Blog Subscription via Follow.it

Showing posts with label Stolen Art Recovered. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stolen Art Recovered. Show all posts

March 24, 2012

Saturday, March 24, 2012 - ,,,, No comments

Carabinieri's TPC (Division for the Protection of Cultural Heritage) Recovery of 37 Paintings Stolen from a private residence in Rome in 1971

Press conference photo from Comando Carabinieri Tutela
Patrimonio Culturale in Rome on March 8, 2012 
by Catherine Sezgin, ARCA Blog Editor

On March 9th Tom Kingston for The Guardian reported "Stolen paintings recovered in Rome 40 years after art heist" which you can read here.  Nick Squires reported from Rome for the Daily Telegraph here.  Noah Charney wrote about the discovery in his column, The Secret History of Art.

Where were the paintings found in Rome? "Italian police find stolen paintings hanging in a house in the same district of Rome from where 42 works disappeared."

The Parioli district is an elegant residential area which also includes the Villa Giulia and the Galleria Borghese.  Thieves had not shipped the paintings out of the country.  Eleven of the paintings were likely on display in a private home for two decades.  How many guests spent the night or ate dinner in this home of stolen paintings, never recognizing the paintings as stolen or maybe not knowing or remembering that another residence had been burglarized in 1971 in the same area? Interpol's Stolen Art Database had a record of these paintings but access to this information is limited.  Public access to Interpol's Stolen Art Database was not made available until 2009.  The public has limited access to the inventory of millions of paintings reported stolen to the Carabinieri.

How did the police find the stolen paintings? The owner, a widow, put four of the paintings up for sale.  In a routine check between for sale items and the stolen art database, Comando Carabinieri Tutela Patrimonio Culturale (TPC, translated to the Carabinieri Cultural Heritage Protection Operations Department) identified the four paintings as stolen in 1971.

Here's the link to the press release by the carabinieri on the recovery of 37 of 42 paintings dated from the 13th to the 19th century which were stolen from a private residence in Rome.  The TPC's investigation started in the first week of February in coordination with the Public Prosecutor of Rome. The woman tried to sell four of the paintings at auction was arrested for possession of stolen property.

Tomorrow's post will feature the images of the most recovered paintings as provided by the Carabinieri TPC. Would you recognize these artworks as stolen if you saw them hanging on the wall of a friend's house?

September 20, 2011

Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - ,,, No comments

The Art Loss Register Recovers Two Seventeenth Century Colonial Paintings Stolen from a Church in Bolivia

St. Rose Viterbo
ART LOSS REGISTER PRESS RELEASE - On Christmas Eve in 1997, more than a hundred religious artefacts were stolen from the Church (Templo) of San Andres de Machaca in La Paz, Bolivia. The church, declared a Bolivian National Monument in 1962, had been the target of thieves several years earlier before being stripped of its colonial masterpieces in 1997. The theft was reported to the Bolivian Ministry of Culture and Interpol and subsequently recorded on the Art Loss Register’s international database of stolen, missing and looted artwork.

Saint Augustin
In May 2011, over thirteen years after the theft, the Art Loss Register received a request to search its database of stolen art for two of the Bolivian colonial works. The request was submitted by a U.S. art dealer who claimed to have received the paintings on consignment from an elderly American collector. The art historians employed by the Art Loss Register were able to conclusively identify the portraits of ‘Saint Rose of Viterbo’ and ‘Saint Augustin’from several unique areas of damage thanks to the good quality archival photographs taken by the church prior to the theft.

Bolivian Ambassador Maria Beatriz Souviron Crespo
 and Christopher Marinello of the Art Loss Register 
Christopher A. Marinello, a lawyer who specializes in recovering stolen art for the Art Loss Register in London, handled the complicated negotiations that brought these iconic pictures back to Bolivia. “We could not have located these paintings without the important and groundbreaking work of Interpol and the Interpol Database of Stolen Art. This case is emblematic of the cooperation between the public and the private sector, a relationship that, in my view, is crucial to the protection of cultural heritage worldwide.”

