The use of the word “tentative” in describing her course of action is revealing. Throughout the documentary, Elizabeth encounters her great-grandfather’s paintings in places both expected and unlikely, from the 52 works preserved in Warsaw’s Jewish Historical Institute to a single wooden carving velcroed to the wall of a distant friend’s home. Although she repeats the mantra that she has no intention of taking the paintings back with her, the framing of the documentary retains the tension that, even if Elizabeth doesn’t plan to take the paintings, she would prefer to. When the curator of the Jewish Historical Institute tells her that Rynecki’s paintings are “in the right place” under the museum’s care, the grief in her expression is unmissable.
The ownership of history is a major theme of Chasing Portraits. Frequent cutaways to conversations with her father Alex, or her son Tyler (whose favorite Rynecki painting, Luna Park, is a joyous carnival scene) drive home that the search for Rynecki paintings is as much about familial reclamation as it is about the diaspora education that works serve in museums. Israel’s Yad Vashem, an international museum of the Holocaust, acquired a Rynecki painting called Refugees in the 1990s. “There’s no other place in the world that gives the Holocaust such a...comprehensive stage,” says Yehudit Shendar, the curator who finalized the acquisition. “When I came to your family, I said, ‘it’s a chance...for your great-grandfather to be displayed in the museum, which tells the annals of his people which he opted to stay with.’”
CHASING PORTRAITS Shares The Discomfort That Comes From Lacking Closure
Structurally, Elizabeth’s documentary consists of short excursions to different locales where Rynecki paintings can be found. A particular thread running through the documentary concerns the Wertheim siblings. Their introduction comes when Moshe Wertheim, a Toronto-based collector, agrees to let Elizabeth see the four Rynecki paintings he owns. After telling the story of his parents purchasing the paintings in Poland just after the war, he connects Elizabeth to his brother, still living in Warsaw.
