October 20, 2000

Museums with high end security systems

To Whom it May Concern --
My name is Stephanie Juhasz, marketing manager for the International Security Conference and Exposition (ISC EXPO). I am in the process of planning some security tours in differenct parts of the U.S. for 2001. I am sure that there are many museums that have very "high-end" security systems in place, however, I know that they will not be advertising these systems anywhere. Would someone be willing to help me with obtaining a list of museums that have "high end" security systems, that might be willing to host a tour in there facility.
I would appreciate any information you could provide.
Best Regards,
Stephanie
ISC EXPO/Home Automation
ph:203/840-5501; fax: 203/840-9501
mailto:sjuhasz@reedexpo.com

From: "Artprotech international" info@artprotech.nl
Subject:

STEDDIE for art.

Ever heard about STEDDIE ?.
It's - The bodyguard - for art.
Patented and made in Holland.
If you have time, please visit our website http://www.artprotech.nl/start.htm
For more information about STEDDIE, than you can also call Mr. A.Hollander of Instituut Collectie Nederland:+ 31 70- 3073831
Thank you.
Kind regards ,
The Artprotech international team

From: Chris Stanley C.Stanley@nhm.ac.uk
Subject:

Catastrophes and Catastrophe Management

An International Congress 'Catastrophes and Catastrophe Management in Museums' is to be held in Sarajevo, Bosnia Herzegovina, 17-21 April, 2001.
Further information and registration forms can be found on web site:
http://www.sarajevo-congress2001.org

Chris J Stanley BSc PhD MIMM CGeol F.Min.Soc. FGS,
Deputy Head of Department of Mineralogy
Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, LONDON SW7 5BD,UK
Tel. +44 (0)20 7942 5627 Fax. +44 (0)20 7942 5537
Museum web site at: http://www.nhm.ac.uk
Personal Web site at: http://www.nhm.ac.uk/mineralogy/stanley/stanley.htm

Perplexing case of the vanishing Wyeth

N. C. Wyeth's depiction of the White House being built may have gone the way of the Pennsylvania Railroad, which commissioned it.
By Eils Lotozo INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
When the White House marks its bicentennial next month, the festivities will include a gala birthday dinner, a reenactment of President John Adams' arrival at the half-finished residence, and the unveiling of a new painting of the iconic building by James "Jamie" Wyeth, son of Andrew. But there's another Wyeth work that organizers would dearly love to make part of the celebrations - one that probably once hung right here in Philadelphia. Commissioned by the Pennsylvania Railroad and painted in 1930 by art dynasty patriarch and Brandywine Valley resident N.C. Wyeth, it's a rare image of George Washington in front of a White House still shrouded in scaffolding.

There's just one problem.

The painting, a reproduction of which was pictured on Richard Nixon's 1971 White House Christmas card and could be worth as much as $1 million, has vanished. "We first started looking for it 10 or 11 years ago, and our interest was renewed because of the 200th anniversary," said White House curator Betty Monkman. "We are trying to contact various people and getting various leads, but so far nothing has turned up." "[N.C. Wyeth] is the only famous artist that has painted a picture of the White House under construction," said Hugh Sidey, a retired Time magazine Washington correspondent and now the president of the White House Historical Association, which is planning the bicentennial events and commissioned the new Jamie Wyeth painting. "We would like to know where [the picture] is," said Sidey. "And ultimately we would like to buy it and include it in the White House collection." White House devotees aren't the only ones looking for the piece, which was part of a series commissioned from Wyeth, then America's premier illustrator, by the once mighty Pennsylvania Railroad. Meant to appear on posters illustrating the theme "Building the Nation," there were supposed to have been 12 images, though only four are known to have been completed. Lauren Smith, curator at the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, Maine, yearned to include the painting in a show that's currently up at the museum called "One Nation: Patriots and Pirates Portrayed by N. C. Wyeth and Jamie Wyeth." (A smaller version of the show will be on view in the Senate rotunda in Washington in January.) "Jamie [Wyeth] had just painted the bicentennial portrait of the White House, and we really wanted the juxtaposition of the grandfather and the grandson," said Smith. While a few of the posters made from N.C. Wyeth's White House scene still exist, Smith had to content herself with displaying the Nixon Christmas card. Because N.C. Wyeth's original artwork often ended up in the possession of those who commissioned it, the White House's Monkman thinks it likely the elusive painting, titled Building the First White House, Washington, D.C., 1798, once adorned the offices of the Pennsylvania Railroad. The first modern corporation, and the largest company in the United States until World War I, the railroad giant (which had its headquarters for many years at Broad Street Station, across from City Hall) became Penn Central and then, in a massive reorganization in 1976, Conrail. According to Monkman, the last faint trace of the painting appeared in 1976, in an appendix to a list of items being turned over to the new Conrail. "It's listed as having "minor surface damage," said Monkman. "A print would be framed under glass, so it seemed that this would have been the original painting." Yet its whereabouts have never been established. Monkman thinks there's a good possibility that someone who worked for the company simply took the work home, or, perhaps, was given it as a retirement gift. "Maybe someone has it and doesn't realize the significance of it," she speculated. But Christine Podmaniczky, the associate curator of the N.C. Wyeth collections at the Brandywine River Museum, is skeptical of that theory. As part of an effort to produce a complete catalog of the artist's work, she has put serious effort into tracking the four original paintings Wyeth composed for the Pennsylvania Railroad. She has found no trace of them.
"These four paintings have never surfaced," said Podmaniczky, Yet the value of N.C. Wyeth's paintings has been soaring since the 1960s. In recent auctions the artist's canvases have reportedly fetched prices in the $1 million range.
"People have been selling right and left," she said. "If they had been hanging in someone's office or home, at least one of them or several of them would have come to market by now." Podmaniczky, who has a list of 200 Wyeth works she would like to locate, wonders if the Pennsylvania Railroad quartet might not have met the same fate as a cache of Wyeth originals owned by the now defunct Scribner's magazine, which had been an avid commissioner of the artist's dramatic illustrations. Said the curator, "The Brandywine museum has an old Scribner's card file that records a number of N.C. Wyeth works. And across a lot of those cards someone wrote, 'destroyed by fire.' "
http://web.philly.com/content/inquirer/2000/10/18/magazine/WYETH18.htm

