The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the most popular museum in The Netherlands with more than a million visitors a year, is to close indefinitely from today after asbestos was found in the building during a routine inspection.
Officials said they decided to close the museum, which contains one of the largest collections of Dutch art, including Rembrandt's The Nightwatch, until further notice as a precaution but said the risk was negligible. Staff will also be kept out.
Tear in stolen Van Gogh 'can be repaired'
A £350,000 Van Gogh painting stolen with two others from an art gallery and left outside in a park suffered a tear in its fabric, experts said last night.
The other paintings, a Gauguin and a Picasso, suffered water damage after being exposed to rain when they were left rolled in a cardboard tube by the thieves near the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester. But gallery staff said they were confident that the damage was repairable and that the three works, worth a total of more than £1m, could be back on show in two weeks. A spokeswoman for Manchester University, of which the gallery is a part, said: "The Van Gogh has a tear in one of the corners, but nothing that isn't repairable. "The other two paintings have been damaged from being exposed to the elements but all three should be rehung in two weeks." The thieves took the watercolours from the gallery some time after 9pm on Saturday. An anonymous call shortly before 2am yesterday led police to disused public toilets around 200 yards from the gallery in Whitworth Park, where the works were found against an outside wall, rolled up in the cardboard tube. A handwritten message with the tube was understood to have read: "We did not intend to steal these paintings, just to highlight a breach in security." But Det Chief Insp Peter Roberts, who is leading the investigation, said: "The handwritten note which was found with the paintings suggests they were taken as a noble cause, however unfounded this may be. "If this is the case it has certainly backfired on the person or persons responsible, and I am now investigating an offence of theft." The three paintings, the largest of which measured 15 inches by 20 inches (39cm by 53cm), included The Fortification of Paris with Houses, painted by Vincent Van Gogh when he was just 25. The others were Poverty, painted in 1903 by Pablo Picasso, then 24, and Paul Gauguin's Tahitian Landscape, painted between 1891 and 1893. The gallery houses more than 40,000 works of art, and development officer Jo Beggs, said that security would be reviewed after the incident. It already had a "very sophisticated" security system, with closed-circuit TV cameras and alarms. She said of the damage to the paintings: "Leaving them outside could have had an effect on the paper. They are very fragile. They are very old works so they are going to need possibly a lot of repair after being exposed to the air. "The very act of taking them out of a frame and putting them in a tube could have caused some damage." The frames in which the paintings were hanging have not been recovered. The three paintings were given to the gallery as gifts. The Gauguin and Picasso were donated through the National Arts Collection Fund. They had been hanging together in the same room which houses the modern Masters collection on the ground floor of the building. The theft was discovered when staff at the gallery, which is part of the University of Manchester, arrived for work at noon on Sunday. Ms Beggs said later that the tear in the Van Gogh was "quite significant" but that experts were certain it could be repaired. The damage to the other paintings was "very minor", she said.
http://www.yorkshiretoday.co.uk/
‘Takeaway Rembrandt’ is most stolen painting
By Laura Peek
THE world’s most stolen painting is Rembrandt’s small portrait Jacob III de Gheyn, which has been snatched and recovered four times in the past 35 years. Known as the “takeaway Rembrandt”, the painting, which belongs to the Dulwich Picture Gallery in South London, was once found on the back of a bicycle and on another occasion was retrieved from underneath a bench in a graveyard. It was returned anonymously on each occasion and no one has ever been charged with its theft. However, it is now so well known in the international art world that it would be almost impossible to sell on illegally. The most valuable masterpiece ever stolen is thought to be the Mona Lisa — although it has never been valued. It disappeared from the Louvre in Paris in August 1911. The painting was recovered in Italy in 1913 when Vincenzo Perugia was charged with its theft.
One of the most daring art thefts took place in 1991 when 20 works of art were stolen in a raid on the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The paintings, estimated to be worth £280 million, were found only 35 minutes later in an abandoned car near the museum.
