The Kharkiv Lost Works

Overview

Marie left roughly 230 works. Most of them ended up in one building in Kharkiv, and that building was emptied and then burned in the Second World War. Sixty-five of her canvases are itemised as lost there. This entry carries the destruction history for the whole œuvre, because almost every "lost" and "whereabouts unknown" in the other artwork entries leads back to it.

The sentence found nearly everywhere — that her works "were destroyed by the Nazis during World War II" and "at least 60 survive" — is true in outline and wrong in three specifics, each of which matters:

1. The losses were concentrated in one place. Not scattered across Europe, not "in Russia": her Ukrainian holdings had been consolidated into a single museum in 1932, and that museum was destroyed. 2. "Destroyed" both understates and overstates. The Kharkiv Art Museum's own filings with the German Lost Art Foundation classify the Bashkirtseff losses as **looted property* (kriegsbedingt verbrachtes Kulturgut*), not as destroyed property. Part of the collection was removed westward by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg in 1941–43; the rest burned when the occupiers torched the building. Some of the sixty-five may still physically exist somewhere. 3. The claim that her paintings perished in the bombing of Gavrontsi is unsupported and should simply be dropped. See below.

Description

The baseline against which any loss must be measured is the posthumous exhibition catalogue of 9 February 1885 — 224 numbered paintings, pastels and drawings plus five sculptures, probably compiled from Marie's own notebook, and therefore as close to an authorial checklist as exists. Against that baseline:

| | Count | Confidence | |---|---|---| | Works in the 1885 catalogue | 229 (224 + 5 sculptures) | High — primary source | | Works given by her mother to the Museum of Alexander III, St Petersburg | 141 | Medium — the museum's own unfootnoted figure; the date is disputed | | Works transferred to Soviet Ukraine, 1930–1932 | 129 (2 + 127) | Medium — same source | | Canvases itemised as lost at Kharkiv | 65 loss records ("66" in the Russian Museum's formula) | High for 65 — filed by the museum itself | | Paintings surviving in Ukraine (as of August 2026) | 3 | High, but see the war note below | | Works locatable today in public collections worldwide | 14 | High |

The arithmetic does not close, and honest public text should say so. 127 + 2 sent onward, plus 8 paintings and 13 drawings retained in Leningrad, comes to 150 against a stated inflow of 141 — and at least one work (the Parapluie, inv. Ж-2740) entered the Russian Museum in 1904, before the supposed donation, so the museum evidently held Bashkirtseff material from more than one accession. The usable formulation is: roughly 140 works went to St Petersburg, most were sent on to Kharkiv in 1932, and about 65 were lost there in the war — with the precision flagged as unsettled.

History

The provenance chain

Everything begins in her studio in the rue Ampère and passes, after the 1885 memorial exhibition, to her mother, Maria Stepanovna Bashkirtseva née Babanina, who spent the rest of her life placing her daughter's work. Some went to French and Dutch museums and is still there: the Petit Palais (1902 and 1907), the Rijksmuseum (June 1902), the Musée Ziem at Martigues, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nice (1920). The great bulk — about 141 works — went to the Museum of Alexander III in St Petersburg, today the State Russian Museum.

When is genuinely unresolved. The Russian Museum's artist page says 1908; S. I. Bocharova of the Poltava Art Museum, the best-credentialed Ukrainian specialist, says 1902; and the museum's own object record for Le Parapluie says «Пост. в 1904 г. от М. С. Башкирцевой» — received in 1904. The safe phrasing is "in the first decade of the twentieth century."

From St Petersburg the collection was broken up: two works to Krasnoyarsk in 1928; two paintings to Dnipropetrovsk in 1930; and, at the request of the Ukrainian People's Commissariat of Education, 127 works to Soviet Ukraine in 1932, where they were concentrated in the Kharkiv State Art-Historical Museum. The collector Tetiana Shvets reports that the transfer was initiated in 1931 by the academician Novytsky, petitioning on behalf of Ukrainian cultural figures on the grounds that Marie was born near Poltava — a detail that rests on Shvets's testimony and is attributed to her here. Eight paintings and thirteen drawings stayed in Leningrad.

Kharkiv, 1941–1943

The Kharkiv gallery was not on the Soviet evacuation priority list. In October 1941 only 4,711 items out of some 75,000 were taken east, to Novosibirsk; nothing places any Bashkirtseff among them. Under German occupation the building housed officers and functioned as an open warehouse, with consignments shipped to Germany. A few days before the liberation of 23 August 1943, the occupiers burned the five-storey museum with everything left inside.

The Russian Museum's formula for what happened — «во время эвакуации Харьковской картинной галереи бесследно пропали 66 её полотен», sixty-six of her canvases vanished without trace during the evacuation — is a Soviet-era euphemism. There was no evacuation of these works. The museum's own postwar claims are filed against Germany.

The itemised evidence: lostart.de

The German Lost Art Database holds a contiguous block of loss records filed by the Kharkiv Art Museum and published since 2003, IDs 293222–293786, indexed under the transliteration "Baskirceva, Marija Konstantinovna" — which is why searching for Bashkirtseff, Bashkirtseva or Baschkirzew finds nothing at all. The count is 65. A specimen record:

> Sketch of a woman — Baskirceva, Marija Konstantinovna (1860–1884) — oil on canvas — 116 × 93 cm — inv. `1784 kleines russisches sh` — Kharkiv Art Museum — published since 2003 — looted property, report type Suchmeldung (search request). — lostart.de record 293511

Titles recoverable from the block include Woman Model and Skeleton, Rendezvous, Portrait Pelican (almost certainly the Portrait du général Pélikan, no. 13 in the 1885 catalogue), Moon Light, Sea Shore, Forest, Two Women, Boats, Old Woman, Girl and the Sketch of a woman above. This is the single best documentary source on the losses and it is essentially unused in the English-language literature. It has never been cross-referenced against the 1885 catalogue; doing so would let anyone say, work by work, what was lost, and would test whether "65" or "66" is right.

