Chasing Portraits: A Great-Granddaughter’s Quest for Her Lost Art Legacy

Elizabeth Rynecki is the great-granddaughter of the late Polish-Jewish artist, Moshe Rynecki (1881-1943), who perished in the Holocaust. Her memoir, Chasing Portraits: A Great-Granddaughter’s Quest for Her Lost Art Legacy, was published in 2016 and immediately reviewed in the New York Times. For many years after his death, Moshe Rynecki’s family believed that most of his oeuvre—close to eight hundred paintings and sculptures depicting the lives of the Polish-Jewish community in the interwar years—had been lost. After her grandfather (Moshe’s son) passed away, Elizabeth made it her mission to revive her great-grandfather’s legacy and to track and reconstitute many of his lost works around the world.