ARTWORK by Van Gogh, Picasso and Gauguin has been snatched in an audacious multi-million pound raid at one of Manchester's top art galleries. Police said it was a "well planned theft" and are investigating how the gang managed to break into Whitworth Art Gallery and steal the works without being noticed. Staff at the gallery, on Oxford Road, were shocked to discover three sketches by Van Gogh, Picasso and Gauguin had been stolen when they turned up for work today (Sunday). Police say the value of the artwork stolen is in the region of one million pounds. Detectives were called to the gallery at 12.30pm. They believe the theft took place sometime between 9pm last night (Saturday) and noon today. The drawings stolen include Poverty by Pablo Picasso, The Fortifications of Paris with House by Vincent Van Gogh and Tahitian Landscape by Paul Gauguin. Police are keen to speak to anyone who was in the Whitworth Park area last night or early this morning.
If you have any information contact Greenheys CID on 0161 8564450 or 0800 555111.
Civil War artifacts are stolen
By Nicholas Grudin Staff Writer
An estimated $500,000 worth of Civil War artifacts have been stolen from a private collection, police confirmed Saturday.
Mike Trujillo, a defense contractor and Civil War enthusiast, entered his Simi Valley office Friday morning to find his priceless 19th century memorabilia in disarray and several items missing including a family photo album from 1876 that belonged to Civil War legend General George Armstrong Custer. Simi Valley police officials said Saturday that they received a report of the burglary and were continuing to investigate the case. "Somebody knew exactly what to target -- this collection is priceless. This is much easier than robbing a bank and they can get 10-times the money," a distraught Trujillo said Saturday night.
Christopher Kortlander, director of the Custer Battlefield Museum in Montana, was also up late Saturday night, calculating the valuable loss. "The Custer album is priceless -- some of these items are sold for more than $500,000," said Kortlander. "What can a person say -- this is a very unique item. It's a one of a kind item."
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Art buyers urged to be aware as internet auction fraud soars
By Lauren Foster in New York
When Jason Price, apartner at New York-based Tarisio Auctions, which specialises in fine and rare stringed instruments, received a call from somebody in Italy recently, he was startled to learn that a photograph of a Montanari violin from the company's archive had turned up on eBay. It appeared that a fraudster had downloaded the image from Tarisio's website and was using it to advertise the violin, for a fraction of its estimated price, to unsuspecting buyers on the internet auction site.
"We reported him to the eBay police," said Mr Price. "Internet auctions are replete with this sort of thing." As the sale of art and collectibles through internet auctions has boomed, so has the incidence of fraud. According to the Federal Trade Commission, there were nearly 50,000 complaints of internet auction fraud last year - more than double the year before - making it the agency's number one internet-related complaint. Delores Thompson, an FTC attorney who specialises in internet auction fraud, said the most frequent complaints were that sellers failed to deliver the sold item or misrepresented what they were selling - "the classic case of forgery". One of the best- known cases of internet art fraud came to light in 2000 when a Richard Diebenkorn painting attracted a $135,805 bid on eBay. It turned out the painting was fake and the price had been inflated by a shill-bidding scheme. In January, Kenneth Fetterman was charged with masterminding the plan.
Internet art fraud has also caught the attention of Eliot Spitzer, New York's attorney- general. Paul Larrabee, spokesman for Mr Spitzer's office, declined to comment on ongoing criminal investigations regarding art fraud but said the office was "vigilant in its pursuit of those who violate the law". "The internet allows opportunities for the crime to spread to unsuspecting victims who may not be aware of the reputation or the quality of the artwork that they are purchasing," Mr Larrabee said. "The internet is the world's largest flea market - so the age-old warning of caveat emptor is as applicable on the internet as it is on the main street or the shopping mall." Art fraud can range from forging signatures of artists and selling fake works over the internet to inflating bids, downloading images of collectibles and selling phantom items that are never delivered. Minimising the risks is essential for those buying online. Buying from an established online auction house or gallery is preferable to buying from individuals. James Garib, chief executive of Miami-based artsalebyowner.com, said it was essential to establish that a prospective seller is the legitimate owner and that the artwork is original.