Shvets additionally reports having found ERR inventories in Kyiv listing works removed from the Kharkiv museum in 1941–42 with titles and dimensions, and that eight wagons of cultural property left Kharkiv undocumented in 1943. The digitised ERR archive is public at err.tsdavo.gov.ua; a full-text search for «Башкирцева» returns nothing, but the index appears to cover file-level descriptions rather than page images, and ERR inventories list titles in German rather than the artist's Cyrillic surname.

Gavrontsi: the story to drop

The Russian Museum's text states that most of her works «погибла во время Второй мировой войны при бомбёжке Гавронцев» — perished in the bombing of Gavrontsi — and both Wikipedias repeat it onward into English sources. No source in any language supports "bombed," and nothing places any Bashkirtseff work at Gavrontsi in the twentieth century. The family left for abroad in 1870; the estate was sold to Count Sheremetev in 1900 and wrecked in 1917–19. Ukrainian Wikipedia's actual sentence says only that by the Second World War no trace of the estate remained — which is not a claim about artworks at all. The provenance chain runs Paris → Nice → St Petersburg → Kharkiv, and any claim that her work perished with the family estate is a conflation with the Kharkiv loss.

A second confusion worth avoiding: the Poltava Local Lore Museum burned in September 1943, with documented losses that do not include Bashkirtseff. The Poltava Art Museum is a different institution and holds genuine Bashkirtseff material — the 1885 exhibition catalogue, a magazine page, and an album of her early drawings dated 1877 — acquired in 1970 as a gift from Dr Armand Yon of Canada.

What survives in Ukraine, and what is happening to it

Three paintings: За книгою / At a Book at the Kharkiv Art Museum, L'Atelier Julian / У студії at the Dnipro Art Museum, and Горе / Sorrow at the Sumy Regional Art Museum. All three museums have been hit since 2022:

- Kharkiv — shelled on 2 and 8 March 2022 (windows, roof, cracked walls) and again on 31 December 2023. On 14 June 2026 a Shahed drone struck the building directly: roof fire, second-floor ceilings collapsed, some 1,200 m² alight, roughly a thousand works damaged by blast, fire or firefighting water, several canvases burned. The best-known works had been evacuated by the state in 2022 to undisclosed destinations, but the collection exceeds 26,000 items and much remained in the building. *The status of За книгою is not established by any source.
- Dnipro — façade and windows damaged on 30 September 2025 and again on 16 April 2026; anniversary displays restored on 6 June 2026. The condition of У студії* has not been individually reported.
- Sumy — roof damaged in 2023, windows lost in the ballistic strike of 13 April 2025. The collection is not fully evacuated and the acting director treats the matter as classified. Sumy is thirty kilometres from the Russian border.

Any statement that three Bashkirtseff paintings survive in Ukraine should be dated. Two of the three are in museums with partly unevacuated collections under active bombardment.

References in Diary

None: all of this happened after Marie's death on 31 October 1884. The connection runs the other way. Because so much of the œuvre is gone, the diary is in many cases the only surviving description of a picture — the life-size peasant woman at the wattle fence painted at Gavronzi in the summer of 1881 (092.0104, 092.0198), the Thérèse of 1882 (090.0492), the whole Nice campaign inventoried at 090.0492–0493, the six or seven laughing heads of Les trois Rires (102.0072). For those works Marie's own account is the record, and the loss is what makes it one.

Related Entries

- Survivors of the Ukrainian dispersal: #At_a_Book, #Sorrow, #L'Atelier_Julian
- Works whose whereabouts this history explains: #Les_trois_Rires, #Les_Saintes_Femmes, #La_Rue, #Jean_et_Jacques
- Works that never entered the chain and survive in western museums: #Un_meeting, #La_Parisienne, #Im_Nebel, #La_Douleur_de_Nausicaa
- #Le_Parapluie — the one work of hers the Russian Museum publishes, and the evidence that the 141 figure is incomplete
- #Art_Practice — the œuvre as she made it

Sources

- German Lost Art Database, Kharkiv Art Museum filings, records 293222–293786, indexed under "Baskirceva, Marija Konstantinovna", published since 2003, category looted property: search entry point; specimen record 293511
- Kharkiv Art Museum — historical note (the 4,711 of 75,000 figure; the August 1943 burning)
- State Russian Museum — Bashkirtseva, M. K. (the 1908 date, the "66 canvases" formula, the Gavrontsi claim) and the object record for Ж-2740 (received 1904)
- S. I. Bocharova, Велика українська енциклопедія — Башкирцева, Марія Костянтинівна (the 1902 date; the transfers) and the Poltava Art Museum page (the 1970 Yon gift, the 1877 album)
- Tetiana Shvets, interview at kulturomania.ru (the Novytsky petition; the ERR inventories; the eight wagons) — her testimony is valuable and largely uncorroborated, and is attributed rather than stated
- ERR digitised archive, TsDAVO Ukraine, err.tsdavo.gov.ua, fonds 3674 / 3676 / 3206
- Catalogue des œuvres de Mlle Bashkirtseff, Union des Femmes Peintres & Sculpteurs, Paris: Ludovic Baschet, 9 February 1885, Gallica ark:/12148/bpt6k131932r — the 229-item baseline
- On the 2022–2026 damage: Suspilne, 14 June 2026 (Kharkiv), Gwara Media (Kharkiv evacuation), Ukrainska Pravda / Life (Sumy)
- uk.wikipedia — Гавронці (what the estate's fate actually was)