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March 19, 2013

Jennifer Levitz for The Wall Street Journal: FBI Will Begin Media Campaign in Philadelphia to flush out art stolen from Gardner Museum in 1990

In the article "Clearer Picture of Art Heist", Wall Street Journal's Jennifer Levitz outlined the media blitz FBI will understake to flush out art stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990:

Although it doesn't know the current whereabouts of the art, the FBI believes it might still be in the Philadelphia area. So the agency will launch a publicity campaign, soliciting tips using social media and, within a few weeks, putting up digital roadside billboards in and around Philadelphia, where it believes someone may have glimpsed—or even bought—the art without knowing of the tainted origin. The museum is offering a $5 million reward for a tip leading to the recovery. The theft represents the largest property crime in U.S. history, according to the FBI.

The Hartford Courant's Edmund H. Mahoney Links Hartford Mobster Robert Gentile to FBI's Latest Press Release

In the Hartford Courant article, "FBI Releases Surprising, New Detail on Gardner Museum Heist", journalist Edmund H. Mahony writes:
In a stunning development in the investigation of the world's richest art heist, law enforcement officials said Monday they know who stole $500 million in master works from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and disclosed new detail about their interest in Hartford mobster Robert Gentile.
"The FBI believes with a high degree of confidence in the years after the theft the art was transported to connecticut and the Philadelphia region and some of the art was taken to Philadelphia where it was offered for sale by those responsible for the theft," said Richard DesLauriers, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI's Boston office. "With that same confidence we have identified the thieves who are members of a criminal organization with a base in the mid-Atlantic states and New England."
In order not to jeopardize the continuing investigation, Mahony writes, that the FBI 'would not answer specific questions about Gentile, a 75-year-old gambler and confidence man long associated with the rackets in Hartford.'
But since 2010, Gentile has been questioned repeatedly about his membership in the Boston branch of a Philadelphia-based criminal organization, as well as leads that place at least some of the stolen paintings in Connecticut and the Philadelphia area.

The Great Gardner Heist: 2010 Interview by "On Point" Tom Ashbrook

On the 20th anniversary of the theft of the ISGM, NPR's "On Point" Tom Ashbrook interviewed Anne Hawley, Director of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and Anthony Amore, Director of Security. Amore, an ARCA Trustee, takes Ashbrook down to the basement to where the  museum's two security guards were handcuffed and duct-taped during the robbery.

March 18, 2013

FBI Announces New Information Regarding the 1990 Isabella Stewart Gardner Theft

FBI composite of paintings stolen from ISGM in 1990
On the 23rd anniversary of the largest art theft, an FBI press release announced: "FBI Provides New Information Regarding the 1990 Isabella Stewart Gardner Theft".

