Mon September 12, 2016
Chasing Portraits: A Great-Granddaughter's Quest for Her Lost Art Legacy
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With Elizabeth Rynecki
Elizabeth Rynecki grew up in San Francisco in the 1970s, surrounded by her great-grandfather Moshe Rynecki’s paintings of pre-WWII Jewish life in Poland – depicting woodworkers, women sewing and street performers. Moshe created over 800 paintings and sculptures before he was moved into the Warsaw Ghetto, deported and murdered in the Majdanek concentration camp. Hundreds of his paintings disappeared, and, for most of her life, Elizabeth assumed she had seen all of the paintings that had survived the war. But she ultimately uncovered clues that some of his work had been squirreled away from the Nazis during the war – tucked in basements, bought and sold – and might still be out there. She has spent 30 years hunting for lost pieces of her great-grandfather’s legacy, along the way collecting the stories and heartache of Holocaust survivors and families just like hers.
“Elizabeth Rynecki becomes a genealogist, an art historian, a detective, a crusader for justice and a time traveler, peering through windows and into paintings to unearth her family’s past."
– Amy Stewart, author of The Drunken Botanist
show less
Elizabeth Rynecki grew up in San Francisco in the 1970s, surrounded by her great-grandfather Moshe Rynecki’s paintings of pre-WWII Jewish life in Poland – depicting woodworkers, women sewing and street performers. Moshe created over 800 paintings and sculptures before he was moved into the Warsaw Ghetto, deported and murdered in the Majdanek concentration camp. Hundreds of his paintings disappeared, and, for most of her life, Elizabeth assumed she had seen all of the paintings that had survived the war. But she ultimately uncovered clues that some of his work had been squirreled away from the Nazis during the war – tucked in basements, bought and sold – and might still be out there. She has spent 30 years hunting for lost pieces of her great-grandfather’s legacy, along the way collecting the stories and heartache of Holocaust survivors and families just like hers.
“Elizabeth Rynecki becomes a genealogist, an art historian, a detective, a crusader for justice and a time traveler, peering through windows and into paintings to unearth her family’s past."
– Amy Stewart, author of The Drunken Botanist
With Elizabeth Rynecki
Elizabeth Rynecki grew up in San Francisco in the 1970s, surrounded by her great-grandfather Moshe Rynecki’s paintings of pre-WWII Jewish life in Poland – depicting woodworkers, women sewing and street performers. Moshe created over 800 paintings and sculptures before he was moved into the Warsaw Ghetto, deported and murdered in the Majdanek concentration camp. Hundreds of his paintings disappeared, and, for most of her life, Elizabeth assumed she had seen all of the paintings that had survived the war. But she ultimately uncovered clues that some of his work had been squirreled away from the Nazis during the war – tucked in basements, bought and sold – and might still be out there. She has spent 30 years hunting for lost pieces of her great-grandfather’s legacy, along the way collecting the stories and heartache of Holocaust survivors and families just like hers.
“Elizabeth Rynecki becomes a genealogist, an art historian, a detective, a crusader for justice and a time traveler, peering through windows and into paintings to unearth her family’s past."
– Amy Stewart, author of The Drunken Botanist
read more
Elizabeth Rynecki grew up in San Francisco in the 1970s, surrounded by her great-grandfather Moshe Rynecki’s paintings of pre-WWII Jewish life in Poland – depicting woodworkers, women sewing and street performers. Moshe created over 800 paintings and sculptures before he was moved into the Warsaw Ghetto, deported and murdered in the Majdanek concentration camp. Hundreds of his paintings disappeared, and, for most of her life, Elizabeth assumed she had seen all of the paintings that had survived the war. But she ultimately uncovered clues that some of his work had been squirreled away from the Nazis during the war – tucked in basements, bought and sold – and might still be out there. She has spent 30 years hunting for lost pieces of her great-grandfather’s legacy, along the way collecting the stories and heartache of Holocaust survivors and families just like hers.
“Elizabeth Rynecki becomes a genealogist, an art historian, a detective, a crusader for justice and a time traveler, peering through windows and into paintings to unearth her family’s past."
– Amy Stewart, author of The Drunken Botanist
show less
Date/Times:
3200 California St, San Francisco, CA 94118
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