about lost and looted art from the Nazi era. While much of the recent interest centers around the astronomical value of famous artworks both lost and found, there are much greater numbers of lesser known pieces that vanished during the war, and each has its own tale to tell. Chasing Portraits seeks to tell one of those stories in order to share the rich history in the scenes my great-grandfather painted as well as what the paintings themselves represent as survivors.

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