The gang responsible for the theft of three valuable paintings may have had an "intimate knowledge" of the art gallery in which the raid took place. The detective leading the hunt for the art thieves said he was not ruling out a disgruntled former member of staff being involved in the plan to expose poor security at Manchester's Whitworth Art Gallery. The masterpieces by Van Gogh, Picasso and Gauguin - valued together at more than £1 million - were taken over the weekend. They were found 200 yards from the gallery next to a disused public toilet following an anonymous phone call to the police at 2am on Monday. The paintings were wrapped in a cardboard tube with a note attached which, in childlike writing on a scrap of notepaper, read: "The intention was not (underlined) to steal, only to highlight woeful security." The Van Gogh was found to have been torn and the other two water-colours damaged after being exposed to overnight rain.
Detective Chief Inspector Peter Roberts, speaking at the gallery, challenged the thieves to get in touch. He said: "If they see their actions as a noble cause, perhaps they are brave enough to come forward and give us their reasons." Mr Roberts said he believed it was a well-planned theft designed to expose the poor security, which required some inside knowledge of the Manchester University-owned art gallery in Oxford Road. "The method employed does suggest to me that they had an intimate knowledge of the gallery and the security system employed at the time," he said. The detective also said he believes the anonymous female who tipped off police in a telephone call is "closely linked, if not actually responsible" for the theft.
http://www.ananova.com/
Truth is stranger than art fiction
Will Bennett looks at the reality behind the headlines that claim 'stolen to order'
In the first James Bond film, the suave British agent played by Sean Connery was walking down an elegant staircase in the lair of the villainous Dr No when he spotted Goya's portrait of the Duke of Wellington. At the time Dr No was made, in 1962, the Goya had recently been stolen from the National Gallery in London. "So that's where it went," said Bond, grinning. Using a copy of the portrait, the film makers cracked a timely joke but also succeeded in reinforcing an old myth. After almost every major art theft, newspaper headlines declare that the paintings have been "stolen to order", apparently for some wealthy, reclusive collector who will pay vast sums for masterpieces which he then hides away in a remote location. The theft of works by Van Gogh, Picasso and Gauguin worth £1 million from the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, produced the usual "stolen to order" claims but, as always, the truth has turned out to be more mundane. Yesterday, the pictures were found outside a public lavatory near the gallery and may have been damaged by rainwater. The thieves claimed they were highlighting security failures but cared so little for the paintings that they did not protect them properly.
Most art theft is actually the result of either opportunism or a naive belief that the paintings can be sold for large sums. Yet the theft of major works of art is illogical because it is impossible to sell them on the open market. The thieves who took Titian's £5 million masterpiece Rest on the Flight to Egypt from the Marquess of Bath's home at Longleat in 1995 soon discovered it was only worth a fraction of its notional value in the underworld. The thieves sold it for a relatively small sum to a family of London gangsters. They gave the Titian to a well-known figure in the sporting world to settle a feud and he kept it for a time before deciding it was too hot to handle and passed it on to some South Coast criminals. Last year, in a scene more Arthur Daley than James Bond, it was returned in a plastic bag at a west London bus stop and a middleman got a £100,000 reward.
Stolen masterpieces often embark on a strange odyssey but it is not the journey of popular imagination. The reality is sadder, seedier and more incompetent.
http://www.dailytelegraph.co.uk/
Florence Library Fights to Save Precious Books
Tue April 29, 2003 12:19 PM ET By Svetlana Kovalyova
FLORENCE, Italy (Reuters) - Looking at the shallow, muddy waters of the River Arno as it flows through Florence, it is hard to believe that it ravaged the city in 1966, inflicting inestimable damage on its buildings and art.
