Historic buildings are sitting targets for thieves who plunder the past
Epidemic of thefts is feeding the boom in home renovation
Nicholas Pyke and Robin Stummer Saturday March 1, 2003 The Guardian
There is a fierce lion's head on the cover of Simon Jenkins' popular guide to England's Thousand Best Churches. Dating from the 12th century, it is well worth seeing. Sadly this is now impossible without a copy of the book: the original at St John's, Adel, near Leeds, has been stolen, victim of a plague of architectural thefts sweeping the country. Next week the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) will warn that churches and historic houses have never been at so much risk as crooks target decorative fixtures and fittings to feed the home renovation boom. Such thefts have reached "epidemic" proportions, according to the society, Britain's oldest heritage conservation group.
Last year there were 3,600 thefts from churches alone, with statues, fonts and even whole altars vanishing. Just before Christmas Wells Cathedral lost a priceless alabaster relief of the Ascension and Prinknash Abbey found that a statue of the Madonna had been removed. Both were from the 15th century. National Churchwatch, the insurance- backed security adviser, says thieves appear to be using reputable church guides as crime manuals. Houses and gardens have also been hit. There are no national figures, but fireplaces, doors, troughs and urns are reported missing every day, particularly from gardens and unoccupied buildings. Architectural looting is scarcely new. It is 70 years since William Randolph Hearst outraged public opinion by destroying the medieval Bradenstoke Priory, in Wiltshire. The newspaper magnate, the model for Orson Welles's Citizen Kane, used the doors, windows and even the bricks to "restore" his various properties, including a castle in Wales.
Black market
But the SPAB believes that the black-market trade in architectural fixtures and fittings is flourishing as never before, with homeowners scouring car boot sales and fireplace shops for period pieces. On Monday it launches a special edition of its journal to highlight the issue and cites cases ranging from the theft of an ancient farmhouse door at Eastleigh, Hampshire, to the loss of a 10in statue of a knight at Farleigh Hungerford Castle in Somerset, one of Britain's most important medieval fortifications. While leading auction houses and salvage firms adhere to a strict code of practice, the SPAB, founded by William Morris in 1877, wants a clampdown on the illegal junkyard business which it says is partly to blame. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport is backing efforts by Liberal Democrat MP Richard Allan and the Cambridge archaeologist Professor Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn to ban the resale of any culturally significant goods removed from their original setting. "Architectural thefts have reached epidemic proportions," said Matthew Slocombe of the SPAB. "No historic building is safe. Some buildings are stripped of their roofing materials on a regular basis. Many, many of the historic buildings are robbed of their fireplaces. It is now quite unusual to find an important but empty historic building with all its bits surviving." According to Detective Sergeant Vernon Rapley, head of the art and antiquities unit of the Metropolitan police, thefts have reached a new peak. The most vulnerable features are fireplaces, closely followed by the pineapples and lions on gateposts. But specialists continue to target high-value items, leaving damage and destruction in their wake. Part of the problem, he said, was the lack of a national police database of stolen antiquities. Nick Tolson of Churchwatch said a gang had been targeting 15th- and 16th-century artworks in the south-west, taking tomb brasses, a panel from a medieval rood screen and an ancient altar cloth, as well as the carvings from Wells and Prinknash. He said there was a thriving market in South America where the super-rich like to decorate their homes with ecclesiastical features.
"It's the easiest pickings," said James Hill of Trace magazine, which circulates details of stolen property. "To protect property in gardens and churches is very difficult." Mr Allan, a member of the all-party archaeology group, suggested that rising affluence is one of the biggest threats to architectural heritage. "What protected buildings in the past is that people didn't have the money to do things with the property.The more economic activity, the more money and will to invest, the more dangerous it is from a conservation point of view."