The world’s most famous lost painting is Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man. It was taken from the Czartoryski Collection in Cracow by Hans Frank, the Nazi Governor-General of Poland during the Second World War, for Hermann Goering’s collection.
Frank was later captured by American forces in Bavaria but the Raphael had vanished and is now regarded as the most celebrated work of art to disappear in wartime.
The Times was used as a go-between when Vermeer’s The Guitar Player was stolen in London in 1974 by IRA sympathisers. A strip of canvas was sent to the paper with a demand that Dolours and Marian Price, who were on hunger strike in Brixton Prison, be returned to Northern Ireland to complete their sentences.
After a further threat that the picture would be “burnt on St Patrick’s night”, it was left in a London churchyard to be collected by the police.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/
IRAQ:
An emergency Red List on Iraqi Antiquities at Risk
We have the pleasure to inform you that ICOM has secured funds from the US Department of State (Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs) to draft an emergnecy Red List of Iraqi Antiquities at Risk. Based on ICOM's Red List series, this Red List will present the most representative categories of cultural property from Iraq. The objective is to provide an overview of the different types of objects that could have been looted or stolen in Iraq. The list will be a tool for customs officials, police officers, art dealers, and collectors to help them to recognize objects that could originate from Iraq and, will alert and raise awareness of professionals and the general public on the illicit traffic of Iraqi cultural property. The emergency Red List will be drafted by a small group of specialists of Iraq cultural heritage from all over the world. The meeting will be held in Lyons on Wednesday 7 May and will take place at the Interpol headquarters in the framework of the " Incident Response Team " conference that Interpol will organize on 5 and 6 May 2003. We hope to have this Red List ready as soon as possible and available on the ICOM web site in English, French and Arabic. We will keep you informed about the advancement of this project. Sincerely,
More Than 100 Looted Iraqi Artifacts Returned, Military Says
By Todd Zeranski
Washington, April 28 (Bloomberg) -- More than 100 looted Iraqi artifacts have been returned to the U.S. military and more recoveries may come soon, U.S. Central Command said, as the United Nations organized a second meeting of art experts to aid the effort.
Returned items include a 7,000-year-old vase, a chest filled with priceless manuscripts and parchments, a broken statue of an Assyrian king dated from the 9th century B.C., and one of the oldest bronze sculptures known, the U.S. military said.
The looting took place as U.S. forces seized the capital, Baghdad, in their drive to crush Saddam Hussein's regime. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell pledged the U.S. would make a maximum effort to recover the artifacts and restore those damaged.
``Now that the word is out, you'll find more and more people are stepping forward and returning the items,'' Navy Lieutenant Commander Charles Owens, a Central Command spokesman, said. The U.S. is receiving daily tips on where other items may be found, Owens said.
The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Unesco, today said it will hold the second meeting of international art experts working to recover looted artifacts from museums in Baghdad and Mosul.
London Meeting
The meeting will be held tomorrow in London and include experts from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia; Berlin's Middle East Museum; the Louvre in Paris; the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the British Museum in London, the Paris-based Unesco announced.
``The treasures of Iraq's cultural heritage, which bear witness to a particularly fertile history, are irreplaceable for the world scientific community, but even more so for the Iraqi people,'' Unesco Director-General Koichiro Matsuura said in a statement.
Matsuura, in an interview with the Washington Post earlier this month, said most of the looting was carried out by professional thieves intending to sell the items for profit. Neil MacGregor, head of the British Museum, will lead the meeting with Mounir Bouchenaki, Unesco's assistant director general for culture.
Looters smashed or stole tens of thousands of artifacts dating back several thousand years as U.S. forces took Baghdad. Many of the items were crafted during the founding of ancient Sumer, the civilization that arose between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers around 3,500 B.C. 100,000 Artifacts
Unesco said the National Museum of Baghdad housed about 100,000 artifacts.
The collection included the ``White Lady,'' a stone face of a woman that is about 5,500 years old and one of the earliest examples of the sculpted human form, and the earliest copper casting ever found, the bust of an Akkadian king dating to 2300 B.C., said Gibson, who visited two years ago.