Nearly 40 years on, the ancient city still has not healed all its wounds. A small group of restorers fights the damage every day, working through a mountain of 35,500 precious books dating back to the 17th century, wrecked by the flood. Just 15 restorers are employed by the Restoration Center of the Central National Library of Florence, Italy's biggest library, a fraction of the staff of 120 when the center was opened after the flood. It will take at least another 10 years until readers are able to leaf through the fragile leather-bound volumes showing the world some 200-300 years ago: hand-painted drawings of birds, flowers, rare sea species and Italian villas. "The damage to the library was terrible," said Gisella Guasti, head of the center, sitting in a spacious office where the walls are covered with shelves of catalogs of the damaged books, collected through the centuries by Florentine nobles. "The restoration work is enormous. It is a very long and slow process and the people who can do it are few," said the small, energetic woman who has dedicated 25 years to restoring flood damaged books at Florence's National Library.
A few blocks away from Florence's busy center, in a small 10th century church that used to house Benedictine nuns, Guasti and her colleagues fight against time every day, identifying, cleaning, drying, stitching and rebinding the damaged books, which are stacked from floor to ceiling.
ENORMOUS DAMAGE
On Nov. 4, 1966, one of the most devastating floods ever to hit a European city struck Florence when a third of the region's annual rainfall fell in just two days.
At its peak, the waters of the Arno rose 20 feet above the quays, rushing through the narrow streets, killing 30 people and damaging buildings. On the banks of the river, the National Library and the Uffizi Gallery -- treasure houses of priceless works of art, including Botticelli's "La Primavera" -- were hit hardest. Flood waters and mud tinged with the residue of oil leaked from heating system submerged the library's basement and partially filled the ground floor, damaging more than one million items. Periodicals dating back to the 18th century suffered the biggest losses with fragile newspapers and magazines falling victim to the ooze of mud, oil and sewage. Parts of some catalogs -- the library's memory -- were also destroyed, throwing the restoration into chaos and leaving a chance that some priceless books, missing covers after the flood, would be lost forever as they were unidentifiable. The antiquarian Magliabechiana and Palatina libraries which formed the basis of the modern library were also badly damaged.
Among the wrecked tomes from the Palatina Library were huge, rare 17th and 18th century atlases and encyclopedias from all over Europe collected by Florentine grand dukes, famous art patrons in the age of Enlightenment. Some 52,500 books from a fund started in the 17th century by Antonio Magliabechi, a jeweler who dedicated his life to collecting books, also suffered. Magliabechi's collection was joined with that of the Palatina Library, created in late 18th century by grand duke Ferdinand III of Lorraine, in 1861 under the name of the National Library. It now holds more than 5.5 million books. "As soon as the waters started receding in the afternoon, people got down to work. In the morning, the library was full of people who rushed to help," recalled Vera Martinoli, head of the library's information department. Florentines were the first to roll up their sleeves to dig books and art out of the muddy morass. Soon students from Europe and America, dubbed the "angels of mud" by grateful Florentines, poured into the city to help. They loaded the damaged books onto trucks and took them away from the drenched library for drying. The toxic fumes of disintegrating leather and gold-imprinted bindings mixed with sewage forced rescuers to wear gas masks.
The Restoration Center was set up quickly with help from British book salvaging specialists. "It was a moment of great solidarity -- of international institutions, of young people," said Guasti with a sigh. No one imagined the work would drag into the next century. The mostly manual restoration of a single book can take a few days or several months, depending on the degree of damage. "Sometimes the enormous size of the Palatina Library books with their heavy covers helped them to survive the flood," Martinoli said, struggling to lift a meter-high 19th century volume of John James Audubon's "The Birds of America."
