Museum Security website statistics; over 1000 hits per week

January 24, 2001

CONTENTS:




- Treasury deal to let museums scrap fees
- Stolen $410,000 Painting Found In Cleveland
(Man Says He Bought It At Flea Market)
- Yale Researching Provenance of Courbet Painting
- Yahoo faces new action over Nazi sales

Treasury deal to let museums scrap fees

BY DALYA ALBERGE, ARTS CORRESPONDENT
THE Government is preparing to allow all national galleries and museums in England to abolish charges without having to pay millions of pounds in VAT. The Natural History Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Merseyside collections are among public galleries that will be able to scrap charges of up to £9. Last night not all of them indicated that they would want to drop charges, but there will clearly be pressure on them to do so.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,2-72755,00.html

Stolen $410,000 Painting Found In Cleveland

Man Says He Bought It At Flea Market

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M., Posted 9:19 p.m. EST January 23, 2001
-- An oil painting stolen from a museum in New Mexico has been recovered in Cleveland. Oscar Berninghaus' "Pueblo Indian Woman of Taos" was taken from the Albuquerque Museum in 1989. An insurance firm paid the museum $410,000 for the painting's loss. The insurer technically owns the painting, but the museum is expected to buy it back. Assistant U.S. Attorney William Edwards in Cleveland says that it will be returned to the museum once arrangements can be made for safe shipping. He isn't releasing details of the recovery. Museum Director James Moore says that a gallery owner in Indiana had been offered the painting by a private dealer. The FBI later recovered the painting from the home of a man who says that he bought it at a flea market.
http://www.newsnet5.com/

To: securma@xs4allnl
From: Thomas Conroy thomas.conroy@yale.edu
Subject:

Yale Researching Provenance of Courbet Painting

CONTACT: Tom Conroy 203-432-1345
For Immediate Release: January 22, 2001

Yale Researching Provenance of Courbet Painting

New Haven, Conn. --The Yale University Art Gallery has received an ownership claim regarding an 1864 painting by Gustave Courbet on loan to the Art Gallery since 1981.
The claim was made by the son of the late Josephine Weinmann, a Jewish citizen who left Germany before World War II. It is claimed that she purchased the Courbet painting at auction in the 1930s, but left the country without it and never recovered it or received compensation.
The University is researching the claim and will make its findings public. In agreement with the painting's owner, Dr. Herbert Schaefer, the painting, "Le Grand Pont," will remain on display at Yale until the claim is resolved. "Many works of art owned by Jewish citizens and other Germans were lost or confiscated during the war," said Jock Reynolds, the Art Gallery's director. "We take ownership claims from that era seriously and we are working to determine the full provenance of the painting and the validity of this claim." The Art Gallery is a member of the American Association of Museums (AAM) and supports and complies with the AAM's recently adopted guidelines concerning the unlawful appropriation of objects during the Nazi era. Among the guidelines is that museums should make serious efforts to allocate time and funding to conduct research into objects in their collections whose provenance is incomplete and that may have changed hands during the Nazi era. In addition, Reynolds is a member of the Association of Art Museum Directors, whose task force in 1998 issued a report on Spoliation of Art during the Nazi/World War II Era (1933-45). The Art Gallery has been conducting research in Europe and in the United States to shed light on the painting's ownership history during the Holocaust era. Schaefer has cooperated with Yale's efforts. Schaefer has informed Yale that he purchased the painting from a dealer in 1938. He loaned "Le Grand Pont" and other works in his collection to Yale in 1981. "Le Grand Pont" was among 35 European genre and landscape paintings on loan to the Art Gallery from Schaefer that were exhibited in 1998. "Le Grand Pont" has been available to public viewers continuously since the late 1940s, initially in museum collections in Hamburg. It has also been loaned temporarily during this period to numerous special exhibitions about Courbet. "Le Grand Pont" has been included in a number of illustrious private art collections in addition to Schaefer's, including the Marczell de Nemes collection of Munich and Budapest, and the Leo Lewin and Max Silberberg collections in Breslau. The known provenance, or ownership history, of "Le Grand Pont" indicates that the painting belonged to Max Silberberg of Breslau in the 1930s, and was sold at auction at Galerie Paul Graupe on March 23, 1935. The identity of the buyer of the painting at the Graupe auction has never been confirmed and the exact whereabouts of the work in the period immediately following the sale are unknown at this time. The Art Gallery, the oldest university art museum in the western hemisphere, was founded in 1832 when John Trumbull gave 100 paintings to Yale. Its collections have grown to well over 80,000 objects from around the world, dating from ancient Egyptian times. The Art Gallery is open to the public for free throughout the year.

The known provenance of "Le Grand Pont" is attached.

# # #

From the Collection of Dr. Herbert Schaefer: Gustave Courbet (1819 -1877) Le Grand Pont, 1864

Known Provenance Collection Marczell de Nemes, Budapest (sold at auction, Galeries Manzi-Joyant, Paris, 1913, no.100, illus.) Collection M. Bousquet, Paris (as Le Grand Pont) Collection Mandelbaum, Berlin Collection Leo Lewin, Breslau Collection M. Silberberg, Breslau (sold by Graupe, Berlin, no.19 as La Promenade de Robinson) With Wolfgang Luck, Berlin (as Le Grand Pont)

Bibliography

Exhibited

Condition Report

September, 1 981, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven CT: The painting's overall condition appears excellent. The surface is stable with a slight crackle throughout as well as raised painting surfaces.

Treatment Report

May, 1996: The varnish was removed and a dammar varnish brush coat was applied. Areas judged to have been overcleaned were toned back with thin veils of dammar toned with drained oils. When retouches were completed, the richness of the surface seemed appropriate without a final spray coat of varnish.

Yahoo faces new action over Nazi sales

Internet giant Yahoo is facing fresh legal action over the sale of Nazi memorabilia on its website - this time from concentration camp survivors.
French representatives of Nazi camp inmates have filed a suit against Yahoo chairman Tim Koogle claiming a symbolic one franc in damages for what they claim is the American company's justification of war crimes. At the beginning of this month, Yahoo said it would forbid online sales of Nazi and Ku Klux Klan memorabilia as it did not want to profit from items that glorified or promoted hatred. That move followed the decision by a French court last November to order Yahoo to block French net surfers from accessing auction pages on American servers selling Nazi items.
http://itn.co.uk/news/20010123/business/06yahoo.shtml