·Churches' vanishing treasure
A gang of specialist thieves has been targeting medieval church monuments in Somerset and the south-west. Here are some of the treasures that have vanished in the past eight months
· December A 15th century relief sculpture of the Ascension is taken from Wells cathedral
· December the church at Chedzoy, Somerset, loses a 15th century gold altar cloth
· November A 16th century Madonna and Child and a 15th century stone knight are stolen from Farleigh Hungerford castle in Somerset
· September A 15th century statue of two draped females goes missing at Yetminster, Dorset
· November A 14th century wooden statue of the Madonna and Child is removed while the monks at Prinknash abbey in Gloucestershire are at prayer
· September The church at North Petherton, Somerset, loses an openwork panel from its medieval rood screen
· September Thieves take a 13th century carving from the wall of St Julian's church in Wellow, Somerset
· August A 700-year-old misericord seat is removed from St Mary's at Fairford, Gloucestershire
· June A church in north Somerset finds two stone fragments missing from 13th century tombs, a knight's foot resting on a dog and a weathered owl
· June A 15th century brass grave monument depicting a woman in medieval costume is taken from a Somerset church.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
Council accused of producing a 'thief's guide' to art show
TOM GORDON
COUNCIL officials have been accused of producing "a thief's guide" to a multi-million-pound art exhibition in Glasgow after it put details of a new hi-tech security system into the public domain. The council's culture and leisure service, which runs all of the city's museums, last week made its security plans for the forthcoming Art Treasures of Kelvingrove show freely available to all in a planning application. The new £180,000 system is designed to protect more than 200 of the finest pieces from the city's Kelvingrove museum when they go on show at the McLellan Galleries in Sauchiehall Street next month. The documentation includes colour photographs of all exits from the exhibition, descriptions of locks, and engineers' drawings showing the location of CCTV cameras, infra-red sensors, and pressure detectors. Last night, one councillor said making such a level of detail available was absolutely crazy. John Mason, leader of the council's SNP group, said he was amazed officials had not been more careful when they put together the public file for the planning application.
"It sounds like a thief's guide," he said. "I would have thought we would have said the minimum possible about the security. To tell the thieves how we are planning to catch them is verging on the ridiculous." Two years ago, the council suffered the theft of a £40,000 medieval tapestry from under the noses of security staff at the Burrell Collection. It later emerged the piece had been fixed to a wall using only Velcro, and the council had been warned nine months earlier that the Burrell's security was out of date. The tapestry was recovered four months later from a rubbish bin after an anonymous tip- off. In 1992, a £150,000 painting by L S Lowry was stolen from the Kelvingrove Art Gallery during a £25-a-head charity ball attended by 300 people. The oil painting, which had been in the gallery for 40 years, was recovered intact six months later. However, the theft raised serious questions about security at the gallery. Paintings by Rembrandt, Raeburn, the Glasgow Boys and the Scottish colourists, including Fergusson, Peploe, and Cadell will be among those transferring to the McLellan for two-and-a-half years while Kelvingrove closes for a £26m refurbishment. The planning application, which describes the work as "installation of new security system including CCTV, intruder detection (and) door access", was made because the galleries are in a B-listed building. Alexandra Smith, operations manager with the Art Loss Register in London, which helps recover stolen art, was startled by Glasgow's actions. She said: "It's very rare that museums actually publish all of their security details, I must admit. It's entirely possible that they won't have mentioned every position of every item.
"I would like to hope that they haven't, because art thieves are now getting very sophisticated." The council's culture and leisure service made the planning application. John Lynch, senior vice- convener of the cultural and leisure services committee, said: "It is ridiculous to believe that thieves would find it easier to steal paintings if they knew where cameras and sensors were. "The data protection act obliges us to reveal the presence of cameras. This system will be the most up-to-date possible."