ENOUGH FUNDS, NOT ENOUGH PEOPLE
Until 10 years ago, the Restoration Center carried out all the work, but it was forced to start contracting out as staff levels shrank. Guasti said the last tender, funded by the Italian government and completed more than a year ago, helped place 1,200 books with other restoration centers. "Theoretically, we could have contracted out all work at once. But the problem is that the work is very specific and the market cannot absorb this huge amount of books," she said. Italian labor legislation, among the most rigid in Europe, also hinders what seems to be the most natural solution -- boosting the center's staff to the levels necessary to complete the lengthy work as soon as possible. Hiring for the government-funded book restoration -- as for any public work -- is done through national contests and is frozen until 2004. "These books have an immense cultural value. But at best, it would take another 10 years before people could see all of them," Guasti said.
http://reuters.com/
Museum regains swiped statue
An expensive equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson was returned to the Morris Museum of Art after police say a man grabbed the 70-pound model and fled from the gallery in an attempted theft. Security guard Robert Hawkins watched on a video monitor as the man took the heavy maquette, or model, from a table and went out onto 10th Street at 2:10 p.m. Saturday, according to Richmond County Sheriff's Investigator John Pencille.
"He had been touching around to see if there were any sensors. He pushed on it a little and then picked it up and walked out with it," he said. The security guard captured the man on Broad Street and held him for police. Dannie Lee Gant, 40, of Brookstone Road, Hephzibah, was charged with felony theft by taking, Investigator Pencille said. The statue, valued at $42,000, might have been damaged in the attempted theft, police said. A museum registrar spent the weekend examining its condition and prepared a report. It was the first attempted theft in the museum's 10-year history, Director Kevin Grogan said Sunday.
"I think that it confirms the way we operate works well," he said. The Jackson Equestrian Statue has been on permanent exhibit at the Augusta museum, the first piece of art visitors saw upon entering from 10th Street. Mr. Grogan said he will reconsider the statue's location. "It's unlikely that in the future it will be on an open pedestal," he said. The statue was designed in 1855 by Clark Mills, a New York native who made the piece with zinc alloy and a bronze finish. The model measures 23 1/2 inches by 20 inches by 8 1/2 inches. Three life-size statues were cast between 1853 and 1880. They are displayed next to the state Capitol in Nashville, Tenn.; at Jackson Square in New Orleans; and behind the White House in Washington.
Reach Greg Rickabaugh at (706) 828-3851 or greg.rickabaugh@augustachronicle.com.
http://www.augustachronicle.com/
Asbestos forces Rijksmuseum's closure
29 April 2003
LATEST: part of the museum will reopen Saturday this week. May 6 a decision will be reached about the reopening of the complete museum.
AMSTERDAM — The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has been closed for an unspecified period of time following the discovery of asbestos during preparatory work for the planned renovation of the historic museum.
It is possible that the museum might remain closed until 1 January 2004, after which renovation work will be commenced forcing the museum to close for a longer period, an NOS news report said. The renovation work, costing EUR 200 million, will continue until mid-2008. The museum will be temporarily relocated to the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam and various other locations from the start of 2005. Museum management was aware that asbestos was spread throughout the building, but said the asbestos was not dangerous if the walls were not demolished. Due to the fact that the asbestos would be exposed later this year, an examination of the material throughout the building was considered necessary. The asbestos was discovered on Monday and newspaper De Volkskrant said that an unacceptable high level of asbestos dust was found in several areas, including visitor rooms. But the museum management claimed the health risk for museum visitors was "negligibly small". The hundreds of thousands of visitors who have visited the museum in recent years have not been exposed to the asbestos for very long. Asbestos is dangerous if it is broken and the dust inhaled. The inhalation of asbestos can cause cancer, but the risk is only large if people have been exposed to the material over a long period.
The length of time that the museum will remain closed due to the asbestos discovery depends on the type of asbestos found and the Rijksmuseum is investigating how, when and to what extent the material was spread throughout the Amsterdam building. Investigations are expected to be completed within several days. The Labour Inspectorate is also examining whether the museum's personnel have been placed at risk due to the fact that an unspecified number of the museum's 150 security guards and curators have been employed there for the past 20 years. The Rijksmuseum — the largest museum in the Netherlands — attracts between 2,000 and 3,000 visitors every day and notice boards and museum staff posted outside the building will inform visitors why the museum has been closed. The financial consequences of the closure are not yet certain.
http://www.expatica.com/
Security tight at new Christchurch Art Gallery as priceless work go on show
28.04.2003 - Christchurch Star
By Guy Grant
Security will be tight when a collection of paintings worth tens of millions of dollars goes on display next month to celebrate the opening of Christchurch’s art gallery.