Art Attacker: It Was My 1st Amendment Right

By MICHELE McPHEE
Daily News Staff Writer
A retired teacher charged with defacing the controversial Madonna painting displayed at the Brooklyn Museum of Art last year had a First Amendment right to vandalize the work, his lawyer argued yesterday.
"It was his response to an obscenity against his beloved Virgin Mary," said lawyer Bruce Barket as Dennis Heiner's trial opened in Brooklyn Criminal Court yesterday. "He was offended by the nature of that painting, and that's what the museum wanted."
In December, Heiner, 72, smuggled a hand-lotion bottle filled with white latex paint into the museum, faked a heart attack, and smeared the elephant-dung-decorated painting.
It marked the strongest reaction against the work, which sparked weeks of protests and an effort by Mayor Giuliani to yank the museum's city funding. Prosecutors argued yesterday that Heiner's actions weren't protected by his right to free speech.
Heiner did not target the "Sensation" exhibit as a whole, but just one painting, noted Assistant District Attorney Noel Downey.
"He might have had an argument if he emptied the shark tank or kicked the bloody head across the floor," Downey told jurors, referring to two of the exhibit's grislier works.
"He didn't," Downey said. "He attacked one painting."
Heiner is charged with criminal mischief, a misdemeanor.
http://www.nydailynews.com/2000-10-18/News_and_Views/Crime_File/a-84732.asp

Boston museum in pact to keep refugees' painting

By Joan Gralla, Reuters, 10/19/00
NEW YORK -- The heirs of a French Jewish art dealer have agreed to partly donate, partly sell the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston an 18th-century Italian painting that the museum purchased in 1992, officials said Thursday. Unlike a number of art works in public collections that have been found to belong to Holocaust families, "Adoration of the Magi" by Corrado Giaquinto, which in 1990 sold for about $500,000, was not stolen by the Nazis. In this case, the heirs of Federico Gentili di Giuseppe, who died of natural causes in 1940 in Paris, could not claim the contents of his estate because they had fled France due to the Nazi occupation, Dawn Griffin, a spokeswoman for the Boston museum, told Reuters.
Gentili di Giuseppe's collection was sold in April 1941 under order of a French court. But in June 1999, the Court of Appeals in Paris nullified that auction, ruling that the heirs had been unable at the time of the 1941 sale to assert their rights to the estate because of the Nazi occupation of France. Since February 2000, the Gentili di Giuseppe heirs have been talking with the Boston museum about how to handle the circa 1725 Giaquinto painting, the only one the museum had by this artist.
The family wanted the painting to remain on display at the museum partly because its members took refuge in Boston and Canada during the Second World War, Griffin said.
She declined to disclose how much the museum paid the heirs or how much they donated.
"The restitution of artwork from the Holocaust and World War II-era is one of the most important issues that museums are dealing with today," said Malcolm Rogers, Ann and Graham Gund director of the MFA.
The arrangement that the Gentili di Giuseppe family reached with the Boston museum echoes one they concluded in June with the Art Institute of Chicago over a 1630 sculpture by Francesco Mochi.
http://www.globe.com/news/daily/19/refugee_painting.htm