The press release is issued by the FBI Boston office in cooperation with with Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts, released new information about one of the largest property crimes in U.S. history—the art theft:
The FBI believes it has determined where the stolen art was transported in the years after the theft and that it knows the identity of the thieves, Richard DesLauriers, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston office, revealed for the first time in the 23-year investigation. “The FBI believes with a high degree of confidence that in the years after the theft, the art was transported to Connecticut and the Philadelphia region, and some of the art was taken to Philadelphia, where it was offered for sale by those responsible for the theft.” DesLauriers added, “With that same confidence, we have identified the thieves, who are members of a criminal organization with a base in the Mid-Atlantic states and New England.” After the attempted sale, which took place approximately a decade ago, the FBI’s knowledge of the art’s whereabouts is limited. 
Information is being sought from those who possess or know the whereabouts of the 13 stolen works of art—including rare paintings by Rembrandt and Vermeer—by publicizing new details about the case and continuing to highlight the $5 million reward for the return of the art. Although the FBI does not know where the art is currently located, the FBI is continuing its search, both in and beyond the Connecticut and Philadelphia areas. “With this announcement, we want to widen the ‘aperture of awareness’ of this crime to the reach the American public and others around the world,” said DesLauriers. 
Anthony Amore, the museum’s chief of security, noted that the reward is for “information that leads directly to the recovery of all of our items in good condition.” He further explained, “You don’t have to hand us the paintings to be eligible for the reward. We hope that through this media campaign, people will see how earnest we are in our attempts to pay this reward and make our institution whole. We simply want to recover our paintings and move forward. Today marks 23 years since the robbery. It’s time for these paintings to come home.” 
“The investigation into the Gardner Museum theft has been an active and aggressive effort, with law enforcement following leads and tracking down potential sources of information around the globe. Over the past three years, I have visited the museum several times, and each time I entered the Dutch Room and saw the empty frames, I was reminded of the enormous impact of this theft. I do remain optimistic that one day soon the paintings will be returned to their rightful place in the Fenway, as Mrs. Gardner intended,” said U.S. Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz. “As we have said in the past, the U.S. Attorney’s Office will consider the possibility of immunity from criminal prosecution for information that leads to the return of the paintings based on the set of facts and circumstances brought to our attention. Our primary goal is, and always has been, to have the paintings returned.” 
To recover stolen items and prosecute art and cultural property crime, the FBI has a specialized Art Crime Team of 14 special agents supported by special trial attorneys. The team investigates theft, fraud, looting, and trafficking across state and international lines, with estimated losses running as high as $6 billion annually. The FBI also runs the National Stolen Art File, a computerized index of stolen art and cultural properties that is used as a reference by law enforcement agencies worldwide. 
The FBI stressed that anyone with information about the artwork may contact the FBI at 1-800-CALL-FBI (1-800-225-5324) or the museum directly or through a third party, said Special Agent Geoffrey Kelly, who is the lead investigator in the case and a member of the Art Crime Team. “In the past, people who realize they are in possession of stolen art have returned the art in a variety of ways, including through third parties, attorneys, and anonymously leaving items in churches or at police stations.” Tips may also be submitted online at https://tips.fbi.gov. 
The publicity campaign announced today includes a dedicated FBI webpage on the Gardner Museum theft, video postings on FBI social media sites, publicity on digital billboards in Philadelphia region, and a podcast. To view and listen to these items, visit the FBI’s new webpage about the theft: www.FBI.gov/gardner.



ARTNews' George Stolz on "Authenticating Picasso"

Pablo Picasso at 90 Photographed by Ara Güler
 in the South of France in 1972
ARTnews contributing editor George Stolz presents the story on "Authenticating Picasso" in the January issue. What is and what isn't an artwork by Pablo Picasso is being sorted out amidst conflict amongst the artist's heirs, Stolz writes:

"Forty years after Picasso's death, while his paintings are among the most expensive ever sold, the problem of how to authenticate his work remains a challenge. To avoid mistakes, four of his five surviving heirs have clarified the process but have not included his eldest daughter."

Poor health of Maya Widmaier-Picasso (b. 1935), Picasso's daughter by his mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter (1927-37), and the tension between Maya and her half-brother Claude, Picasso's son with his mistress Françoise Gilot (1943-53) have left the family's authentication business solely to Claude since last September. Stolz explains:
The right to authenticate Picasso's work, however, is considered an inherited moral right, or droit moral. Only individual heirs have this right. When Claude exercises his droit moral to authenticate works by his father, he does so as an individual heir (as does Maya), not in his capacity as the estate administrator. Under French law, an artist's descendants are presumed to have an innate understanding of - or at least a privileged firsthand familiarity with -- the art created by their progenitor, and are thus entitled to issue certificates of authenticity.

March 17, 2013

Sunday, March 17, 2013 - , No comments

Courbet Museum in Ornans welcomes home "The Oak of Flagey" from Japan after French town raises purchase price

Gustave Courbet, The Oak of Flagey, 1864
Today in Ornans the Courbet Museum provides free admission for public view of the 4 million euro painting local inhabitants helped purchased from Japan last year to return to Gustave Courbet's hometown. You may read more here in France 24 in "French town raises 4 million euros to bring Courbet painting home".

The Oak of Flagey (The Oak of Vercingetorix) painted in 1864 was formerly exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia before entering the collection of Michimasa Murachi in Japan.  