Last week U.S. officials in Boston, Atlanta and Washington confiscated 15 paintings, a cache of gold-plated weapons and other souvenirs taken from palaces of Hussein's son, Uday.
British customs officials also discovered a shipment of ornamental weapons destined for a U.S. military base in the state of Georgia, officials at the U.S. Homeland Security Department's immigration and customs enforcement bureau said.
Fox News
Benjamin James Johnson, a 27-year-old satellite truck Engineer for News Corp.'s Fox News, is the only person facing criminal charges so far, U.S. customs officials said. Johnson was charged with smuggling goods into the U.S. and making false statements.
Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the U.S. customs bureau, said customs agents are on the ground in Iraq and are working with museum officials to catalogue the loss as well as with the U.S. military. Investigations are continuing both in the U.S. and Iraq, Boyd said.
Interpol, the largest international police organization, also formed a special response team to locate art and antiquities and arrest those responsible for the looting. A special meeting on the issue will be held in Lyon, France, Interpol's headquarters city, on May 5 and 6 to develop a strategy for dealing with the theft.
http://quote.bloomberg.com/
Iraqis keep looted property safe from exploiters
By Alex Spillius Baghdad April 29 2003
A "neighbourhood watch" team in a Baghdad suburb is refusing to return 500 trunks of artefacts looted from the National Museum because it fears museum staff are too closely linked to Saddam Hussein's regime to be trusted.
The leaders of the community protecting the items say they will hand them back only when a new government is in place. In the days immediately after the fall of the capital, thousands of priceless pieces dating back to 9000BC went missing. There have been reports of international gangs looting to order. Journalists who visited the museum during the looting saw the vault doors had been opened without force. At any museum few people hold keys to vital areas. A team of US customs officials and military officers which is trying to recover the museum pieces is satisfied that community leaders are guarding them in a secure location. The head of the team, Colonel Matthew Bogdanos, a marine and a graduate in classical studies, said: "Certainly some of the most important pieces are missing. We want to disseminate information about them as far as possible around the world so that a customs official in Lithuania would recognise one of them."
In addition to the looting, parts of the museum were burned, offices ransacked and invaluable relics smashed. "Seeing these things I have studied destroyed or stolen is very sad," Colonel Bogdanos said. "They belonged to the Iraqi people but in a much larger sense were the property of mankind." In its heyday, the 28-gallery museum was the largest in the Middle East, with 125,000 items. During the 1990s, it was subjected to repeated theft and looting, and at least 4000 pieces were sold abroad. Rumours at the time held Saddam and his family responsible. Among its star pieces was the world's first calendar, a 10,000-year-old pebble with 12 scratches on its surface. Its fate is not clear. The museum's inventory, destroyed in the looting, included near-intact 10,000- year-old nude female statues, vases, bowls, necklaces and plaques. The American-backed Iraqi National Congress, which opposed Saddam from exile, yesterday handed over the largest single recovery of 465 items: tablets, statuettes, seals and an ivory head. Six of its armed members, acting on a tip, found the items in the back of a truck in Kut, bound for Kuwait.
On Saturday a man turned up at the museum gates with a 7000-year-old vase that he said a neighbour had given him. Like everything else, it was accepted with no questions asked.
http://www.theage.com.au/
Some antiquities, manuscripts turn up
Associated Press
Gen. Tommy Franks said Monday that military forces have begun recovering artifacts looted from Iraqi museums -- thefts that sparked international criticism that the United States could have done more to protect such sites. The commander of U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf region said in the past three days Iraqis had begun informing coalition forces of the whereabouts of the artifacts.
THOUSANDS OF ITEMS, some dating back thousands of years, were stolen from Iraq's National Museum in Baghdad as well as other museums and libraries when Saddam's regime collapsed. The FBI is working with international law enforcement agencies, art collectors, auctioneers and experts to try to recover them. More than 100 items have been returned, according to U.S. Central Command -- including priceless manuscripts, a 7,000-year-old vase and one of the oldest recorded bronze bas relief bulls. The number of returned antiquities, while promising, hardly puts a dent in the huge loss of anywhere from 170,000 artifacts (by the highest estimates) to 50,000 (by the lowest).
