- Haunted Museums (Steve Keller)
- "Sprinkle Library" redux (three messages from Exlibris)
- Legal battle brews over ``Nude on a Black Armchair''
- French & Italian Stolen Art - notes from the field (Jonathan Sazonoff)
- Art hoard puts widow in line for a million
- Restorers save Renaissance masterpiece
- Reuniting Art and Owners, German Government to Launch Web Site Monday
- Boston Museum to post possible Nazi-looted art on Web
From: IntlArtCop@aol.com
Subject: Haunted Museums
This may be among the strangest requests for information ever, but here goes . .
.
In my years of consulting I have done projects in four museums that were reportedly haunted. Guards in one museum who were assigned to the midnight shift sat in a stairwell rather than in the security control room so they could see and hear anything on both floors and could sit with their backs to the wall! Who knows if they ever actually did the various patrols they were paid to do. In another historic house museum, the Director would lock up each night personally, being careful to lock doors and turn off lights. In the morning, the lights would be on in the attic and the attic door would be unlocked and standing open. She changed the burglar alarm code without telling staff, to be sure no one was playing a prank on her. No one but she could enter the house without setting off an alarm yet the ghostly activity continued. An electrician confirmed there was no problem with the lights. in another museum a reported ghost would lower the very large and very heavy chandelier lights in the lobby, a process that takes about an hour using a cranking mechanizm with a very slow gear ratio. No alarms in the area were ever received, verifying that this was no prank by guards. On another occasion someone turned a valve on a water pipe causing a major water flow into the galleries from a mechanical area. A few nights later a guard encountered a ghostly figure dressed in the period of the early days of the building. He walked through--yes, directly through-- some exhibits into the area where the water valve was located and when the guard followed him at a distance, the "man" pointed to the hatch housing the water valve. Many others reported similar experiences in that museum including "sounds in their heads but not their ears", "coldness", and the sound of footsteps. Several guards refused to work in the building and were transferred by their contractor who went to great lengths to keep the knowledge of a possible ghost a secret so as not to scare new guards. They all seemed to learn of the ghost on their own! I assume that I have not lost any of you and that you are still reading this post. It is certainly not your usual MSN posting, is it. My question is this: Whether or not there is a ghost is irrelevant. Something is happening that potentially effects security. We as security professionals sometimes have to deal with this type of problem. I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who has a similar situation in their museum. This could be ghostly activity or just a reputation of ghostly activity. What has happened in your museum that might "spook" the guards or staff? How do you deal with it? Please feel free to post your answer or reply to me in confidence by email at steve@stevekeller.com if posting a reply might in some way compromise your museum's security. If your haunting is public knowledge, I'm sure others would like to hear about it but if it is not and you want it to remain confidential, i will, of course, keep it confidential. By the way, I put 64 CCTV cameras in the museum where the guards sit on the staircase, and built them a highly secure security control room. We have yet to capture anything ghostly on video. I stayed in the museum over night on several nights and saw or felt nothing, but the Director of Security slept there one night and had a very scary experience that even I, as a skeptic, have trouble questioning. My mind remains open.
Steve Keller
Museum Security Consultant
Sprinkle Library" redux (three messages from Exlibris)
From: Christopher G Mullin mullin@selway.umt.edu
Subject: "Sprinkle Library" redux
Last Fall I informed this list that the State of Montana planned to install a sprinkler system in our 30-year-old, 200,000-square-foot five-level library here at The University of Montana-Missoula. Based on the responses I received then, we were able to convince the campus engineers and the chosen sprinkler designer to specify a mist-type system (Grinnell Aqua Mist heads) for at least the Archives and Special Collections areas in the subbasement of the building. Unfortunately, the State's insurance provider (Factory Mutual) has no experience with mist-type systems, and has been strongly resistant to the idea. At this point, they've convinced off-campus state officials to insist on conventional sprinkler heads. These officials are concerned with safety issues, and are under the misapprehension that Freeze-drying wet books will solve all our problems. I've tried to explain to people about the problems with coated paper, but so far have had no success. I've done a fair amount of web searching (CoOL, NDCC, etc.) and been unable to find anything that deals specifically with Grinnell Aqua Mist heads in a library environment, or even any library PR about planned systems. I'm aware of the Iowa State mist installation, and our archivist is getting more information from them. I would be delighted to get any information on recent (post 1995) or planned sprinkler installations that exlibris members can send, especially any new news since last Fall, when I last asked this question on this list
Thanks for your help --Chris
Christopher G. Mullin mullin@selway.umt.edu | I buy good
Special Collections Librarian 406-243-4036 (voice mail) | regular-8mm
University of Montana 406-243-2060 (fax) | movie stuff
Missoula, MT 59812 Who else has *these* opinions--not UM!
