date January 9, 2000
CONTENTS:
- Y2kaye Problems? (Ron Lander)
- 4 Detained in Theft of Koran
- Reward offered for stolen artwork: Theft troubles Folsom residents
- Kazimir Malevich and claims for return paintings
From: "Ron Lander, CPP" rlander@ix.netcom.com
Subject: Y2kaye Problems?
I am working on a magazine article to discuss some of the computer
and operational problems that occurred after midnight of January,
2000. If you know of a an incident (like the video store that had 100
years of late charges or the Queens County affidavit problems),
please direct e-mail the details or link to me at:
rlander@ultra-safe.com or post to the list. As predicted, we will hear
about many problems as the year evolves. However, for the mostpart,
everyone did well in preparing for the "worst case". This article
won't be written for a month or so, so keep me in mind if you hear
about something. If you contribute, I will see that you end up with a
copy of the story...
Thanks in advance,
Ron Lander, CPP
LASD Retired
80-334-6670
4 Detained in Theft of Koran
ISTANBUL, Turkey (AP) - Police detained four people suspected of
stealing a 15th-century Koran from Topkapi Palace, the former home
of sultans that has become one of the world's most visited museums,
the Anatolia news agency reported Friday. Authorities seized a Koran,
but said they needed expert advice to determine whether it was the
stolen book, the report said. The theft in September shocked Turks
and prompted an investigation into security measures at Turkey's
museums and historical sites, from which numerous artifacts have been
stolen over the decades. Anatolia said Hasan Erkin, 24, was detained
in Istanbul where he was trying to sell the Koran for $100,000. At the
time of the theft, authorities estimated the value of the handwritten
Islamic holy book at between $5,000 and $50,000. Erkin said the Koran
was hidden in his uncle's home in the Black Sea city of Ordu. His
uncle and another person were detained there. A fourth person, to
whom the Koran was reportedly sent, was detained in the Aegean town
of Aydin, Anatolia reported. In September, police said that the
culprits, who took only the book and left behind many other valuable
objects, were most likely working for a private collector. Topkapi
Palace, which overlooks the bustling Bosporus Strait and the Golden
Horn, was home to the Ottoman sultans and their court from the
mid-15th century to the mid-19th century.
Reward offered forstolen artwork
: Theft troubles Folsom residents
By Peter Hecht Bee Staff Writer
(Published Jan. 8, 2000)
http://www.sacbee.com/news/news/local08_20000108.html
Residents in the Natoma Station subdivision of Folsom have long felt
their neighborhood has a special flair because of an eye-pleasing
collection of public art that distinguishes the community from the
beigy sameness of many suburban tracts. On street corners, grassy
medians and parks, a dozen Northern California artists have adorned
the community with commissioned works. Among them are bronze monkeys
by Carmichael artist Kathleen Kasper Noonan; giant feet in sandals
from Sacramentan Steve Kaltenbach; and playful tiled bunnies by
Donna Billick of Davis. Suddenly, the Folsom suburb has a new -- and
unwanted -- notoriety: as a destination for art theft. In two
audacious late-night incidents in the past week, thieves made off
with two neighborhood landmarks: Noonan's cast bronze statues of
monkeys. The perpetrators meticulously cut the 200-pound-plus pieces
-- known as "Trimate" and "The Hundredth Monkey" -- from their
granite rock pedestals, then carefully loaded them and drove off into
the night. On Friday, state Treasurer Phil Angelides, who built the
community and commissioned its artwork along with fellow Sacramento
developer Angelo Tsakopoulos, announced a $5,000 reward fund for
information leading to the arrest and conviction of the culprits.
Angelides is providing $4,000 of the money and homeowners $1,000.
Meanwhile, neighbors were dumbfounded, and more than a bit angry,
over the loss of treasured public works of art valued at between
$30,000 and $50,000, not to mention the psychic rewards they brought
the community. "I'm really upset, just disgusted that anyone would do
such a thing," said Patricia Aitken, who stopped by the spot where
the abstract, three-legged monkey, Trimate, had wondrously marked the
turnoff to her home on Fantages Way. "We could always tell people to
just turn at the monkey." Her husband, Lowell Aitken, said would-be
thieves unsuccessfully tried to steal one of the artworks several
years ago. But as residents periodically adorned the monkey
sculptures with Halloween figures, Christmas lights -- and just
recently, year 2000 streamers -- they believed the neighborhood
symbols were safe. Angelides, who said 20 works of art were
commissioned for the 1,200-home Natoma Station community, said the
early 1990s project was considered the largest public art endeavor
ever undertaken in a suburban setting. The pieces were showcased in
Sunset Magazine. Noonan said her playful monkey figures had helped
add style to the new neighborhood -- and importantly used a suburban
setting to make art accessible to more people. "I think it was a
great idea," she said. "The more people see art, the more they're
willing to engage it." What surprised Noonan was that someone would
also steal the statues. "What are they going to do with them? Are
they going to put them in their back yard?" Noonan asked. "And if
they do, will they begin to feel guilty?" Folsom Police Capt. Wayne
Vierra said the pieces appeared to have been stolen with precision
-- by people who carefully removed them from their granite stands
and avoided dragging them. "We're hoping the reward fund will spur
some leads," Vierra said. Meanwhile, some Folsom officials suggested
that remorseful thieves could leave the artworks outside a local fire
station or library. Residents in Natoma Station have insured the
artworks with fees paid through a local community district. If the
pieces aren't recovered, Angelides said the reward fund could be used
to cover a $5,000 insurance deductible if new works are commissioned.
