WASHINGTON -- In a remarkable act of public candor, the Culture Ministry has confirmed that two important private Jewish-Hungarian art collections, confiscated by the Nazis in World War II, have been secretly kept in Russia since 1945. An exhibition of these works at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow is scheduled for sometime this year.


The 132 paintings span the centuries and include the works of Tintoretto, El Greco, Goya, Corot, Renoir and Degas. They hung in the homes of the Herzog and Hatvany families of Budapest. Confiscated in 1944 by chief Nazi exterminator Adolf Eichmann, they were apparently on their way to Germany when advancing Soviet troops intercepted them and shipped them home as war booty. They have since been hidden in Gorky, now Nizhny Novgorod, except for those sent for repair to the Grabar Restoration Center in Moscow.


Explicit admission that Russia was holding these works came late Saturday at the end of a conference in New York on "The Spoils of War," during a lecture by Valery Kulichov, director of restitution at the Culture Ministry. The conclave was attended by officials from Russia and 13 other countries -- most of them now seeking the return of works recently revealed to have been kept in secret repositories in Russia and Ukraine since World War II.