Tadeusz Wierzejski (1892–1974): Museum Donor or Persona Non Grata?

Abstrakt

Tadeusz Wierzejski was the most generous museum benefactor in Communist Poland, donating to 25 museums in the country. In the cases of the National Museum in Warsaw, the Royal Łazienki Palace, the Wawel Royal Castle and the District Museum in Toruń, his gifts – in their size as well as their quality – exceeded these institutions’ acquisitional possibilities in those days. The artistic calibre of these groups of works attests to the versatile professional knowledge possessed by Wierzejski. As donations, they were the culmination of his passion for collecting and the outcome of his fifty years of practically uninterrupted activity as an art dealer. Having started out in Bydgoszcz after the First World War, he developed his business fully in Lviv and continued in the extraordinary circumstances of German-occupied Kraków. Where he operated the longest, i.e., for nearly thirty years, was in post-war Warsaw, in constant ‘hit-and-run battle’ with the socialist reality, systemically hostile toward private initiative and ownership. The methods he resorted to in the People’s Poland period were not always ethical – he was not averse to looted goods or the illegal export of artefacts abroad. Arguably, however, his actions were a response to the pathology of the political system, a dimension which goes largely unnoticed by Wierzejski’s critics today. Even worse, his detractors tend to indiscriminately repeat rumours of Wierzejski’s collaboration with the Germans during the occupation, which have been following the collector’s name since that time but were found to be baseless by the communist investigators in pursuit of him. The author of the paper attempts a polemical discussion with these opinions, citing little-known or ignored facts from the dealer’s life and proposing an analysis of his post-war activity that takes into account the country’s cultural policy and the situation of museums at the time. The paper concludes with a plea for the objects donated by or purchased from Wierzejski to undergo provenance research, which may define the status of the artefacts acquired from the man and add to the existing knowledge on the outstanding but equally controversial collector, donor and dealer.