April 14, 2001
CONTENTS:
- Shutdown of Paris museums leaves tourists disappointed
- Judge Accepts Plan to Settle Suit Against Auction Houses
- Auction houses tighten belts, and hope that nobody notices
- Montreal Museum uses Net to trace artworks
Shutdown of Paris museums leaves tourists disappointed
By Hugh Schofield
14 April 2001
Tourists wishing to avoid the gloom of foot-and-mouth disease in Britain with an Easter break in Paris were left disappointed yesterday. A week- long strike by museum workers shut down the Louvre and Orsay museums, as well as the Arc de Triomphe and parts of the Chateau de Versailles. There is a strong chance that the action will continue throughout this weekend.
Union leaders seemed to be unhappy at the state of talks they held with the Ministry of Culture yesterday. They will hold a further series of meetings this morning to decide on the next course of action. The past week has shown that only a handful of picketers is enough to shut down a tourist attraction. The strike is over the implementation of a 35-hour working week, but unions are demanding the problem of staff shortages is addressed first. Twenty per cent of rooms in the Louvre are shut at any one time because of a lack of guards. Disruption on the railways continues after two weeks of strikes, and this week mid-wives and local transport-workers have also downed tools in search of better pay and conditions. The mass lay-offs at Marks & Spencer and Danone, the French food giant, have added to the gloom, along with a decline in predicted financial growth for this year from 3 per cent to 2.6 per cent. "France has the blues again," Alain Duhamel, the political commentator, said yesterday. As well as the Louvre, other victims of the strike were the Picasso museum in Paris and the Chateau de Chaumont on the Loire. Only some galleries in the Rodin museum were open. Worse news for visitors is that the high level of the Seine means pleasure-boat trips are banned. And the forecast for Saturday is for rain and snow.
http://news.independent.co.uk/
Judge Accepts Plan to Settle Suit Against Auction Houses
By CAROL VOGEL and RALPH BLUMENTHAL
Resolving a last-minute dispute that threatened to derail a settlement, a federal judge gave final approval yesterday to the $512 million agreement to end a class-action lawsuit by customers who said they were cheated in a price-fixing conspiracy by Sotheby's and Christie's. In a reference to the convolutions of the long-running lawsuit, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District Court in Manhattan said that "life imitates art," adding that the final stretch of the litigation had "taken on a decidedly Dickensian air." Although the door was left open for a possible appeal, the ruling effectively ends a lengthy and bitter lawsuit brought by some 130,000 buyers and sellers who accused the auction houses of colluding on fees and other business practices. Language worked out earlier this week — and accepted by Judge Kaplan yesterday — provided that buyers and sellers who would collect from the settlement would not be barred from suing in the United States over transactions that took place abroad. Yesterday's settlement covers domestic transactions. The suit grew out of a four-year criminal antitrust investigation by the Justice Department that heated up last year when the former chief executive of Christie's provided documents detailing how officials of the two companies illegally met to set commission rates and exchange customer information. In that investigation, Diana D. Brooks, former president and chief executive of Sotheby's Holdings Inc., pleaded guilty to violating antitrust laws and agreed to testify against her former boss, A. Alfred Taubman, Sotheby's largest shareholder and its former chairman. Mr. Taubman remains a target of a grand jury investigation. He denies any wrongdoing; no charges have been brought. In September, a settlement was reached calling for each auction house to pay $412 million in cash and the rest in discount certificates to be used against future sales. Mr. Taubman agreed to pay $156 million of Sotheby's part of the settlement. In November, Judge Kaplan initially approved the settlement. But a sticking point was whether customers who bought at auctions overseas as well as in the United States would be compensated only for auctions that took place in America and would give up their right to sue for transactions that took place abroad. Last month, Sotheby's and Christie's agreed to set aside $7 million in discount certificates for this group. But the judge said the arrangement did not address concerns over the loss of the right to sue over foreign claims in the United States.
http://www.nytimes.com/
Auction houses tighten belts, and hope that nobody notices
Sotheby’s and Christie’s are having to cut costs around the globe and corners across the board.
full story at:
http://www.msnbc.com/news/559005.asp?cp1=1
Museum uses Net to trace artworks
ALAN HUSTAK
The Gazette
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts has put 14 paintings from its permanent collection on a Web site in an attempt to find out more about them. The artworks have gaps in their provenance and the museum wants to be certain none of them was stolen from their European owners during World War II. It plans to put a total of 150 of its works of art on the site. Museums and art institutions around the world are trying to make certain they are legally entitled to own the works they hang in their galleries. Among the first artworks to be posted on the Web site www.mbam.qc.ca/ provenance/index.html are a view of St. Mark's in Venice by Canaletto, Maurice Utrillo's painting of the Guillaume Gate at Chartres, and a study of the Virgin and Child attributed to Van Balen. "We began by looking into about 350 suspicious works in our collection," museum spokesman Wanda Palmer said. "Fifty of them were immediately eliminated because they were donated to the museum before 1915. We have clear title to about half of the remaining 300, and the other 150 will go up on the Web site." The museum is following the lead of the Art Gallery of Ontario and Ottawa's National Gallery in posting questionable artworks or items with gaps in their ownership relating to the years of the Third Reich, when treasures were looted by German authorities and invading Allied armies. Yesterday, the National Gallery returned one of its art treasures to China. The gallery discovered that a Chinese sculpture from 700 AD might have been stolen from a gallery in London in 1970. No one has filed claims for any of the artworks in the Montreal museum. "We can not, however, say for certain there are no problems," Palmer said. "That is why we are investigating the background of the works we're not 100 per cent certain about."
http://www.montrealgazette.com/