ITEMS COMING IN
Central Command said one man returned a chest filled with priceless manuscripts and parchments to a nearby mosque; a local pianist returned 10 pieces including a broken statue of an Assyrian king dated to the 9th century B.C. and the bas relief. After some negotiation, one man arrived with 46 stolen antiquities, then with eight more pieces, and finally with the vase. "Over the last 96 hours we have had a whole lot of Iraqis contact our people up in Iraq and say actually we know where a great many of these artifacts are," Franks said in a satellite hookup from his Gulf command post here with the annual meeting of the news cooperative in Seattle.
Franks said ordinary Iraqis had told coalition forces that they wanted the items in coalition hands, not with Baath party members who were responsible for managing the museums and are accused of spiriting the antiquities away.
'SCORE SETTLING'
The general said he had expected there would be some "score settling" between various factions as well as a temptation to loot in the aftermath of the regime's collapse. But he said he thought U.S. forces reacted well in containing it, and that the situation was improving daily. "I don't know if I want to use the word sad or bad, but it is an unfortunate thing that happens," Franks said. The British Museum's ancient near-east specialist, John Curtis, was returning later Monday from a six-day fact-finding trip to Baghdad. The museum said it plans to send conservators and curators to Iraq soon to help with the restoration of the country's looted museums.
Among the items missing are the Sacred Vase of Warka from 3200 B.C. and other treasures from the Assyrian and Sumerian civilizations. No one knows for sure how many artifacts were stolen or destroyed in the looting.
REWARDS OFFERED
The U.S.-led coalition on Sunday began broadcasting messages on radio offering rewards to Iraqis to hand over antiquities so they could be returned to museums. In a follow-up interview after the broadcast, Franks didn't elaborate on which items had been recovered. He said some of the items had been taken out of the museums before the war started by Baath party museum officials either for their personal use or for selling on the black market. "So we're securing these things and at the appropriate time we'll place them back in the museums for the Iraqi people," he said. Franks said he doesn't expect to find an organized network of thieves as some art experts have suggested. "We're apt to find where an individual person decided he or she could take some of the antiquities and save them for a rainy day," he said. "We're going to get some more from looters -- someone who knew someone who stole something. We're getting it back that way."
http://www.msnbc.com/
UNESCO to co-chair new experts meeting to retrieve looted Iraqi antiquities
28 April – In their second such meeting in less than two weeks in the effort to salvage Iraq's looted antiquities, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and top international experts will gather in London tomorrow to consolidate their plans.
The session, co-chaired by UNESCO's Assistant Director-General for Culture, Mounir Bouchenaki and the Director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, will discuss ways to fight illicit trafficking in Iraqi cultural property, notably within the framework of the 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, for which UNESCO is responsible.
The participants, including curators of the largest collections of Mesopotamian antiquities outside Iraq from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the Middle East Museum in Berlin, the Louvre in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the British Museum, will try to work out the best ways to rapidly help their colleagues in Baghdad and, in the longer term, curators and archaeologists in other parts of the country.
"I am very pleased to see, once again, the exemplary way in which heritage conservation professionals have mobilized to try to save Iraq's cultural property," UNESCO Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura says in a message that Mr. Bouchenaki is scheduled to deliver to the meeting. "I would like this meeting to study all possible means of ensuring the restitution of artefacts stolen from Iraqi museums. The treasures of Iraq's cultural heritage, which bear witness to a particularly fertile history, are irreplaceable for the world scientific community, but even more so for the Iraqi people, for the conservation of their cultural identity and their confidence in the future."
The session follows up recommendations made at the first experts meeting at UNESCO headquarters on 17 April in Paris in the wake of the looting of major museums, libraries and other Iraqi cultural centres, principally in Baghdad and Mosul, with the loss of priceless antiquities stretching back 7,000 years.
That meeting called for an immediate ban on international trade in Iraqi cultural heritage and for an international effort to help Iraq's cultural institutions.