http://www.theherald.co.uk/
Did Money Motivate an Art Thief? Dali Would've Understood
By SHAILA K. DEWAN
There have been enough forgeries of Salvador Dali's work to fill a book, scare off scholars and inspire one New Yorker to devote a substantial part of his life to sorting the real Dalis from the fakes. But most of the forgeries have been in the form of prints of Dali's famous paintings, art experts said yesterday. Few, if any, were like the one found Saturday on Rikers Island: an imitation replacing an original that hung for years in the lobby of the men's jail. "Clearly, someone thought about it in advance," said Sharon Flescher, the executive director of the International Foundation for Art Research, which frequently consults on questions of fraud and ownership. "That's an intriguing aspect of this. And it's doubly ironic that it happens to be Salvador Dali, when he's an artist whose works are so often faked that we don't even accept Salvador Dali works for review in our art authentication service anymore." Ms. Flescher marveled that such a large work — it is four feet by three feet — could disappear. It was taken from a locked display case that faced a booth that was staffed 24 hours a day, said Thomas Antenen, a spokesman for the city's Department of Correction. "It's fairly obvious that this is somebody who had some form of clearance to Rikers Island," Mr. Antenen said. The piece looks nothing like the iconic Dali oil paintings done at the height of Surrealism, with their melting watch faces and distended bodies. It is a later work, dashed off in a couple of hours in 1965. As the story goes, Dali was due to appear at Rikers for a talk with the prisoners, but he took ill. With reporters waiting in the lobby of his hotel, Dali, famously reluctant to disappoint the press, took India ink to paper and created a gestural evocation of the Crucifixion. In those later years, Dali was quick to license reproductions, and even signed thousands of blank pieces of paper. Some of those were later used for forgeries, said Lee Catterall, the author of "The Great Dali Art Fraud and Other Deceptions." "It was totally unethical," Mr. Catterall said, "but he was just interested in making money." Whoever stole the Rikers piece, appraised at $175,000 in 1985, probably had similar interests. But the thief may find it difficult to cash in, at least on the open market, because the incident has received so much notice.
Bernard Ewell, an appraiser who has valued the collection of the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla., said most art was stolen with the intention of ransoming it. Mr. Ewell said the work was probably worth about the same amount as it was in 1985, and that it would bring only 7 to 10 percent of its value on the black market. But, he added, "I can imagine Dali being quite pleased that someone was interested enough in it to steal it."
http://www.nytimes.com/
Many contributed to Fraktur’s return
Monday, March 3, 2003
Our past is precious to all of us, and the York County Heritage Trust expresses its appreciation to everyone involved in the speedy recovery of four historic documents stolen from the York County Historical Society Museum during the week of Jan. 13. We thank Ray Mead, who saw the stolen items listed on the eBay auction Web site, and York City Police Cpl. Kim Hibner for responding immediately to our call. Thank you to Det. Scott Hose and his colleagues for coordinating the recovery efforts among the York City Police, eBay, the Baltimore Police Department, the antique man in Baltimore who had unknowingly purchased the stolen documents and York County Heritage Trust.
It was an outstanding example of cooperation among various departments, organizations and individuals to recover and return the documents to the Trust. The 1846 Fraktur was taken from a frame secured to a wall, and the three other documents were stolen by prying open two locked cases in the same gallery during regular operating hours of the museum. York County Heritage Trust is constantly reviewing its security procedures and will take steps to improve them. It should be noted the Trust is currently wrapping up its “Shared Past, Shared Future” Capital Campaign, which addresses enhancing security in all the Trust’s properties.
Our thanks go out to all those who made the recovery of these priceless pieces of York’s heritage possible and to all those who visit and support the York County Heritage Trust.
DELAINE TOERPER INTERIM PRESIDENT/CEO
Panel on Nazi Art Theft Fell Short
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
A Clinton administration commission on Nazi plunder failed to examine critical records pertaining to traffic in looted art before, during and after World War II, some leading scholars who worked on the inquiry now say. The experts, historians and economists who worked from 1998 to 2000 on the panel, the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States, say that as a result it came up with a report that broke little new ground and failed to come to grips with the question of how much stolen art passed through American controls. Several of the panel's leaders defend the work or say that shortcomings were results of lack of time, but in many quarters the report is perceived as a lost opportunity to provide definitive answers to questions that in many ways are being asked more now than anytime since the days just after World War II. "The tents were folded much to the chagrin of many of us," said former Representative Benjamin A. Gilman, Republican of New York, and one of the commission's 21 members. "I felt we should have been doing much more than we did." Objections to the panel's work were so strong that some staff members said they contemplated writing a minority report. Their comments, and similar ones from leading experts in the field, were not publicly expressed when the commission reported its findings and came out in recent interviews about the search for missing Nazi plunder nearly 60 years after World War II. Stuart E. Eizenstat, the former deputy Treasury secretary who urged the panel's creation and served as a member, acknowledged that the report did not go as far as he had hoped. "Lack of time was a major problem," he said. He added that the panel's mandate had proved too narrow and that its work had fallen short of what similar inquiries had uncovered in Europe. The chairman of the commission, Edgar M. Bronfman, president of the World Jewish Congress and the former chairman of Seagram, praised the overall work of the panel, which wound up two and a half years of work in December 2000 with a 313-page report, "Plunder and Restitution." But he said missing records and a lack of time made the inquiry into looted art difficult. "We didn't do as good a job as we could have," he said, adding that the commission had more success with its inquiries into missing financial assets. The report concluded that American authorities in Europe had made "extraordinary efforts" to find, safeguard and return art and other victims' assets but that their work had been compromised by conflicting wartime and occupation priorities and occasional acts of thievery by G.I.'s. Yet the report did not, in the words of one of the panel's experts, Helen B. Junz, a former Treasury official, examine "the ways art was laundered into the U.S." Legislation creating the commission was passed by Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton in June 1998 while world attention focused on efforts to settle victims' long- dormant wartime claims against Swiss banks and insurance companies.
