Friday December 20, 2002
Two masterpieces by JMW Turner which were stolen while on loan abroad in 1994 have been recovered and are today back in the Tate Gallery's collection in London. The two works - Shade And Darkness: The Evening Of The Deluge, and Light And Colour (Goethe's Theory): The Morning after the Deluge - were taken from the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt while on loan to an exhibition on Goethe and the visual arts. A third artwork, German artist Caspar David Friedrich's Nebelschwaden, taken at the same time, is still missing. The Turner paintings, described as two of the great Romantic landscape artist's most significant works, are intact but were found without their original frames. However, the Tate's former director of programmes, Sandy Nairne, and the Tate's head of conservation, Roy Perry, have both seen the paintings and agree they are genuine and in good condition. Police have revealed that the paintings were found in Germany but are reluctant to talk further about the recovery for fear of hampering the chances of finding the Friedrich work.
The four people who carried out the theft were arrested in 1995 and convicted in Germany in 1999 but it was not until July 2000 that one of the paintings, Shade and Darkness, was recovered, even though the discovery was kept secret while investigations continued. Light and Colour was recovered on Monday, and both paintings were brought back to the UK on Wednesday. Insurers paid out £24m in 1995 and the title to the works passed to the insurers. But three years later Tate chiefs were concerned that with the paintings still not recovered, a large amount of cash was lying dormant in the insurance fund rather than being used for any purpose. So a deal was struck where the Tate bought back the insurers' title for £8m. Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota said today: "These two paintings are among Turner's most important works and, in their references to Goethe's colour theories, show him to be at the forefront of European intellectual inquiry." The works will go on display at Tate Britain from January 8, 2003.
images: http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/news/story/0,11711,863767,00.html
Tate retrieves its stolen Turners and makes £15m
By Dalya Alberge
How the recovery of two masterpieces was a gamble that paid off - richly A VENTURE into the murky world of stolen art has paid off richly for the Tate. It has recovered two missing Turner masterpieces after paying off middlemen, and made a £15 million profit on the insurance. Turner’s Shade and Darkness and Light and Colour were stolen eight years ago in a violent raid on a German gallery where they were on loan. The Tate likened the excitement of seeing them again to being reunited with long-lost friends. Sandy Nairne, the Tate’s former director of programming — and now director of the National Portrait gallery — co-ordinated the recovery. He said: “We had an absolute determination to see if these paintings could come back. It was an extraordinary moment to know they were safe. One great fear is not only that you might never find them but that they would be damaged.” The paintings are in good condition beyond “a slight abrasion or two”. Only their 19th-century frames are missing. They will go back on show at Tate Britain from January 8 after forensic checks by police. The robbery in July 1994 at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt took place half an hour after closing time. The thieves had hidden inside before knocking out one of the guards. Fingerprints were found on an emergency exit. As a condition of the loan from Tate, the paintings were each insured for £12 million. The insurers settled in full in April 1995. This left the insurers with rights to the paintings if they were ever found. But in 1998, the determined Tate took a gamble and paid £8 million to buy back the rights. The deal was approved by the Treasury, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the Charity Commission. In 1999, three robbers were convicted and given sentences ranging from three to 11 years, but the paintings were still not found. The Tate had its hopes of recovering the paintings dashed many times. Two conmen in Antwerp tried to sell poor fakes of the lost works. Two other conmen were arrested in Britain after falsely claiming to have stolen the paintings.
Shade and Darkness was recovered in July 2000, but no announcement was made for fear of jeopardising the recovery of the second painting. Only two of the Tate’s 12 trustees and two members of staff were informed. Light and Colour was recovered earlier this week after “negotiations and discussions”, Sir Nicholas Serota, the Tate director, said. He revealed that the gallery had spent £3.5 million on “a number of payouts” for information leading to the recovery and legal bills. Although he emphasised that they were not paying the thieves, he did concede that no one could be absolutely certain. The recovery operation, involving the Metropolitan Police, extended across Europe but both paintings were recovered in Germany. The Tate declined to be more specific. It dismissed reports that Serbian gangsters were involved. “It’s speculation, but it is quite likely that the paintings passed through more than one pair of hands,” Sir Nicholas said. He said that they had never given up on recovering the two works — Shade and Darkness, the Evening of the Deluge and Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) the Morning after the Deluge, Moses writing the Book of Genesis — painted in the 1840s when Turner was at the height of his powers and inspired by the biblical description of the flood. The recovery also turned out to be profitable. The £24 million insurance had gained about £10 million in interest. Deducting £8million for the rights, £3.5million for the recovery and a further sum of more than £7 million which was loaned for the purchase of the freehold of Tate’s store in Southwark leaves a cash profit of about £15 million. The Tate’s Trustees will decide with the Charity Commission how to use the balance.
