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Hidden Treasures Revealed
Albert Kostenevich
Hidden Treasures Revealed tells one of the great art-world stories of the twentieth century: the unveiling, in 1995, of seventy-four Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings that the Soviet Union had kept secret for half a century. Seized from private German collections at the end of the Second World War and hidden in the storerooms of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the pictures—by Monet, Renoir, Degas, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, and others—had been unseen, in many cases unknown, for fifty years. Albert Kostenevich, a Hermitage curator, provides full-page color plates and detailed commentary on each work, including Van Gogh's haunting White House at Night, painted weeks before his death. The book is both a sumptuous catalog and a document of history's disruptions—of war, secrecy, and disputed ownership. For anyone drawn to Impressionism, or to the tangled fate of art in wartime, it's a fascinating and beautiful volume.
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The author
Albert Kostenevich (1929–2019) was a distinguished curator of French painting at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg and a leading Russian authority on Impressionism and modern art.
The book
Published by Abrams in 1995, Hidden Treasures Revealed accompanied the Hermitage exhibition that first showed seventy-four French paintings taken from German private collections after the Second World War and long kept hidden in Soviet storage. Kostenevich supplies a full-page color plate and extended commentary for each.
How to read it
As catalog and history at once. The paintings are superb, but the book's added charge comes from their story—trophy art, decades of secrecy, and unresolved questions of ownership that it does not shy from.
For more context
Read alongside accounts of wartime looting and restitution, such as Lynn Nicholas's The Rape of Europa.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Albert Kostenevich
- Publisher
- Abrams
- Place of publication
- Washington; New Haven
- Year
- 1995
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Art
- Location
- Maine