The panel's mission was to "conduct a thorough study and develop a historical record of the collection and disposition" of artworks, gold and other assets of Holocaust victims that came through American jurisdiction and "review comprehensively any research by others." The report noted that as early as 1946 the State Department had notified museums and other institutions that looted art was entering the United States. But the panel did not examine how museums responded. It also said that it had only preliminarily investigated "the possibility that looted art from Europe was trafficked through Latin America" and that this was among the issues it left "for others to pursue." A scattering of artworks stolen from Jews and other victims of the Germans have turned up recently in some American museums. But how many of the estimated 10,000 to 100,000 works of museum quality that are still missing may have found their way into the country through Customs and the mails through Latin America, Canada or other channels has long remained uncharted despite State Department reports in the 1940's and 50's by a zealous art tracker, Ardelia Hall, and voluminous additional documentation. The National Archives hold more than 50 million records relating to World War II and the Holocaust, including more than a million pages of American occupation records about recovered cultural property. In recent interviews scholars who worked on the panel said that rather than exhaust these channels, it focused on a search for possible American misdeeds, and it found few besides an episode of looting by soldiers from a train of Hungarian gold. Marc J. Masurovsky, director of research of the commission's section on gold and co-founder of the Washington-based Holocaust Art Restitution Project, which conducts research into wartime losses, said he had expected the panel to investigate "anything that came into the U.S., legally or illegally and all research done by others." But, he said, "90 percent of what we did was reinvent the wheel," restating well-known historical facts. Aside from short general visits by staff members to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Getty, he said, museum holdings and records were not scrutinized. And while Congress had not given the commission authority to investigate private enterprises, "we could have worked around that" by studying federal import and auction records, Mr. Masurovsky said. Some of the disaffected staff members, he said, considered writing a stronger minority report. The final report, he said, "could be construed as akin to a whitewash."
Carried out as he and other staff members had urged, he said, the investigation would have examined the Ardelia Hall records, European auction records and other investigative archives. But Mr. Eizenstat, who now heads the international trade and finance practice at Covington & Burling, a law firm in Washington, and is the author of a recent book on Nazi looting, said the commission's mandate limiting its inquiries to assets flowing through official United States control had been overly restrictive. He called for another international conference on the issue like one held in 1998 and for creation of a new foundation to continue the commission's work. Lynn H. Nicholas, a research adviser to the panel and author of the 1994 book "The Rape of Europa," which became a touchstone of art-looting scholarship, said the commission "started out with an agenda." "They were so anxious to find smoking guns in the misdeeds of the U.S.," she said, particularly G.I.'s stealing booty as commanders turned a blind eye. Gerald Feldman, a professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley and an expert on financial and insurance issues, said the panel "had some good scholarship but didn't do anything with it." He deplored the decision not to issue a multivolume comprehensive study of Nazi looting as documented by American authorities, similar to reports by the Swiss and Austrians. Instead, after the scholars weighed in, "the original research was distilled by nice young people who wrote the report," he said. "It was a quickie." In the end, he said, "this was a commission set up because they needed to set up a commission." Kenneth L. Klothen, the commission's executive director and the son of Jewish refugees from Nazism, said, "If documents had been available, we definitely would have gone after them." Mr. Klothen, former counsel to the Corporation for National Service, the federal agency that runs programs like AmeriCorps, said many could not be found. He said the panel had been handicapped by limited time and had no power to compel information. But he said efforts were under way to continue the commission's work as a citizens' commission constituted as a private nonprofit foundation. Separately, Lucille A. Roussin, a lawyer, art historian and archaeologist who was deputy research director of the commission's art and cultural property section, said the panel should have searched harder for government records documenting the traffic in looted art. She was dismissed from her $55,000-a-year position after seven months and later sued in federal court in Washington, charging age discrimination. Dr. Poussin, who was 58 at the time, later settled her suit for $32,000. Mr. Bronfman wrote her a letter praising her work.