In addition, the combined value of the paintings is now estimated at £40 million. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/
Stolen Turners rescued in Tate's secret deal
Fiachra Gibbons, arts correspondent Saturday December 21, 2002 The Guardian
The Tate spent £3.5m on an extraordinary cloak and dagger operation to return two of its greatest paintings by JMW Turner stolen from a German art gallery eight years ago, it emerged yesterday. In what was one of the most daring, if ultimately ham-fisted, art thefts of the last decade, Shade and Darkness - the Evening of the Deluge was stolen along with its companion picture Light and Colour - the Morning after the Deluge while on loan to the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt in July 1994. The contrast with the subtlety of the operation to recover them could not be more stark. When Turner painted his two late works about the Biblical flood, they were to show that evil had not entirely been washed from the earth by the great cataclysm. Last night it emerged that the Tate too had to descend into the moral and metaphorical murk he so brilliantly depicted to get the masterpieces back. A sizeable chunk of the cash they handed to the German authorities went to pay a chain of informers and middlemen for "information" on the paintings, now worth around £50m. But the Tate insists no ransom was paid nor were criminals rewarded, at least not directly by them or by the two former Metropolitan policemen they employed. Three petty thieves, with strong connections to the Serbian underworld, were jailed for the raid three years ago, but the gang refused to divulge who they had sold the paintings on to. A third, Wafting Mist, by the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich, is still missing. Even before the thieves were arrested in 1995, insurers and detectives saw the hand of Arkan, the Serbian warlord, pulling the strings. Significantly, the first of the paintings, Shade and Darkness, was handed to Sandy Nairne, the Tate's former director of programmes, in July 2000, six months after Arkan was assassinated in Belgrade. In a further twist, its retrieval was kept secret for two and a half years until yesterday. Only two of the Tate's board of 12 trustees knew.
Like its companion piece, Light and Colour, which was finally brought back to Britain on Wednesday, Shade and Darkness had been taken out of its frame but was otherwise undamaged. Both are being examined by forensic experts from Scotland Yard. Yesterday, the Tate's director Sir Nicholas Serota described the return, which came after a secretive deal brokered in Germany and meetings with German and Eastern European contacts, as the "best Christmas present imaginable ... I express everyone at the Tate's delight that these paintings are finally back in London. "These two paintings are among Turner's most important works and show him to be at the forefront of European intellectual inquiry." Their recovery is cause for double celebration. When the insurers paid out for the stolen works, the title would have passed to them if the paintings had ever been found. But the Tate gambled £8m buying the rights to the pictures back from their insurers four years ago, thus securing a notional profit of around £38m. The story of the paintings' disappearance and their odyssey through the German underworld - where they were reportedly used as collateral on smuggling deals - is nothing compared to the farrago of extortionists, forgers and chancers their disappearance brought out of the woodwork. Within a week of the theft, an extortionist contacted the Tate claiming to know of their whereabouts. Then in July last year, when the Tate had already got one of the paintings back, two conmen were arrested in Antwerp trying to pass off crude copies of the Turners in the hope of a reward. Last night the men who know most about what really happened to the Turners were keeping silent. Sandy Nairne, now director of the National Portrait Gallery, said they could not reveal anything that might endanger the recovery of the Friedrich painting, owned by the Kunsthalle in Hamburg.
"There were years when we heard nothing," he said.
He tracked every whisper about the works, flying to Frankfurt the morning after the theft - a classic "stay behind" operation in which the alarm was disabled by a gang member who hid in the gallery at closing time. "I saw the blank spaces on the walls that morning and it was a horrible feeling." Sir Nicholas added cryptically: "In recovering the second painting, we realised we would do well to maintain the links with the people who returned the first. But we still don't know whether the two were held by the same group ... It appears they may have passed through several hands." One thing is sure. Arkan, who led the most bloodthirsty private army of irregulars during the Balkan wars, never had these meditations on the perennial nature of evil hanging on the walls of his various mansions in Belgrade. "We don't think the paintings left Germany," Sir Nicholas said.