"The screening mechanism that we have in place is what provides the buyers and sellers with some security," he said. "We are not going to list an item unless we know for a fact that we have been able to review some tangible evidence attesting to the provenance of the item."
Retaining custody of the item is also crucial.
"When we have a lot listed with us, it is in our possession until it is sold," said Tarisio's Mr Price. "By cataloguing the item consistently there is very little that can go wrong on the fraud end. We screen people ruthlessly when they start bidding and we do not release items until they are paid for." With this system, he said, "the buyer only has to have faith in the middleman, not the actual owner; unlike eBay, where you have to rely on the seller's goodwill". While eBay does not guarantee the authenticity of the items on its site, it has a partnership with Sotheby's, which does vouch for the fine art sold on the co-branded site. This is to change at the end of this month, however, when Sotheby's ceases its online auctions. http://news.ft.com/
Tracing Iraq's Lost Treasures
By Jane Waldbaum and Patty Gerstenblith Sunday, April 27, 2003; Page B07
This month the world has witnessed the looting of Iraq's National Museum of Antiquities in Baghdad as well as the looting and burning of its National Library, National Archives and other cultural institutions. We need to move quickly now to do whatever we can to repair the damage.
The Archaeological Institute of America and other scholarly organizations have presented many good proposals, including an amnesty, a modest reward program within Iraq and the sealing of Iraq's borders -- with searches being conducted for looted cultural objects. A moratorium on the international trade in artifacts from Iraq has also been proposed. But while museums and dealers are repeating this refrain, we fear that the less scrupulous dealers, private collectors and even some museums will simply wait out the current focus on the issue and then proceed with the secret sale and purchase of these cultural treasures. The theft of archaeological artifacts from museums and sites in Iraq is not all recent -- it has been going on since the conclusion of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Some of these have appeared in London and New York. The routes and methods by which such objects -- and the thousands of others that have gone unaccounted for over the past dozen years -- reach the Western art market would be crucial information for the international efforts underway to recover looted objects. The theft of artifacts directly from archaeological sites, both known and unknown, is particularly devastating because they have never been documented, their find spots are unknown and the context provided by their association with nearby materials, such as architectural, floral and faunal remains, is destroyed. The resulting losses to our ability to reconstruct human history are devastating.
We therefore propose that the museum officials, dealers and private collectors who truly wish to contribute to the effort to locate and restore these looted items make available to law enforcement agencies images of the ancient Mesopotamian objects in their collections and inventories, as well as the documentation of the sources of these objects. This would be of enormous help to law enforcement efforts, because it would provide information on how objects move through the international market and thus would help authorities in tracing any taken out of Iraq.
Among the many organizations that have denounced the recent looting and called for a strong international response are the American Council for Cultural Policy, which includes prominent collectors of antiquities on its board of advisers, and the National Association of Dealers in Ancient, Oriental and Primitive Art. We urge these organizations to encourage their members to participate in this effort. These steps would provide solid documentation of all objects currently outside Iraq, so that new objects that appear on the market now could be easily distinguished from those that left Iraq before the beginning of the current war. It is in the interest of collectors, dealers and museums to do this, because they would then be able to demonstrate when these objects were acquired.
Such cooperative efforts would also represent the first attempt to rebuild the world's knowledge of ancient Mesopotamian civilization in the aftermath of the tremendous losses suffered this month. These efforts could provide as complete documentation as possible on the objects that have been found in Iraq over the past 70 years. They would also allow connections and associations to be made among objects, some of which may be located in different museums or in private collections throughout the world.
We call on all museums, private collectors, dealers, auction houses and archaeologists to join in this effort to begin the repair of the world's cultural heritage.
Jane Waldbaum is president of the Archaeological Institute of America. Patty Gerstenblith is a professor at the DePaul University College of Law.