In her complaint Dr. Roussin contended that the director of the commission's art unit, Jonathan Petropoulos, had obstructed her inquiries into the Metropolitan Museum and others and had blocked her efforts to inquire into Nazi-era transactions by the Wildenstein family of art dealers. Dr. Petropoulos, professor of history at Claremont McKenna College in California and author of two books on Nazi art thefts, praised the commission's work and denied any effort to inhibit Dr. Roussin's inquiries. He said the commission had collected about 1,000 pages on the Wildensteins. "There was nothing conclusive," he said. The Wildensteins have consistently denied any art dealings with Nazi authorities in France. Mr. Petropoulos said that since leaving the commission he had become a consultant to the Wildensteins in another lawsuit involving Nazi-era claims.
http://www.nytimes.com/
Fuchs quits over endless delays to renovations
Stedelijk Museum of Contemporary Art falls victim to serious planning blight
By Martin Bailey
AMSTERDAM. What is going on at the Stedelijk, Amsterdam’s municipal modern art museum and once one of the most dynamic in Europe? Its director, Rudi Fuchs (60), resigned in January and its general director is also leaving. The system of dual leadership, introduced in 2000, is likely to be scrapped and the museum will revert to being run by a single overall director.
“I am not bitter and I was not pushed out, but I have no wish to spend the last years of my working life overseeing a building site”, Mr Fuchs told The Art Newspaper. Behind Mr Fuchs’s departure lies a seemingly endless series of delays to the Stedelijk’s building plans, including proposals by the city council to move the museum to a new site on Amsterdam’s outskirts. It had been announced that the Stedelijk would close for building work at the end of 2002, but it was only last December, less than a month before the intended closure, that the closure was delayed until 2004. This means that there are no special exhibitions organised for the current year, so galleries are now hastily being arranged with displays from the permanent collection. Visitor numbers are expected to be around 200,000 in 2003, half those of a normal year. Meanwhile, the city council has decided to “privatise” the Stedelijk, which means that it will be run by an independent board of trustees. A new director is now being sought and the hope is that work will begin next year on renovations and a new wing. However, Mr Fuchs thinks the entire museum may not now reopen until 2008-9.
The Stedelijk saga
1975 Director Edy de Wilde says Stedelijk must expand.
1989 Amsterdam city council asks director Wim Beeren to draw up plans for a new extension. Four architects invited to submit plans.
1993 American architect Roberto Venturi submits scheme, but it costs twice as much as the city wants.
1994 New director Rudi Fuchs asks Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza to design new wing. Commission withdrawn because of dispute over tendering, but Siza is then reappointed.
1998 Siza’s initial proposal published. By this time original 1895 building also needs renovation, estimate E18 million ($19.2 million). 1999 Fuchs asked to seek corporate sponsorship. He proposes Audi, but its request for space to exhibit a car inside museum rejected by city council.
2000 City council agrees to a budget of E25 million for renovation of original building. A E95 million ($101.2 million) plan proposed, including new wing and collections centre/store in Amsterdam Noord (with a 60-metre tower housing a restaurant), but this requires some national government funding, which is rejected. Proposal to donate Rembrandt’s “Nightwatch”, owned by the city council, to the Rijksmuseum (where it remains on loan), fails to shift the national government.
2001 December, city council allocates E57 million ($60.7 million) for project, but insufficient for a new wing.
2002 September, city council proposes that either part or all the museum should move to a new site in Zuidas, a development area in the southern suburbs. Council dubs this “The museum of the 21st century”. Zuidas plan criticised by Mr Fuchs and many others in the Dutch art scene. 4 December announcement that Stedelijk will stay on its present site. Of allocated E57 million ($60.7 million), E9 million has already been spent on planning and other costs. E32 million is allocated for renovations and E12 million for a new store in suburbs. This leaves just E4 million for the new extension, with a possible further E25 million to be raised.