Displaying items by tag: looted

A Renaissance silver-gilt and enamel salt cellar, bequeathed by collector Michael Wellby to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, has been identified as Nazi loot. It will thus be returned to the descendants of its pre-WWII owner.

The intricate piece is one of the 500 silverware items—believed to be worth in excess of £10 million—donated to the museum in 2012 by Wellby, a former friend of Professor Timothy Wilson, the museum's Keeper of Western Art.

The Swiss art gallery named as the sole heir of reclusive German art collector Cornelius Gurlitt is to accept his bequest of masterpieces which include works looted by the Nazis from Jews, a Swiss paper reported on Sunday.

Gurlitt, who died in May aged 81, had secretly stored hundreds of works by the likes of Chagall and Picasso at his Munich apartment and a house in nearby Salzburg, Austria.

The collection, worth an estimated 1 billion euros (0.78 billion pounds), contains an as yet undetermined number of works taken by the Nazis from their Jewish owners during World War Two.

A portrait by Gustav Klimt could be put up for sale, potentially fetching over $30 million, to resolve a dispute between a Viennese art foundation and the granddaughter of the woman in the painting, a lawyer for the granddaughter said on Thursday.

Klimt, an Austrian symbolist, painted the portrait of Gertrud Loew in 1902 and it belonged to her at least until 1938, a year before she fled Austria to escape the Nazis.

Her U.S.-based granddaughter, Andrea Felsovanyi, has been contesting ownership with the private Klimt Foundation, which currently holds the work.

A Claude Monet landscape has been discovered in a suitcase that belonged to late art hoarder Cornelius Gurlitt.

The case, which was left at a hospital where the German had been staying, was handed over to the administrators of his estate.

They are tasked with finding out if the newly uncovered artwork was stolen by the Nazis during World War Two.

Gurlitt, who died in May aged 81, had a stash of 1,280 works of art hidden in his Munich apartment.

The U.S. has returned nine stolen 18th-century paintings by Mexican artist Miguel Cabrera to the government of Peru.

Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara says the works were stolen from a church in Lima in 2008. He says they were smuggled out of Peru to be trafficked on the international art market.

A Chinese organization has appealed to Japan's Emperor Akihito to return a 1,300 year-old stele taken from China over a century ago, state media reported.

The Honglujing Stele was "looted by Japanese soldiers early last century from northeastern China", the official Xinhua news agency said, and now sits in "virtual seclusion" in Tokyo's Imperial Palace.

The stone monument, 1.8 metres (six feet) tall and three metres wide, shows that the first king of the northeast Asian Bohai kingdom was given his title by a Chinese emperor from the Tang Dynasty (618-907), the report said.

German government-appointed experts on Friday gave the green light to the restitution of one of the most valuable artworks in the trove of late collector Cornelius Gurlitt to its American owners.

Back in February 2011 ArtLyst reported that the disgraced international art dealer Helly Nahmad was in possession of a $20m painting by Amedeo Modigliani, "Seated Man with a Cane" (1918) that had allegedly been stolen by the Nazis from Oscar Stettiner, a prominent Paris gallerist. In 1939. Stettiner escaped Paris leaving the painting behind. The work was confiscated by Marcel Philippon, who was appointed by the Nazis to sell the Stettiner property.

The Nahmad family is now being sued by relatives of the descendants of Oscar Stettiner the original owner of the masterpiece. Helly Nahmad who is currently serving a prison sentence of 366 days as punishment for his involvement in a Russian mob linked, high-stakes gambling ring was, needless to say, unavailable for comment. He was arrested in 2013 as part of an inquiry into illegal gaming promoted as private parties for high net worth individuals including film stars, professional athletes and bank bosses.

The president of the World Jewish Congress, Ronald Lauder, urged a leading Spanish museum to return a painting that the Nazis stole from a Jewish art collector.

Lauder, in a statement issued on Friday, called on the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, which is owned by the Spanish state, to stop its legal fight to keep the Impressionist masterpiece “Rue Saint-Honoré, après-midi, effet de pluie,” which the Nazis stole from Lilly Cassirer, a German Jew seeking to flee her homeland in 1939.

The painting was purchased from the painter Camille Pissarro by Lilly Cassirer’s father-in-law, Julius. Her late grandson, Claude, sued for restitution in 2005 in a claim he filed with the United States District Court for the Central District of California.

Spain is to return to Colombia 691 indigenous artefacts seized in a police operation 11 years ago.

Most of the ceramic items are of huge cultural and archaeological value, and date back to 1400BC.

They had been smuggled out of South America by a man linked to the drug gangs before being recovered in Spain, the embassy in Madrid said.

Following a court order in Spain, the items were handed over to the Colombian authorities.

They were put in the Museum of America in Madrid and will be returned to Colombia in the next few months.