From: "Kevin Mac Donnell" macbooks@jump.net
Subject:
Re: "Sprinkle Library" redux
When I'm not selling rare boooks, I serve as the fire commissioner for the larger portion of the county that surrounds Austin. I have one observation and one suggestion. The observation: I'd suspect that the mist systems are more effective than conventional systems (as well as kinder to paper materials) because by creating a mist the surface area of the water droplets is increased, which in turn allows greater heat absorption. The mist turns to steam quickly rather than pooling on the floor (or shelves) as with many systems. The fire service has moved toward various kinds of high pressure air-boosted systems that produce fine mists rather than heavy streams of water which absorb less heat. This is especially critical in interior (enclosed) areas where reducing heat is the most effective way of protecting life and property. The suggestion: Locate the website for the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA). They are not a political subdivision of the Federal government, but they are the agency that is mandated by the Feds to set national standards for the fire service. If you don't find resources at their site, call them and they will surely refer you to somebody who would be helpful.
Good luck!
Kevin Mac Donnell
Mac Donnell Rare Books
From: ewilkie@mindspring.com
Subject:
Sprinkler systems
If you are faced with objections to your choice of sprinkler systems for libraries and archives, you can get a little ammunition of your own. One of the best places to start is the web site of the National Fire Sprinkler Association (http://www.nfsa.org). This is a national group that distributes information and advice about sprinkler systems and would probably be willing to answer a few questions. Another place to look is the National Fire Protection Association (http://www.nfpa.org). This organizatio In general, if local codes allow a certain type of sprinkler system, there really is no basis for anyone to object to its installation. The important question to ask the objectors is: "Do you have any technical data to support your position that a mist fire suppression system is any less effective in saving lives and property than the system you favor?" The answer is probably "No," because all approved suppression systems are in general equally effective, otherwise they wouldn't be approved in the first Another gambit is to counter your insurance company with another. One of the recognized leaders in this type of question is Industrial Risk Insurers (IRI) of Hartford, Connecticut. They've been at this a *long* time. (One of their delightful sidelines is the largest collection of sprinkler heads in existence.) They might be able to give you some third-party opinion that supports your position.
Everett C. Wilkie, Jr.
Legal battle brews over ``Nude on a Black Armchair''
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A bitter battle over Picasso's famously erotic ``Nude on a Black Armchair'' has gone to court in San Francisco, where two prominent families are squaring off over allegations of a broken promise. Picasso's 1932 portrait of his mistress Marie-Therese Walter asleep on a divan has been hailed as an icon of modern art, and sold at Christie's auction house last year for more than $40 million. But San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art and investment broking baron Charles Schwab believe the painting should have been sold to them -- and filed suit charging the heirs of art patron Madeleine Haas Russell with breach of oral contract. Attorney Charles Cohler representing the museum said Friday he had filed the suit in San Francisco Superior Court demanding millions of dollars in compensation for the scotched deal, which has set the tiny world of San Francisco high society art patrons abuzz. Russell, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, was a longtime trustee of the museum, where Charles Schwab's wife Helen is a board member. The suit alleges that the two sides entered an oral agreement last September under which the Schwabs and the museum would jointly buy the painting for $44 million. The Schwabs planned to give the museum 40 percent of the purchase price, while paying the rest themselves and marking the painting as a ''promised gift'' to the museum upon their deaths. Russell's three grown children, as trustees of her estate, eventually sold the painting at Christie's for a ``hammer price'' of $41 million. In a letter to the museum's board of trustees, their lawyer Roger Mead said Russell's heirs decided not to go ahead with the original sale after learning that the Schwabs planned to ``jointly own and use'' the painting. ``Seller has breached the oral contract, to the Museum's injury,'' the suit charges, which demands some $18 million in compensation for the 40 percent of the painting the museum would have owned under the Schwab plan. Mead was not available for comment Friday. But he told one reporter the museum's suit was misguided. ``You don't have an agreement until both parties sign on the dotted line,'' he said.
