Displaying items by tag: Stolen

An art historian is claiming that two artworks residing inside Germany’s parliament were stolen from their rightful owners by Nazis during World War II. The shocking discovery ran in an article in Bild newspaper on Monday, December 30.

The historian’s investigation into the German parliament’s art collection began in 2012 and determined that an oil painting by Georg Waltenberger and a chalk lithograph by Lovis Corinth had been stolen by Nazis. One of the works was acquired by the parliament from Cornelius Gurlitt, a recluse who was recently accused of hoarding hundreds of masterpieces stolen by Nazis. Gurlitt’s father, Hildebrandt, had been put in charge of selling the stolen artworks by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, but secretly hoarded many of them. 

The parliament’s art collection is comprised of nearly 4,000 works and according to investigations, 108 of those pieces are of unknown provenance. The Central Council of Jews in Germany has called for a list of the parliament’s artworks to be published.

Two signed works by contemporary British artist Damien Hirst were stolen from the Exhibitionist Gallery in London. The works, which are from Hirst’s colorful spot paintings series, are worth around $54,000.

Officials believe that one person carried out the robbery and gained entry into the gallery by forcing open the front doors. It appears that the suspect had specifically targeted the two paintings.

Hirst, who rose to fame in the 1990s, is believed to be the richest living artist.  

Radu Dogaru, the ringleader of a gang that stole $24 million worth of art from Rotterdam’s Kunsthal Museum, has been sentenced to six years and eight months in prison by a Romanian court. Fellow gang member, Eugen Darie, received an identical sentence. The trial will continue on December 3 of four other defendants, including Dogaru’s mother, who is accused of destroying three of the stolen masterpieces.

Dogaru and Darie pleaded guilty to stealing seven paintings from the Kunsthal Museum including works by Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin, Meyer de Haan, and Lucian Freud. The works were on loan from the Triton Foundation to celebrate the Kunsthal Museum’s 20th anniversary. None of the paintings have been recovered.  

The German government has released some details about the astounding art collection found in a dilapidated Munich apartment. Authorities released a written statement saying that about 590 of the 1,400 artworks could have been stolen by Nazis and identified 25 of the pieces on the website www.lostart.de. Among the paintings listed on the site were Otto Dix’s The Woman in the Theater Box, Otto Griebel’s Child at the Table and Max Liebermann’s Rider on the Beach. The trove also includes works by Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall and Pablo Picasso.

The masterpieces were found in the apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of the art dealer Hildebrandt Gurlitt, who reportedly acquired the works in the late 1930s and 1940s. Gurlitt’s father had been put in charge of selling the stolen artworks abroad by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, but secretly hoarded many of them and later claimed that they were destroyed in the bombing of Dresden. Gurlitt, an unemployed recluse, sold a number of the paintings over the years and lived off of the profits. 200 of the pieces have outstanding return requests from the original owners’ heirs.

The German government has assembled a task force of six experts to research the provenance of each recently discovered artwork. To date, it has been determined that one painting by Matisse was stolen by the Nazis from a French bank in 1942.  

German officials will update the Lost Art website regularly as the investigation progresses.

A four-year investigation led by the Netherlands Museum Association revealed that 139 artworks in Dutch public collections may have been stolen or forcibly acquired by the Nazis during World War II, many from Jewish owners. 162 Dutch museums took part in the probe, which targeted artworks acquired between 1933 and 1945. Around a quarter of the institutions were found to house objects with “potentially problematic histor[ies].”

The release of the investigation’s findings coincides with the launch of the website www.musealeverwervingen.nl, which details the objects and their histories in hopes of attaining missing information. Names of the original owners have been attributed to 61 objects and museum officials will make ongoing attempts to contact relatives or heirs of the artworks’ original owners. So far, about a dozen works have been returned to their original owners or their descendants.

According to a study conducted by the United States National Archives in 1997, the Nazis plundered 20% of the art in Europe.

A bronze sculpture by the British artist Henry Moore was stolen from a park in Scotland last week. Standing Figure (1950), which measures over 7 feet tall, was one of four Moore pieces in the Glenkiln Sculpture Park, which includes works by Auguste Rodin and Jacob Epstein.

This not the first time that a large, sculptural work by Moore has been targeted by thieves. Last year, two men were arrested for stealing a sculpture from the estate of the Henry Moore Foundation in England and in 2005 Moore’s monumental Reclining Figure was stolen from the grounds. Police believe that the sculpture, which weighed over two tons, could have been melted down and sold for scrap metal.

