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Showing posts with label Nazi-stolen art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nazi-stolen art. Show all posts

November 13, 2020

Friday, November 13, 2020 - ,,,,, No comments

Exhibiting Absence: Introducing Samsung’s Missing Masterpieces

Bringing the wider public's attention to works of art that have been stolen or lost has been a long-standing goal of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art.  But when Samsung reached out to us earlier this Autumn to curate a group of missing masterpieces, to be exhibited on The Frame TV, we combed through more than a hundred of the world’s most iconic and intriguing lost and stolen artworks before narrowing our selection down to a choice and meaningful handful.  

Some of these paintings, despite wide press coverage, have been missing for years, others were stolen in extraordinary heists. Sometimes the works were stolen in more banal circumstances and the fact that they may never be seen again makes their loss all the more poignant.   One painting was the art world's first victim of the Covid Pandemic, stolen on the artist’s birthday.   Others are artworks we selected because we know they are cherished locally, but lessor known to communities outside the artists' home countries.  In whittling down our selection, we knew our list would not have been complete, had we not addressed the subject of precious works of art which are lost to the world's eyes forever, artistic casualties lost to mankind's wars. 


Harnessing Samsung's power of technology to connect people in the search to find lost art from the comfort of their living rooms was a key goal of the Missing Masterpieces exhibition.  Scheduled to run from 12 November until 10 February, during the holiday season, our combined objective is to keep the global community searching for these missing masterpieces while scrolling through films and programs.  It only takes one valid clue to change the course of an investigation and return a fabulous work of art to its rightful owner placing it back on the wall, in its proper setting. 

Museums normally tell stories through the objects they have in their collections.  Samsung's initiative will allow everyone to step into ARCA's empty museum, to engage and reflect, to see and to learn, not looking at the art we have, but rather, exploring the precious art we haven’t, in the hopes that they might be found.

To learn more about The Frame TV which functions both as a TV and a multi-media art platform blending into home décor please visit the Missing Masterpieces website here.

If you have tips on where any of these artworks might be you can share them on social media using #MissingMasterpieces, or please write to us at: 

missingmasterpieces@artcrimeresearch.org

All leads will be forwarded to the appropriate law enforcement authority.

February 3, 2015

Tuesday, February 03, 2015 - ,,, No comments

Ghosts of the Past: Nazi-Looted Art and Its Legacies

An International Conference co-organized by Columbia University's Department of Art History and Archaeology & Deutsches Haus ​in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut New York and the Jewish Museum, New York.


Schedule:
February 19, 6:30 - 8:00 PM
Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street   
Keynote Lecture by Prof. Olaf Peters

February 20, 9:00 - 1:00 PM
Columbia University, 501 Schermerhorn Hall

February 21, 9:00 - 6:00 PM
Columbia University, Deutsches Haus, 420 West 116th Street

For details please see the event website here. 

May 15, 2014

Thursday, May 15, 2014 - ,,,, No comments

Dutch media reports that Gutmann family porcelain auctioned in 1934 ended up in museums in The Netherlands

by Catherine Schofield Sezgin, ARCA Blog Editor-in-Chief

Dutch art investigator Arthur Brand sent me a link to an article posted in English on May 14 by Maxime Zech in the NLTimes.nl, "Nazi-stolen art in Rijksmuseum, Palace Het Loo:Report". I asked Mr. Brand if people in The Netherlands were surprised, and here's his response:
Yes, people are highly surprised. Just recently an extensive search has been closed and those items were not discovered. Some huge names are involved. There is no doubt that these 15 items, divided amongst five museums, including Palace Het Loo and the Rijksmuseum, have to be considered as looted. They were all auctioned in 1934 and that particular auction has been considered by both the German and Austrian government as being an "involuntary sale". This absolutely does not mean that the Palace or the museums did know that they once bought looted art. Far from that: this is a worldwide problem that just shows that we have done too little, too late regarding provenance-research...
Here's the article:
The art collection of Palace Het Loo, the Rijksmuseum and three other museums are thought to include pieces and artifacts that were looted from a Jewish family during a Nazi plunder, the Telegraaf reports. In total, 15 pieces of a valuable Meissen porcelain dinnerware ware set may have been stolen from the Gutmann family. The items may have been put up for auction in 1934 under coercion from the Nazis. Now, 80 years after the fact, Amsterdam investigation bureau Artiaz was able to trace the pieces, to the museums. “We are taking this very seriously, and are going to establish an origins research action immediately”, a spokesperson of the Paleis Het Loo National Museum Foundation said in a reaction.
Artiaz traced the dinnerware set pieces by looking through old auction documents.
“Salacious is that the Ekkart commission concluded a big investigation into looted art in Dutch museums without detecting these set pieces”, says Arthur Brand who executed the investigations with David Kleefstra and Alex Omhoff. 
The Facts and Files bureau in Berlin investigated the case for the Gutmann family, who live in Germany, and concludes that the 15 porcelain gravy boats and plates were still registered as lost until yesterday. “We are expecting that the Gutmanns will request us to contact the Netherlands State and the Restitution Commission, so that the pieces can hopefully return to the family” says investigator Beate Schreiber. The items are part of a unique 435-piece Meissen dinnerware set depicting village scenes, which was given to Willem V around 1774 as a gift from the United East-Indian Company. The prince sold the set during exile in England. Later, 26 items were bought by Herbert Gutmann, son of banker Eugen Gutmann who set up the Dresdner Bank. When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, they saddled him with a sky high debt.

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