By Olha Hembik | 2025-04-01

WARSAW — A historic exhibition from Kyiv's Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko National Museum of Arts has concluded in Warsaw, marking a significant effort to safeguard Ukrainian cultural heritage from the dangers of war.

The exhibition at The Royal Castle in Warsaw, entitled "The Cabinet of European Art. Masterpieces from the Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko National Museum of Arts," featured 37 paintings and other art pieces by Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Flemish, and French artists, as well as Polish works. It included pieces by Rubens, Bernardo Bellotto, and Juan de Zurbarán, among others. This was the first time the collection had ever left Ukraine.

The exhibition began in early December and closed March 30.

Ukrainian art patrons Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko began collecting art in the 1870s. In total, the museum held 25,000 pieces of art before the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The decision to move the artworks to Warsaw was driven by necessity. On October 10, 2022, a Russian missile strike on Kyiv shattered the museum's windows, destroyed a glass ceiling and threatened the entire collection.

Polish experts step up to help

At the time, Russia launched at least six missile strikes on the Ukrainian capital.

"Only thanks to the prompt response of museum specialists was the loss of the collection avoided," Ekaterina Gavrilenko, a senior researcher at the National Art Museum of Ukraine, told Kontur.

The attack also damaged two buildings of the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, the library and the symphony hall.

Following the attacks, Polish experts were among the first to offer help.

"The management of The Royal Castle in Warsaw wrote us and were the first to offer to accept the paintings for the duration of the war," said Gavrilenko.

"This produced an amazing result. The collaboration of Polish and Ukrainian colleagues allowed these paintings to be studied," she said.

Workers preserved some of the works to prevent further degradation.

"I was in Kyiv at the Khanenko Museum after the shelling. We were shown around the interior rooms. All the windows were blown out," Larisa Glushko, a visitor to the exhibition in Warsaw, told Kontur.

"The halls have nothing but photographs. They told us that some of the paintings are in other museums, and some are hidden," she said.

Paintings of a Polish King

The Khanenko Museum team first sent paintings and art pieces to Warsaw in the spring of 2023 and specialists have worked to restore the Khanenko Museum's holdings.

"We've had only a year to work, but you could call our discoveries a sensation," said Tomasz Jakubowski, curator of the Khanenko Museum guest exhibition at the Royal Castle in Warsaw.

"We did preservation work on the paintings, and worked on attribution to determine artists, periods of creation and movements," Jakubowski told Kontur.

The Royal Castle had the opportunity to display the portrait of Stanisław August Poniatowski dressed as Henry IV by Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, and two other paintings from the collection of Poniatowski, the last king of Poland, for the first time in Poland.

Until recently those latter two paintings were believed to be lost.

"This exhibition would have been a success even if we had exhibited only these two works," said Jakubowski, referring to Landscape with a Waterfall by Jean-Baptiste Pillement and to Bacchus and Ariadne by an unknown artist.

After Poniatowski died in 1798, these royal paintings along with hundreds of others were sold to a Russian merchant and were thought of as the "lost Eastern collection."

"In 1911-1917, the Khanenkos bought them at the Passage in St. Petersburg," said Jakubowski.

Two hundred years later, he compared the inventory numbers on the works of art and found their exact description in the Polish royal catalog.

While the exhibition in Warsaw closed, the journey for these artworks is not over. They are expected to be shown next in The Hague and Cologne, Germany. Meanwhile, other works from the Khanenko Museum have been sent to the National Museum of Lithuania and the Louvre in Paris for safekeeping.