A cheap painting of magnolias bought at a flea market might make one man very wealthy after it was determined to be the work of the late 19th century American painter Martin Johnson Heade. Retired police Detective Dale Zierten, an amateur art appraiser, was asked in September to take a look at a friend's collection of paintings. Most were worth $100 to $300, Zierten said. Then the friend retrieved another painting from his kitchen, between the refrigerator and the wall, and opened the sealed box. The man had bought it for $5 at a flea market in another state. "I pulled it out and I said, 'I think we got something here,"' Zierten said Monday. Christie's, the New York auction house, wanted to see the painting and sent an air-conditioned, armored truck to transport it, Zierten said. The painting, since authenticated by an expert on Heade's work, will be sold at auction May 25 in New York City. Christie's experts have set an estimated price of $300,000 to $500,000, but that could be low. The last Heade painting sold by Christie's, in 1999, went for $882,500. It, too, had been found at a flea market.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A prominent Jewish advocacy group called on Tuesday for the use of U.S. and other nations' postwar archives to create a database listing all the artwork looted by the Nazis, making it easier for Holocaust families to identify stolen heirlooms. The World Jewish Congress also countered the position of many museums, saying it was up to them and not claimants, many of whom perished in the Holocaust, which took 6 million lives, to prove that they own suspect works of art. This spring, a number of well-known U.S. museums have published on the Internet lists of paintings with gaps in their histories that suggest they might have been seized from Holocaust victims. British and German museums have taken a similar approach. "We don't want to be stuck in a situation where we finally have museums producing lists of so-called red-flag paintings and not be able to move beyond that to actual recovery," Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress, told Reuters. "If a painting which a museum currently says simply has a gap in the provenance is matched against the (proposed) database and (is) known to have been looted, the museum would then have to prove it acquired proper title, or its ownership is called into question," Steinberg said. In the past, Steinberg has said that perhaps artwork looted by the Nazis should be gathered together and used to create a new kind of Holocaust museum. Or perhaps it should be sold for the benefit of Holocaust survivors, he has suggested.
In preparing my exhibition, I took my little packet of burned books (which I'd brought back from Kosovo inside a Zip-lock bag wrapped in paper towels and stuffed into the cut-off bottom half of a large empty plastic Coke bottle) up to the paper conservators at the Strauss Center for Conservation, on the top floor of the Fogg Art Museum. They helped me to unpack them and to arrange a sample for display. As we watched a conservator and an intern gently picking through the remains with tweezers, we all learned something new about the way books burn. They don't turn into wispy paper ash, like the crumpled newspapers one uses to start a fire in the grate. When scores of books packed into shelves or in piles are set ablaze, the pages fuse and carbonize, turning into clinkers in the intense heat due to the lack of oxygen. We watched as the conservator picked out these small bits of charcoal -- the carbonized fragments of manuscripts and old books. They were hard and black, some had shiny surfaces that reflected the afternoon sunlight. Looking closely, one could distinguish: smooth, blackened fragments of leather bindings; loose fibers or carbonized pieces of woven cloth from the inside of the spines of books; chunks of charcoal in which one could still see the fused layers of pages; still smaller fragments of burned paper; black charcoal dust. One larger piece, softer and grayish in color, not completely turned to carbon, was still recognizable as a book: the remains of a spine, or perhaps the fore-edge of a volume, less than an inch wide and perhaps 2-3 inches long, with the curled edges of charred pages still visible on the narrow ends. It had come from the burned-out interior of a 15th-century mosque in Pec, torched by Serbian policemen on June 11, 1999, the day before the first NATO peacekeepers arrived. It was an odd feeling to take the glass laboratory dishes with these burned remains of books down to the Fine Arts Library to put them in the display cases. Sad, almost reverential ... and also furious at those who have burned both books and human beings in Bosnia, in Kosovo, and in too many other places in recent years. In my office, I keep a copy of a poem, an elegy for the burned Sarajevo library by a Bosnian poet, which talks about the removal of tons of such clinkers from the ruins of the burned out National Library. It brings home the vulnerability of the human knowledge that institutions such as universities and libraries are established to cultivate and preserve. We like to believe that we can be keepers of the records of civilization and we do our best to preserve them from fires and floods and other natural calamities. But what can one do to keep books and human beings safe from the barbarians?