March 16, 2013

Kunsthal Rotterdam art heist: German prosecutor arrests middle-man for blackmail after attempt is allegedly made to sell back stolen paintings to Dutch owner Triton Foundation

Harlequin Head by Pablo Picasso
On the afternoon of Wednesday, March 13, German prosecutors arrested a 46-year-old German man for attempting to sell seven of the paintings stolen from the the Kunsthal Rotterdam on October 16 back to their Dutch owner, the Triton Foundation [David Rising and Toby Sterling reporting from Berlin and Amsterdam, respectively, for the Associated Press ("Police name man claiming to sell back Picasso, Monet in $100 million heist"].
Three Romanian men suspected of carrying out the heist were arrested Jan. 22 in Bucharest and remain in custody there. A 19-year-old Romanian woman was arrested in Rotterdam on March 4 on suspicion of assisting the thieves.
Police believe the works were brought shortly after the theft to a home in Rotterdam where the young woman was staying and removed from their frames.
The suspect has contacted two lawyers in Cologne to negotiate the return of the paintings back to the owner and has been arrested for blackmail.

DutchNews.nl reports in "Romanians implicated in Kunsthal art heist to face trial at home" that the three men arrested for the theft will not be extradited to The Netherlands.
None of the works have been recovered and the mother of one of the defendants told a local Romanian broadcaster she had destroyed two to help her son [DutchNews.nl].
The suspects would prefer to avoid prison and Romania and have claimed that the paintings will never be seen again if their trial is not held in the Netherlands: "They have made this very clear," their lawyer said.

Here's another view of the  value of the stolen paintings.

March 15, 2013

Novi Sad City Museum welcomes home "The old man with the fur cap" -- but did Serbian police recover a Rembrandt painting?

The Novi Sad City Museum welcomes home
"The old man with the fur cap"
This week did Serbian police recover a painting by Rembrandt or a known fake? The Portrait of the Father stolen from the Novi Sad City Museum in 2006 has been deemed a fake Rembrandt, according to ARCA Trustee Anthony Amore and Tom Mashberg, authors of "Stealing Rembrandts" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2011).

An appendix in "Stealing Rembrandts" includes Portrait of Rembrandt's Father as one of more than 80 "Rembrandt" artworks stolen in the past century (excludes works looted by the Nazis during WW II).

According to CODART, the specialists in Dutch and Flemish art in museums worldwide, the painting is likely a copy of a Rembrandt painting at Tyrolean State Museum in Austria: Old Man with Fur Cap, 1630.

The Novi Sad "Rembrandt" oil painting was recovered 60 kilometers (40 miles) south of Novi Sad (BBC) and more than four people have been arrested in connection with the robbery.

According to Nicholas Wood in The New York Times ("Rubens and Rembrandt, a Day's Loot for Balkan Gangs" February 19, 2006), two masked men carrying a pistol robbed the Navi Sad City Museum on January 8, 2006:
In just 15 minutes, they tied up an unarmed night watchman and a museum guide and, standing on antique furniture, lifted the paintings off the walls. One of the four works taken in the January theft was attributed to Rubens, another to Rembrandt.
The thieves then 'walked out the front door ... loaded their haul into a parked car and drove away, confident that the police had not been informed' because the museum did not have an alarm system. After years of war and a struggling economy, the city had scheduled a $50,000 alarm system to be installed on January 15 (the thieves struck one week early). The stolen paintings came from the collection of Branko Illic, a doctor. [Woods, NYT]

On March 13, the Novi Sad City Museum welcomed home "Old man in a fur cap"; three paintings remain missing: 

Unknown Flemish painter,
 Life Head of Christ, oil on panel
Rubens's studio,
the first half of the 17th century,
 bust of Seneca oil on board
Pier Francesco Mola (1612-1666)
Night landscape with fishermen, oil on canvas

March 14, 2013

Nominees for ARCA's 2013 Lifetime Achievement in Defense of Art Award


Here are the four nominees for ARCA's 2013 Lifetime Achievement in Defense of Art, which usually goes to an individual or institution in recognition of many decades of excellence in the field). Past winners: Carabinieri TPC collectively (2009), Howard Spiegler (2010), John Merryman (2011), and George H. O. Abungu (2012).

