Displaying items by tag: investigation

An international investigation into antiquities looted from India and smuggled into the United States has taken authorities to the Honolulu Museum of Art.

The museum on Wednesday handed over seven rare artifacts that it acquired without museum officials realizing they were ill-gotten items. Agents from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will take the items back to New York and, from there, eventually return them to the government of India.

U.S. customs agents say the items were taken from religious temples and ancient Buddhist sites, and then allegedly smuggled to the United States by an art dealer. The dealer, Subhash Kapoor, was arrested in 2011 and is awaiting trial in India. Officials say Kapoor created false provenances for the illicit antiquities.

The Dutch royal family has said it will return a painting from its collection thought to have been looted by the Nazis during World War Two. The painting, by Joris van der Haagen, had been bought by Queen Juliana from a Dutch art dealer in 1960.

The palace said an investigation looked at tens of thousands of art works in the House of Orange's collection. Officials have contacted the heirs of the original owner, who was not named, to arrange its return.

Thieves have breached stringent security at Christie's London flagship headquarters to pull off a heist valued at up to a million pounds. The stolen items, thought to be mostly jewelery and small antiques, included works by the Russian jewelers Fabergé.

Police have been investigating the theft for two weeks and even though they have CCTV footage, have failed to identify any of the suspects, who may be of an Eastern European background.

Six former high ranking Spanish government officials are being investigated over alleged corruption surrounding the sale of government-owned artworks, including two paintings by the Spanish master Francisco Goya with a total worth of around €14 million, Spanish daily newspaper ABC reported on Friday.

Former education secretary Eva Almunia, and her husband Carlos Eso, who served in the cabinet in Spain’s Aragones region, oversaw the purchase of five paintings purchased with public funds between 2006 and 2010, while they were both in office.

Twelve old master paintings worth an estimated €4 million ($5.5 million) have been returned to the Museo Nazionale San Matteo di Pisa (National Museum of San Matteo, Pisa), according to the AGI. The works were missing from the museum for over ten years. Yet, for most of the time, no one even knew to look for them.

Dario Matteoni, the museum’s new director, spearheaded an investigation into the museum’s inventory last year. The museum then discovered that 12 paintings, which had been sent to a restorer in the city of Lucca in 2002 never returned. That restorer is reported to have been paid approximately €31,000 for his work on a total of 17 canvases for the museum.

Hundreds of paintings were discovered in the 12th century Cambodian temple complex Angkor Wat hiding in plain sight.

Though thousands of people pass through the religious monument every day, nobody had ever noticed the ancient graffiti on the faded walls. Researcher Noel Hidalgo Tan first saw the red and black pigment on the walls of the monument when he visited and decided to investigate, Smithsonian Magazine reports.

The FBI agent in charge of the investigation into the theft of $500 million worth of masterpieces from a Boston museum nearly a quarter century ago says the bureau has confirmed sightings of the missing artwork from credible sources.

MyFoxBoston.com first reported that FBI Special Agent Geoff Kelly, who lead the international investigation for more than 10 years, says the trail for the missing artwork has not grown cold.

"We believe that over certain periods of time, this artwork has been spotted," Kelly told the station. "There have been sightings of it, confirmed sightings."

On Wednesday, April 2, Italy’s Culture Ministry unveiled two paintings that were recovered by police specializing in locating stolen art. The works, which are by the French artists Paul Gauguin and Pierre Bonnard, had been hanging in an Italian factory worker’s kitchen for nearly 40 years. He was unaware of the spectacular value of the works in his possession.

The two paintings were stolen from a London home in 1970 and then abandoned on a train traveling from Paris to Turin. The works were stored in an Italian Railways lost and found facility until they were offered at a lost-property auction in 1975. A Fiat factory worker with a passion for art purchased the paintings for roughly $30. A friend of the factory worker alerted Italian heritage police last summer when he grew suspicious of the paintings’ value.

Gauguin’s “Fruits sur une Table ou Nature au Petit Chien” is estimated to be worth between 10 million and 30 million euros. The Bonnard painting, titled “Le Femme aux Deux Fauteuils,” is said to be worth around 650,000 euros. The investigation into how the paintings ended up in the Fiat worker’s kitchen are still ongoing. It is unclear who the works will be returned to since the original owners have passed away. 

Last week, it was discovered that part of a fresco was missing from the ancient Roman city of Pompeii. It is believed that thieves broke into a closed-off section of the UNESCO World Heritage site and chiseled off a portion of the fresco bearing a depiction of the Greek goddess Artemis.

Police have launched an investigation into the disappearance of the eight-inch wide fragment. They will be reviewing surveillance footage from the perimeter of the site in hopes of identifying the thieves, but there are no security cameras within the ruins.

Professor Umberto Pappalardo, an archaeological expert at the Suor Orsola Benincasa University in Naples, told AFP he believes petty criminals were behind the theft, rather than art thieves aiming to sell the fragment on the international market. Pappalardo added, “Selling a stolen fresco from a site as well documented as Pompeii would be a very, very tall order. There would certainly not be any market for it in Italy.”    

In January, a fragment of fresco was taken from another part of Pompeii and sent to the curator’s office in an anonymous package. Pompeii, one of Italy's main tourist attractions, has become a symbol for decades of mismanagement of the country's cultural sites. Italy's new Culture Minister, Dario Franceschini, has promised to increase maintenance work at Pompeii.