Moore amassed considerable wealth after gaining recognition for his large-scale, semi-abstract works and fulfilled numerous significant commissions. Despite his affluence, Moore lived frugally and put most of his fortune towards endowing the Henry Moore Foundation, which continues to support education and promotion of the arts.

The New York Police Department is asking for the public’s help in locating a Norman Rockwell painting that sold for over a $1 million at Sotheby’s in May. Sport, which appeared on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post in 1939, was being kept in a storage warehouse in Queens. Police said that the painting went missing last month.

While the buyer has not been identified, the painting was sold from a private collection in Birmingham, AL. The oil on canvas painting, which features a fisherman clad in a yellow raincoat in a boat, will be nearly impossible to sell if the alleged thief is hoping to turn a profit.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is currently presenting a single-work exhibition devoted to the rare Renaissance painting Senigallia Madonna by Piero della Francesca. The show, titled An Italian Treasure, Stolen and Recovered, recounts the fascinating story of the work’s theft and recovery in the 1970s. On loan from Italy’s Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, this is the first time that Senigallia Madonna has been on view in the United States.

The exceptional tempera and oil on panel painting was one of three paintings stolen in 1975 and recovered the following year by Italy’s famed Carabinieri Cultural Heritage Protection Command, which specializes in the protection of the country’s cultural heritage on national and international levels. The loan is part of the Museum of Fine Arts’ Visiting Masterpieces series as well as Italy’s initiative, 2013–Year of Italian Culture in the United States, which was organized to nurture the close bonds between Italy and the U.S.

Senigallia Madonna will be on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston through January 6, 2014. A video chronicling the efforts of the Carabinieri will complement the work.

After a Bucharest court opened a trial today in the Dutch heist that saw $24 million worth of art stolen from Rotterdam’s Kunsthal Museum, the accused ringleader refused to reveal where the missing paintings are hidden. Radu Dogaru, who was denied a trial in a Dutch court, admitted to stealing the paintings with two accomplices. Back in August, Dogaru offered to return five of the seven stolen paintings if he was granted a trial in the Netherlands rather than Romania where punishments for robbery are more severe. Dogaru’s lawyer, Catalin Dancu, said, “My client has made a 180-degree turn and is now saying: if the Dutch authorities don’t want to take me, nobody will ever see those paintings again.”

Last October, Dogaru and his accomplices made off with Pablo Picasso’s Tete d’Arlequin, Claude Monet’s Waterloo Bridge, London and Charing Cross Bridge, London, Henri Matisse’s La Liseuse en Blanc et Jaune, Paul Gauguin’s Femme devant une fenetre ouverte, dite la Fiancee, Meyer de Haan’s Autoportrait, and Lucian Freud’s Woman with Eyes Closed. Following the heist, rumors began to circulate that Dogaru’s mother, Olga, had incinerated the stolen paintings in her stove in an attempt to protect her son. Olga Dogaru later retracted her statement although fragments of oil paintings were found in the ashes in her stove.

Dogaru is currently asking for a simplified legal procedure in Romania, where he could be given a 14-year prison sentence. Insurer Aon Plc paid nearly the full worth of the works to the Triton Foundation, which owned the artworks at the time of the theft. The paintings were on loan to the Kunsthal Museum to celebrate the Dutch institution’s 20^th anniversary.

James Meyer, a former studio assistant to the contemporary artist Jasper Johns, was charged with stealing 22 unauthorized works, which he then sold through an unnamed art gallery in Manhattan. Meyer, who worked at Johns’ studio in Connecticut from 1985 to 2012, made $3.4 million off of the sales, which totaled $6.4 million.

Meyer was assigned to protecting the works that Johns did not want sold but ended up creating fake inventory numbers and false documents for the paintings, which he photographed inside a binder that catalogued Johns’ authorized works. Meyer told the gallery in New York that he had received the paintings from Johns as a present and offered notarized documents that supported his claim.

Meyer, who was arrested at his home in Salisbury, CT on August 14, 2013, appeared in federal court in Hartford, CT where he was charged with interstate transportation of stolen property and wire fraud. The maximum prison sentences are 10 years for the stolen property charge and 20 years for wire fraud. Meyer was released on a $250,000 unsecured bond and will appear in federal court in Manhattan on or before August 23, 2013.