Andras Riedlmayer Harvard University
HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) - A peanut gallery of lawyers and reporters watched on Friday as an art museum and the family of a Howdy Doody puppeteer argued over who gets custody of TV's freckle-faced marionette. The Detroit Institute of Arts claimed that puppeteer Rufus Rose promised to give the original Howdy Doody to the museum. The Rose family argued that no such promise was ever made and that the puppet they have may not even be the original. Several copies of Howdy Doody were made, including a stunt ``Double Doody.'' The puppet in question, estimated to be worth $50,000, is being stored in a bank vault in Rhode Island. U.S. District Judge Christopher Droney gave lawyers two weeks to submit written arguments. No date was set for a ruling. The lawsuit is based on correspondence between Rose and Buffalo Bob Smith, the host of ``The Howdy Doody Show.'' In 1970, when Smith wanted to visit college campuses and military bases with the puppet, Rose said he would lend him ``the one and only original Howdy.'' In the letter, Rose said NBC gave him the marionette with the provision that Howdy eventually be placed in the Detroit museum. However, Rose's family argued that there is no documentation between Rose and NBC to confirm such an understanding existed.
Rose died in 1975.
DOZENS of sacred Jewish scrolls that Saddam Hussein ordered destroyed have been smuggled out of Iraq in an operation masterminded by Mossad, the Israeli secret service. At least 50 manuscripts containing the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, had lain for decades in a warehouse in Baghdad after being hidden by Iraqi Jews who left for Israel in 1950-51. Mossad has retrieved 30 of the scrolls after bribing members of the Iraqi army. One of them, thought to have been handwritten 70 years ago, was put on display last week in a synagogue in Afula, northern Israel. Another, 200 years old, has been exhibited in New York. Many more scrolls, some far older and more valuable, are still in Iraq. "There is a fair chance that we will recover and return them to Jewish hands so that they can be presented in synagogues in Israel and across the world," said one source. Mossad is believed to have started the operation after its agents in Baghdad learnt of a meeting at which Saddam's generals told him that 50 manuscripts had been found in the city's Battawein district, where the Jewish community used to be concentrated. He is said to have replied: "Burn them." The news appalled officers at Mossad's headquarters in Tel Aviv, prompting comparisons with Kristallnacht in 1938 when the Nazis burned Jewish shops, synagogues and Torah scrolls in Germany. Mossad soon learnt that some of Saddam's officers, realising the value of the scrolls, were prepared to defy his orders in return for money. The agency's station in Istanbul, which carries out espionage against Iraq, was ordered to investigate. It is not known how much Mossad paid either to the Iraqi officers or to merchants based in Jordan who acted as intermediaries. It may have been as much as GBP.30,000 each. The rescue of the scrolls appears to have been part of a much larger operation to recover artefacts linked to Iraq's once sizeable Jewish community. After Iraq declared its independence from British rule in 1932, Jews held prominent positions in the country: Sasun Haskail, the first minister of finance, was Jewish. The climate turned hostile after the creation of Israel in 1948. About 121,000 of the 137,000 Jews who lived in Iraq were flown to Israel in 1950-51. There was a further exodus following the 1991 Gulf war, and a mere 68 are now left in Baghdad. Israeli sources said last week that efforts to rescue the remaining Torah scrolls were continuing. "We know where they are. Some of them served the Iraqi Jewish community for hundreds of years," said a source in the Israeli Ministry of Religion. "We will not leave them in the hands of the Iraqis. The state of Israel, with the help of all its secret and non-secret organisations, will bring the scrolls back home."
(Sunday Times London)