Heirs threaten legendary collection. Art lovers' hands are tied.

More paintings by the Young Poland master are disappearing from the Józef Mehoffer House in Krakow. Surprisingly, they are not being stolen.

In the heart of Krakow , in a villa on Krupnicza Street, a quiet revolution has been underway for years. Paintings have been disappearing from the Józef Mehoffer House , a branch of the National Museum . However, they are not disappearing mysteriously; they are being legally returned to the artist's heirs. Although the law is on their side, art lovers find it hard to resist a sense of loss.

Józef Mehoffer's House in Krakow - a branch of the National Museum in Krakow

Józef Mehoffer was one of the most distinguished painters and stained glass artists of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. A student of Jan Matejko, professor and rector of the Kraków School of Fine Arts, he gained fame, among other things, for winning the international competition to design the stained glass windows for Freiburg Cathedral . The house where Józef Mehoffer lived and worked has been a museum since 1996. From its inception, part of the collection came from deposits of the Mehoffer family , giving visitors the impression of an intimate encounter with the artist's private world.

Just because a painting hangs in a museum doesn't mean it belongs to that museum. Polish museum collections include both permanent objects and deposits — private works lent to institutions .

According to data from the Central Statistical Office, in 2023 there were 21.4 million museum objects and 1.3 million deposits .

In the case of the Mehoffer House, the proportions are exceptional – as many as one in five exhibits belong to the artist's family . Their heirs can legally withdraw them and then sell them. The most notorious examples? " Christ the King ," a painting that left the Mehoffer House in 2018 and fetched PLN 2.46 million at auction four years later, and " Portrait of Alexander Dejean ," which sold in 2021 for PLN 2.76 million.

Formally, everything is fine. Morally, the topic stirs emotions. The idea of creating a museum in Mehoffer's home was to preserve his legacy. Today, part of this legacy is being sold on the art market.