Antiques Roadshow

GUEST: I brought, uh, an Erna Rosenstein painting.

I know that E-Erna Rosenstein was a Holocaust survivor.

It's painted in 1955, we've had it for about 37 years.

It was from an auction house where they were auctioning stuff for a charity.

APPRAISER: Erna Rosenstein was really a very important Polish avant-garde artist.

She was born in 1913 in what is currently known as the Ukrainian city of Lviv.

She studied to be an artist.

She was very taken by surrealism.

She spent a lot of time in Europe learning how to paint from some of the great masters of modern art.

In 1939, she went back to Poland to be with her family.

When the Nazis invaded Poland, her family got rather nervous about how things were going to go.

She and her mother moved to the Jewish ghetto.

Her father went into hiding.

In 1942, he was able to secure some false identity documents so that they could try to escape to Warsaw.

Sadly, um, they had a very tragic, um, experience while they were trying to escape.

Her mother and father were murdered...

GUEST: Right.

APPRAISER: ...in a forest.

She was there.

She was wounded in the whole experience, but she did escape.

And she spent the next several years living under false identities and moving around, trying to just survive the war, which she ultimately did, she was a Holocaust survivor.

She did really spend the rest of her career using those experiences in her art.

And we see some of that in this painting.

GUEST: I remember they would say they were going to get showered.

They enter here and they got burnt.

And they also did experimentations on the bodies and stuff like that.

APPRAISER: Yeah, I mean, I think we have some real tough imagery here...

GUEST: Right.

APPRAISER: That-that I'm sure she didn't like reliving as she was painting IT.

But-but it was something she felt really strongly that she wanted to communicate through her brush and-and get that story out.

She came back to painting in 1945, but nothing before the war survived, none of her art.

GUEST: Okay.

APPRAISER: So really the earliest paintings we see are from 1945 on.

She went back to spend some time in Paris.

She met her husband in the, in the late '40s.

His name was Artur Sandauer, he was a literary critic.

And eventually she made a life as an artist.

But mostly in Poland.

She did take a break from her artistic, kind of, forward-facing career during the social realism period from '49 to '55, where she couldn't really paint necessarily what she wanted in the public.

So she just kind of took a break from her forward-facing art career.

And then in 1957, she regrouped, and made the Krakw Group together, again, with nine artists.

And they came back on the scene with the first modern art show, really in the post-Stalin era.

This painting is from 1955.

This is an oil on canvas painting.

It sustained a little bit of damage.

Right.

But all things considered, it's not too bad.

Have you had this appraised?

GUEST: No.

APPRAISER: Do you have any idea what it's worth?

GUEST: Mm-mm.

APPRAISER: If you had to guess what you paid for it 37 or so years ago, what do you think that might have been?

GUEST: I was thinking $700.

APPRAISER: If this were to come up to auction today, we would estimate this painting at $50,000 to $70,000.

GUEST: Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

(sniffles) (voice trembling): Thank you.

(exhales) Wow.