Meanwhile, Beecher Leversee III, a landscaper for the Folsom Lake
Nursery, whose job includes maintaining greenbelts around the
neighborhood's art, had a hard time Friday tending to the naked
granite pedestals thieves left behind. "This is an upscale attack --
taking away something that everybody recognizes and everybody knows,"
Leversee said. "First it seemed like it could have been kids. But
this was planned out. It definitely was something that didn't happen
on the spur of the moment."
http://www.sacbee.com/news/news/local08_20000108.html
The Artists: Kazimir Malevich
By ERICA NOONAN, Associated Press Writer
http://news.excite.com/news/ap/000105/12/ent-wkd-art-returned
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) - The small canvas painted with a blue
rectangle and black circle may not look like much to the untrained
eye. And the "Untitled" sketch of pencil lines is elegant but hardly
a head-turner. Yet these works by Russian avant-garde pioneer Kazimir
Malevich are so important to the preservation of modern art that a
German museum director risked his life smuggling them out of his
Nazi-occupied homeland. They've recently been the center of an
international custody agreement between Malevich's heirs and Harvard
University's Busch-Reisinger Museum, which has displayed the
pictures in its Cambridge gallery for a half-century. Harvard has
agreed to give back the works to the artist's family, marking another
victory in a growing movement to return to the rightful owners art
and assets lost or looted during World War II, said Lawrence Kaye, a
New York City attorney who represented Malevich's family. "This case
is very important to modern art and art recovery," Kaye said. "It's
important to the (Malevich) family to be able to assert their rights.
... This family is trying to restore their heritage." The tale of
the two wayward pictures begins in 1927, when Malevich brought scores
of his works from his home in Leningrad - where officials often
forbade public showings of it because they believed it to be
subversive - to Berlin, a city more accepting of the burgeoning
avant-garde movement. Malevich returned home and died several years
later without ever retrieving the art. The 1915 oil painting
"Suprematist Painting (Rectangle and Circle)" and pencil-on-paper
drawing "Untitled" wound up in the hands of Dr. Alexander Dorner,
director of the Landesmuseum in Hannover, Germany, and a passionate
supporter of modern art. But in 1933, when Adolf Hitler's National
Socialist Party took control, the government launched a campaign to
rid the country of so-called "degenerate art." Hitler targeted the
works of artists like Malevich because his work didn't propagandize
values of robust health and good-looking Aryan citizens engaged in
productive activities, said Kirk Varnedoe, chief curator of painting
and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Plus, the
artist's roots in communist Russia made his work even more repulsive
in Hitler's eyes, he said. "(Hitler) felt art should not challenge,
that it should be comforting," Varnedoe said. "He wanted it to show
the affirmative aspect of life. He disliked aggressive, deforming
art." In contract, Malevich was an anti-traditionalist who took
Pablo Picasso's Cubist perspective further into abstraction. He often
used black and colored geometric shapes against a white background,
creating art that had no references to the natural world beloved by
more conventional Impressionist painters. "Malevich's work looks so
simple, but it's very subtle and beautiful with an amazing sense of
space," Varnedoe said. "It's anything but flat, dry and mechanical."
By the mid-to-late-1930s - as more and more abstract art was seized
from German museums to be destroyed or sold abroad - Dorner knew the
Malevich pictures were in jeopardy, said Peter Nisbet,
Busch-Reisinger's curator. He also knew he faced deportation to a
labor camp for his support of avant-garde art. Dorner emigrated to
the United States in 1938, secreting "Suprematist Painting" and
"Untitled" in his luggage. "It's probably no accident that the
paintings (he took) were among the smallest," Nisbet said. Dorner
served as director of a museum at the Rhode Island School of Design
and later taught at Bennington College in Vermont. When he died in
1957, the Malevich pictures were willed to Busch-Reisinger until
their proper owner could be determined. In 1993, after the fall of
the Soviet Union, Malevich's heirs began a campaign to reclaim his
work, now scattered in museums in Cambridge, New York, Amsterdam, the
Netherlands, Moscow, Russia, and elsewhere. In June, the Museum of
Modern Art agreed to give Malevich's descendants an undisclosed cash
payment and one painting, "Suprematist Composition (1923-25)" in
exchange for 15 other works that had been in the museum since they
were smuggled out of Germany in 1935. Recovery efforts also have
been aimed at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, which owns 36 of
Malevich's works - the largest collection outside Russia. However,
museum officials there say the pictures are their legal property. On
Dec. 2, Harvard announced it would return the Malevich sketch and
painting it housed for more than 50 years, but it's not clear when
the art will leave or where it will go. Nisbet said no arrangements
had been made. The pictures may be sold, or possibly returned to
Europe. The oil painting from Malevich's Suprematist period could be
worth millions of dollars, said Kaye, the family's attorney.
"Malevich left his art for safekeeping, and now it's coming full
circle," he said.
http://news.excite.com/news/ap/000105/12/ent-wkd-art-returned