Reuters/Variety
From: Jonathan Sazonoff saz@kwom.com
Subject: French & Italian Stolen Art - notes from the field
Dear Subscribers,
For those interested in major art thefts, several notes of interest. First, while searching the web for some information on a major French theft last year, of two Renoirs, a Sisley, and a Corot http://www.interieur.gouv.fr/avis_recherche/oeuvres/vols/10699.htm, I discovered several new web-sites (in French) devoted to stolen art.
ProtectArt base de données d'objets volés.
http://www.protectart.com/
Vols - Tableaux modernes
http://www.gazette-drouot.com/vols/vols-tableau-moderne.html
Next, while searching for details of a recent Florentine art theft (works by Donatello, Simone Martini, and Giotto) I discovered that Italy's Carabinieri Tutela Patrimonio Artistico have updated their web site. They now present an expanded gallery of important stolen art works, in addition to their searchable database. The pieces that are missing rival the finest in any great museum. I only note this because, one is struck by the artistic beauty and quality of the art in their presentation. In Italian see" Importanti opere da ricercare"
http://www.carabinieri.it/tpa/tpa.asp
And finally, our recent bibliography "art forgery - sources of information" is now on-line. Our thanks to Ton Cremers for formatting and posting those pages. We hope this will be of help to those researching that shadowy field.
http://www.museum-security.org/forgery1.htm
Hope you find this updated material of interest,
Jonathan Sazonoff
SAZ PRODUCTIONS, INC.
http://www.saztv.com
Contributing US Ed.
Museum Security Network
http://www.museum-security.org/saz.html
Art hoard puts widow in line for a million
BY ELIZABETH JUDGE
THE sale of a single painting for GBP.112,500 has put the widow of a Doncaster kitchen-fitter well on the way to becoming a millionaire. The South Yorkshire widow, who has asked to remain anonymous, knew nothing of a hoard of Old Masters and other valuable art works that her husband had secretly collected over decades. He kept his finds in a locked room in their Victorian semi-detached house in the South Yorkshire town and forbid her and his children from entering. It was only after he died last December that his widow opened the door, finding paintings in stacks up to 15 deep covering the floor. The latest painting to be sold, a nineteenth-century British work called Deer Shooting, by John Frederick Lewis, raised GBP.122,500 at an auction last week. Silas Currie, from Phillips auctioneers, who first inspected the collection, said that it was very likely that the widow would be a millionaire after the last auction in July. The total raised so far stands at GBP.900,000, and 40 items are still to be sold. The highlight of the collection was a study by the eighteenth-century artist Francois Boucher. The oil sketch was a preliminary work for a larger painting, The Nativity. It had not been seen by the public for 200 years and experts had thought it was lost. It fetched GBP.161,000 at a sale last December from which the widow collected more than GBP.600,000. Mr Currie said that the man lived in an unassuming home with modern furniture. "His widow was blissfully unaware of the collection or his extensive library and reams of carefully made notes," he said. "During the Forties and Fifties, many large estates were being broken up and paintings and art works were coming on to the market. This man had a good eye and was a keen bidder, and he bought a bit here and a little there," Mr Currie said. "It seems art was his all-absorbing passion and he visited fairs, shops, auctions, private sales and dealers to build up his collection. "I don't believe it would be possible to do it today, but 40 or 50 years ago, he was able to use his considerable skill and judgment to buy paintings and art works which have shot up in value." Drawings from the hoard will be auctioned in London on April 20. One, a composition entitled The Last Judgment by Jacob Backer, is expected to fetch around GBP.8,000. Mr Currie said: "Though we cannot say until they sell exactly what they will fetch there is a real possibility this widow could become a millionairess. We have had some surprises already with the amount the art works have fetched already."
