September 21, part II, 2000
CONTENTS:
- Mosler ends MSN sponsorship
- Re - Query: The Monet from the Polish museum (Charles Hill)
- RE: (Fwd) Re: Theft of Monet's "Pourville Beach" (Connie Lowenthal)
- RE: (Fwd) Re: Theft of Monet's "Pourville Beach" (Jonathan Sazonoff)
- Wang Haijun Is Arrested for Stealing and Destroying More than One Hundred Buddha Statues
Mosler ends MSN sponsorship
Mosler Inc (http://www.mosler.com/) has decided to end it's sponsorship of the Museum Security Network. I want all our subscribers to know that I am very grateful for the support they have given the Museum Security Network these past 15 months. Without their generous support I would not have been able to buy new equipment and attend several very interesting conferences in Lyon, London, and Mexico City.
Please do not hesitate to inform Mosler about your appreciation at: John Pearce PearceJ@moslerinc.com
Ton Cremers
From: "Hill At Home" hillathome@thefreeinternet.co.uk
To: "Museum Security Network" securma@xs4all.nl
Subject: Re - Query: The Monet from the Polish museum
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2000 07:55:19 +0100
The same ruse of swapping a fake (in that case a poster print of a masterpiece) and stealing the original oil on panel by Lucas Cranach was used by thieves in the Sternberk Palace (National Gallery of Prague) in the early 1990s. The Cranach was recovered in 1996 in Wurzburg by the BKA (German FBI) along with a hoard of other stolen paintings and statues from the Czech Republic.
Yours,
Charley Hill
From: "Lowenthal, Connie" Connie@rslmgmt.com
To: "'Museum Security Network'" securma@xs4all.nl
Subject: RE: (Fwd) Re: Theft of Monet's "Pourville Beach"
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 13:51:52 -0400
There are numerous versions of paintings by Monet done at Pourville.
Constance Lowenthal, Director
Commission for Art Recovery
New York
From: Jonathan Sazonoff saz@kwom.com
Organization: SAZ PRODUCTIONS, INC.
Subject: [Fwd: Re: (Fwd) Re: Theft of Monet's "Pourville Beach"]
I tried to look up information about Monet's 1882 Pourville stay. He of course produced several paintings over those months - and although I couldn't find a mention of multiple copies of "The Beach at Pourville" Monet as an artist is noted for producing many renderings of his individual works.
In the 1960's as a child visiting the Chicago Art Institute, I remember being bored with Monet. Look, another haystack! At the time I wondered why he didn't try painting different pictures.
Any way, the picture in question was aquired by a German Museum in 1906, it became the property of a Polish museum as Posen became part of Poland after WWI. This story appraises the value at $7,000,000 (US).
Voilą : News with AFP
http://www.voila.co.uk/News/afp/arts/000920154502.wbifr022.html
Monet nabbed from Polish museum was not insured
WARSAW (AFP) - - A seven-million-dollar Claude Monet painting, "The Beach at Pourville," nabbed this week from a Polish National Museum in western Poznan, was uninsured, officials said Wednesday. "The picture was guarded by our regular security personnel and by safety systems," Andrzej Wozinski, the interim head of the museum, was quoted as saying by the Polish news agency PAP.
"However, the National Museum in Poznan does not insure its exhibits - neither probably does any other museum in Poland. We simply can't afford to," he said.
The painting, valued by experts at seven million dollars (8.2 million euros) according to PAP, was discovered stolen by guards on Tuesday afternoon.
"Thieves cut the painting out of the frame and replaced it by a badly painted copy on cardboard," a spokesman for the Poznan municipal police, Jaroslaw Szemerluk, told AFP. "We still haven't determined exactly when it happened."
The oil, measuring 60 x 73 centimeters (24 by 29 inches), was painted in 1882 and had been bought in 1906 by the Poznan museum, while the city was part of Germany.
From: "wyxhsz" hsuzhong@public2.east.cn.net
Subject: Wang Haijun Is Arrested for Stealing and Destroying More than One Hundred Buddha Statues
Qianfudong, a cultural heritage site in China protected at provincial level, located at Huanglin County of Shanxi Province, is a cave temple built in 1095 (Song Dynasty). The cave temple was perfect and there were more than one thousand vivid Buddha Statues inside the temple before Wang Haijun and his accomplices entered it. At the night of May 18 this year, the group sneaked into the temple with tools and tied the protectors up. They cut down the heads of the statues with chisels in the darkness then absconded with the statue heads. Local police found in the morning of the following day that totally 89 heads of the statues were stolen and more statues were destroyed. Such brutal crime made local people very angry. Local police did their best for investigating the case. Recently, Wang Haijun and his accomplices are arrested in succession. Fortunately, the stolen statute heads have not yet been sold.