The paintings will be back on display at Tate Britain next month.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
Stolen salmon sculpture recovered
Michael Scott Vancouver Sun
A large mosaic sculpture of a wild salmon that was stolen from the plaza in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery in September 2001 has been recovered. The 1.75-metre sculpture was part of a charity art project called Wild Salmon City, in which 10 local artists decorated fibreglass forms of steelhead salmon. Sally Michener's version used several thousand small glass tiles. The work was purchased by The Vancouver Sun for $15,000, but was stolen Sept. 16, 2001, before it could be installed at the newspaper's downtown office. The sculpture, weighing more than 45 kilograms and with its original security chain and padlock still attached, was discovered in a downtown alley Monday night by local residents Kelly Swan and Emily Pagdin. Pagdin, an artist, recognized the salmon as a work of art and took the sculpture to her apartment. She used the key words Vancouver-Art-Stolen-Salmon to conduct an Internet search, and discovered that the sculpture had been missing for more than a year. "Someone had taken pretty good care of it," Pagdin said. "We used a little Windex to wipe it off, but it wasn't really dirty."
Pagdin contacted Daniel Burns of the Steelhead Society of B.C., the charity that commissioned the sculptures. Burns said he is hoping to collect the sculpture in the near future. Pagdin and her roommates, who lost most of their living room furniture in an apartment fire in October, are happy to have the fish for company in the meantime. "We're supposed to just hang on to it," she said, "and that's great because we don't have any other furniture right now."
http://www.canada.com/
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This week's top stories:
SERIOUS THREATS TO ENGLAND’S HISTORIC ENVIRONMENT, SAYS OFFICIAL REPORT
LONDON. English Heritage has released its first “State of the Historic Environment” report. It will become an annual publication. The detailed study argues that England’s historic environment is “a massively underexploited asset, which is under attack from all sides.” Threats include “a skills crisis, incongruous development, half a century of unsympathetic agricultural policy, inappropriate tax regimes, climate change and natural erosion, and of course, a lack of funds.” http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/article.asp?idart=10654
BRIDGE THOSE CULTURAL DIFFERENCES
LONDON. Plans have been finalised for the rebuilding of the famous 16th-century Mostar bridge, blown up by Bosnian Croat forces in November 1993 during the 1992-95 conflict, and it is scheduled to be complete by the end of this year. http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/article.asp?idart=10653
RETRENCH AS BOOM GOES BUST
LOS ANGELES. The art museum-building boom has been subsiding since 2000, but until recently symptoms of decline have been suppressed. Now the problems are surfacing beyond the boardrooms. The latest and most conspicuous example is Los Angeles Country Museum of Art’s (LACMA) decision to shelve its $300-million expansion by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. “The economic situation has deteriorated so significantly that it was impossible to continue,” says LACMA chairman Walter L. Weisman. http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/article.asp?idart=10652
ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH: SECRETS OF SUCCESS AMIDST THE GLOOM
MIAMI. The new Art Basel Miami Beach was a rousing, reassuring, definitive success.The location was central, a stroll to the hotel strip; the 200,000 square feet of convention centre was commodious, even elegant. Here were 160 hand-picked galleries from around the world with a whole range of hot stuff from 1890s Vuillards to work made on the spot by some 25-year-old. An estimated 30,000 visitors (at $15 entry) came through the fair on its Wednesday-Sunday run and 7,000 supposedly “exclusive” people attended the invite-only “Vernissage. http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/article.asp?idart=10651
HUNGRY FOR ART WITH MORE HUMANITY
One would almost think we had returned to the good old days of scandals at the Paris salons, of Manet and Baudelaire, Vauxcelles and Matisse. Or perhaps it was ever thus. At this year’s Turner Prize, the British culture minister, Kim Howells, took the opportunity provided at the end of the exhibition to write on a card pinned to the wall: “If this is the best British artists can produce, then British art is lost. It is cold, mechanical, conceptual bullshit.” Some people began to wonder whether Tate was paying Mr Howells when the minister posed for the papers the next day in front of some rather pleasing but hardly sensibility-taxing landscapes of his own. http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/article.asp?idart=10650
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