Restorers save Renaissance masterpiece
By Bruce Johnston in Arezzo
A SERIES of Renaissance frescoes described as one of the world's greatest works of art was unveiled yesterday following 15 years of restoration work. Piero della Francesca's frescoes of the Story of the True Cross, in the Basilica of San Francesco in Arezzo, marked him out as a genius of mathematical persepective. A restoration project in 1985 quickly turned into an emergency when experts judged that the frescoes were heading for total decay. Then began what was described by one restorer as the most "complex, difficult and problematic restoration of all great fresco cycles that our generation has had to face". Some judged the project as bigger than restoring Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel. The frescoes depict scenes from the Golden Legend, in which the Cross of Jesus Christ acts as the link in the redemption cycle that begins with Adam and the tree from which Eve took the forbidden fruit. Piero painted the powerful and contrasting scenes in narrative sequence between 1452 and 1466. It is now realised that he painted them on what was already an unstable surface. Since then, the frescoes were affected not only by leaking rainwater and rising damp, but also by subsidence, earthquakes and lightning. Some of the work was destroyed when a bell tower was added to the building. Napoleonic troops also caused damage by inserting rafters into the frescoed walls and by shooting at the figures in the cycle with their muskets. A chemical process caused by the constant seepage of rainwater, and a turn-of-the-century restoration that used large amounts of cement, was found to be turning the frescoes' plaster base into chalk. Tests showed that, as a result, the frescoes risked disappearing forever. Public access was withdrawn in 1985. Yesterday the restored frescoes were unveiled by the Italian Prime Minister, Massimo D'Alema. The result is far more successful than the even more long-winded restoration of Leonardo's Last Supper in Milan, where so much of earlier restorers' work was removed that not much of the painting was left.
Reuniting Art and Owners, German Government to Launch Web Site Monday
B E R L I N, April 6 - Germany is to publish a list of several thousand works of art plundered from museums and Nazi victims across Europe in an effort to reunite them with their rightful owners more than half a century later. The Web site, www.lostart.de, to be launched Monday, is the latest attempt by the German government to make amends for Nazi persecution. It follows a $5 billion fund launched last year to compensate millions of people whose property was stolen or who were forced into labor by German firms during the Second World War. Hoarded by Hitler, the Failed Artist
A large section of the list consists of unclaimed pieces from the treasure amassed by Hitler, notoriously a failed artist himself, and meant for the lavish "Fuehrer Museum" he dreamed of building in the Austrian town of Linz near where he grew up. "It will predominantly offer what people have come to know as the 'Linz List,'" a government official said, referring to a collection that included old masters to little-valued genre paintings prized by Hitler because they fitted into Nazi ideology. Officials working on the Web site said they hoped the reach of the Internet would help those searching for lost art. As the Third Reich grew, Hitler and officials like Marshal Hermann Goering charged Nazi dealers to tour Europe and plunder, or purchase at gunpoint, art works from museums and private collectors, such as the wealthy Rothschild family.
Resources Devoted to Collection
Hitler, a budding artist who was turned down by the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts, devoted an inordinate amount of time and resources to the collection, even in the final years of the war. Acquiring works of art for him became a way for aides to secure favor in court. Looted pieces classified by Hitler as "degenerate" were sold by Nazi art dealers, many of whom became fabulously wealthy with private trade on the side. The collection, which ultimately included celebrated works by Rembrandt, Rubens and Vermeer, fell into Allied hands at the end of the war and its contents were mostly handed back to their original owners. A section, including some canvases by 16th- and 17th-century Italian and Dutch masters, went unclaimed and are now in storage in government depots in Berlin or on temporary loan to museums. Nazi Looting Makes for Bitter Disputes
The sheer scale of the plundering operation carried out by the Nazis, and the sometimes haphazard restitution process at the end of the war, has frequently led to bitter ownership disputes between museums world-wide. France's greatest art museum, the Louvre, returned five paintings last year, including a major work by the 18th-century Italian artist Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, to heirs of their late Jewish art dealer owner after their claim was substantiated. "We welcome any effort to identify property looted by the Nazis," said Alissa Kaplan, spokeswoman for the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. Details of many of the unclaimed works are already available in a number of separate, sometimes obscure registries.
Museum to post possible Nazi-looted art on Web
BOSTON (April 7, 2000 5:23 p.m. EDT http://www.nandotimes.com) - The Museum of Fine Arts will use the Web to help determine if some of its paintings were looted by the Nazis. On Monday the museum will post on its Web site the images of about 10 paintings because of where or when they were sold, or because their previous owners or agents have been implicated in the theft of art during World War II. Museum curators have been researching the paintings' histories, but someone in the general public may hold the key, said Kelly Gifford, a museum spokeswoman. "We're also hoping the public, if they have answers on these paintings' provenance, that they will come forward," she said. The Museum said there had not yet been a determination that any of the works had been looted. The paintings will remain posted on the Web site, http://www.mfa.org, indefinitely.