In a brief ceremony at the Bolivian Embassy in London on 12 September 2011, the paintings were returned to Ambassador Maria Beatriz Souviron Crespo on behalf of the Bolivian Ministry of Culture.

August 4, 2011

Thursday, August 04, 2011 - No comments

Art Crime Roundup: Riopelle Statues Recovered

Damaged Riopelle sculptures recovered (Photo by The Canadian Press)
by Catherine Schofield Sezgin, ARCA Editor-in-Chief

VANCOUVER, CANADA - The August 3 edition of Canada's national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, delivered to most hotels, homes and newsstands in "The World's Most Livable City", lead off its Globe Index on the front page highlighting an article on Page 3:
'Those guys were imbeciles' Art gallery owner Simon Blais on the metal thieves who tried to make off with a 1,000-pound bronze sculpture by Canadian artist Jean-Paul Riopelle in Montreal. The artwork was recovered hours later, broken but salvageable.
On Page 3, under the headline "'Dumb thieves' botch Riopelle heist", journalist Ingrid Peritz reported from Montreal:
A trio of hapless thieves who tried to abscond with a $1-million sculpture by famed Canadian artist Jean-Paul Riopelle ended up ditching their treasure instead in the Quebec woods. It was retrieved - broken but salvageable.
You can also read more on art theft in Canada in Jon Hembrey's article, "Global art theft: From Rembrandt to Riopelle", on CBC News online.

Today I will be visiting The Museum of Anthropology, the site of a May 2008 theft where 12 pieces of gold artworks by Bill Reid were stolen and later recovered. You can see Noah Charney's piece on the theft published in 2008 in The National Post here. Since the robbery, the museum has undergone a renovation and expansion.

July 8, 2011

Friday, July 08, 2011 - ,,, No comments

Stolen Picasso drawing "Tete de Femme" recovered two days after theft in San Francisco

Police arrested a 30-year-old man in Napa Valley, California, two days after he allegedly stole 1965 pencil drawing by Pablo Picasso, Tete de Femme, from a San Francisco gallery. The artwork is undamaged and the motive is unknown. You may find further information as reported by Mike Aldax in San Francisco's Examiner here.

June 14, 2011

Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - ,,,, No comments

Picasso's Granddaughter Diana Widmaier-Picasso Discusses 4 Year Old Theft with The New Yorker

Picasso's Maya à la Poupée on display at The Gagosian Gallery in New York (Photo from Gagosian website)

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

Picasso's Maya à la Poupée (Interpol)
Just finding information out about an art theft case can be like unraveling a mystery. Four years ago, thieves stole several paintings from the home of Picasso's granddaughter, Diana Widmaier-Picasso. Seven months later they returned but little was reported in the newspaper about the details of the theft. Ms. Widmaier-Picasso spoke to Eric Konigsberg (At the Galleries: Granddaughter) in The New Yorker's current issue (Summer Fiction, June 13 & 20, 2011) and described the people arrested for trying to sell one of the paintings six months later on the street in the 17th Arrondissement of Paris:
"That is how professional art thieves operate. The one in charge had two nicknames, and they're both interesting: the Locksmith and Goldfinger. It was like a Western."
Of the Brigade de Répression du Banditisme she said:
"They treated it like the kidnapping of a person in the family."
One of the paintings, "Maya à la Poupée", of her mother, the daughter of Picasso and his mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, is currently on display at the Gagosian Gallery on West Twenty-first Street, in an exhibition, "Picasso and Marie-Thérèse" open until July 15.

Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - ,,, No comments

ARTINFO reports "How a Routine Traffic Stop Led Italian Police to $3.6 Million in Stolen Art"

ARTINFO reports that police stopped a car whose driver had no license to drive but a criminal record and a stolen painting in the trunk. You can read about it here. The post makes no mention of the two men's criminal affiliation except that they were also arrested with a "Romanian woman" thought to be their accomplice. The paintings were small by well-known artists and had been stolen from a residence in Monte Carlo five years ago.

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)