Ton Cremers, Museum Security and Safety Consultant, founded the MSN. Mr. Cremers is active in security and safety in museums, archives, libraries, churches with valuable collections, monuments, and old Dutch windmills for the past 30 years. He is the former director of security and safety of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and the founding director of the Museum Security Network. The MSN mailing list, presently a Google Group, was the first WWW list-serv dedicated to the subject of museum security and has been active for over 15 years. In those years over 45,000 messages have been send to some 1,000 subscribers (average) in more than 50 countries. Ton Cremers was one of the founding members of the Leiden network on trade in illegal antiquities, dedicated to the struggle against the illicit trade in art and antiquities. Other founding members: Neil Brody, Colin Renfrew a.o.'s. Ton Cremers has been active in over 450 museums etc., in several European, and African countries, such as Zimbabwe where he audited the security and safety of all national museums, national archives, and national galleries.
Cremers  has published numerous articles in international magazines, and was the codeveloper of a self-audit software tool with which museums are able to investigate their security and safety. Thus far Cremers is the first non-American to have received the prestigious Burke Award for the protection of cultural property.  His publication about emergency management in museums is a standard in the Dutch language world. At the moment Cremers is working on a new initiative to build a museum in Athens, Greece and is active in 17 museums on six islands in the Dutch Caribbean, teaching and training museum workers.
Dr. David Gill is Professor of Archaeological Heritage and Head of the Division of Humanities at University Campus Suffolk, England. He is a former Rome Scholar at the British School at Rome, and Sir James Knott Fellow at Newcastle University. He was a curator in the Department of Antiquities at the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, before moving to Swansea University where he was Reader in Mediterranean Archaeology.
He has published widely on archaeological ethics, often with Dr Christopher Chippindale (University of Cambridge). Their research has promoted the material and intellectual consequences of looting. Gill has provided a commentary on the impact of such activity through his research blog, “Looting Matters”. This research has formed part of the effort to restore antiquities to Italy and Greece in the wake of the “Medici Conspiracy”.
Maurizio Seracini is a pioneer in the use of multispectral imaging and other diagnostic as well as analytical technologies as applied to works of art and structures. He joined UC San Diego in 2006, more than thirty years after graduating from UCSD with a B.S. in bioengineering in 1973 and  a Laurea in “Ingegneria Elettronica” from the University of Padua in 1976.
He has studied more than 2,500 works of art and historic buildings, ranging from Leonardo Da Vinci's "Last Supper” and Botticelli's "Allegory of Spring", to Caravaggio’s “Medusa”. Founder and Scientific Director of EDITECH (Electronics, Diagnostics and Technology) in 1977, the first center for authenticating works of art in Italy.
Blanca Niño Norton is an architect and an artist, starting her career with an interest in Vernacular Architecture and completing her architectural thesis on this subject while working on collection inventory projects as a student in Guatemala and other countries of the region. In addition to her architectural degree, Blanca Niño Norton holds a masters degree in diplomacy and completed her thesis on “The action of consular and diplomatic affairs in relation to illicit traffic” which received recognition as the best thesis on diplomatic studies. In her later years she created the office of World Heritage in the Guatemalan Ministry of Culture and directed it for 4 years, during which she worked on the presentation of the tentative list of World Heritage sites of Guatemala and worked on the theme of Intangible Heritage.  As such she was elected and continues to serve as council member of ICCROM for the next 3 years. (3 times elected in General Assembly) and has participated in the meetings regarding international law in UNESCO Paris on the anniversary of the convention on World Heritage.
Blanca Niño Nortonhas participated in workshops in Italy with the Carabinieri, and lectured in Argentina, Roma, Paraguay, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, and Colombia. With the Carabinieri TPC especially with Dr Pastore, Blanca Niño Norton was able to do important training in Guatemala. Through this collaboration with the Carabineri TPC they conducted 4 courses for more than 80 people, each with the support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Italy and Ministero per i Bieni Culturale.