Works by Cezanne, Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Signac, Sisley, Turner, Constable, Corot and Courbet will be among the 16 European masterpieces on show from May 10. Christchurch Art Gallery public programmes manager Hubert Klaassens described the exhibition as priceless. But a quick search of the internet gives some idea of the amount which works by these artists can command. Auction house Christies estimated a work by Cezanne going up for auction next month would be in the US$15-$20 million ($NZ26m-$35m) range, while in 2000 Monets fetched from $2.8 ($NZ5m) to $18.3 ($33m). Christies estimates of a Sisley being auctioned in May ranged from US$900,000 ($1.6m)to $1.2m ($2.1m), while the highest price paid at auction for a Manet was US$24m ($43m).
Mr Klaassens said that, without going into details, security was naturally a criticial issue. ‘‘There will be special security in place for the exhibition on top of the very good security system in the gallery.’’ Security checks are part of the formal opening programme on May 10. The works will be on loan from the National Gallery of Victoria’s permanent collection — regarded as the best collection of international art in the southern hemisphere and one of the finest in the world. He said mounting the exhibition here involved a significant amount of money, and costs had been ‘‘swinging a bit’’ because of issues such as freight costs and insurance — especially as the planning had been taking place three to four years before the opening date.
‘‘Insurance costs have made it more difficult.’’ Government indemnity had been crucial to the exhibition coming here. ‘‘Without the Government indemnity, the gallery would not have let the exhibition go (out of Victoria),’’ Mr Klaassens said. The big names would certainly be a drawcard but it was also important that there was a mix of works satisfying a broad sector of the public. Christchurch Art Gallery director Tony Preston said exhibiting the paintings would confirm the new gallery as one of Australasia’s major new cultural facilities. ‘‘Without doubt, the Christchurch Art Gallery will become a key venue in transtasman touring programmes. The exhibition runs from May 10 to July 27.
http://www.mytown.co.nz/
IRAQ:
Looted Iraqi Art Displayed Online
By Ryan Singel
02:00 AM Apr. 28, 2003 PT
A group of archaeologists and art historians are angry at the looting of Iraq's cultural heritage -- and at the U.S. government for allowing it. They're using technology to retrieve what they can find.
U.S. forces in Iraq promised to guard museums and archaeological sites and then, after the rampage, dismissed the seriousness of the crimes. At least, that's what the group that is trying to document what's missing claims. Working to locate those treasures -- which reach back 7,000 years to the advent of civilization -- archaeologists are building a comprehensive, searchable image database of the tens of thousands of objects that are missing and presumed to be in the hands of professional art thieves. The Lost Iraqi Heritage project is a joint effort of over 80 universities, museums and individuals working to create a tool that law enforcement, customs officials and art dealers can use to prevent the sale and export of stolen objects. The group, which is coordinated by professors at the University of Chicago, includes the Archaeological Institute of America, University of California at Berkeley and the University of Michigan. Archaeologists say they are motivated by what they see as an unprecedented, incalculable loss. "Imagine if Michelangelo's statue of David and the Mona Lisa and the Magna Carta and Botticelli's paintings and all the major Impressionist painters' works were in one museum that got looted," said Dr. Clemens Reichel, a research associate at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute. Nicholas Kouchoukos, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago who heads up the technical effort, says the project will be built in phases. The first online effort is to display images of some of the most famous pieces from the museum in order to show the extent of the losses.
Iraq's Lost Heritage will be the backbone of an extensive effort to catalog the losses, as well as to facilitate the objects' return and the rebuilding of the Iraq Museum. The first version will show only images of the museum's known masterpieces, but the organizers plan to turn it into a searchable database as soon as possible. The effort faces severe challenges. Little is known outside Iraq about the extent of the holdings, which makes the process of learning what has been looted almost impossible. The museum's own records were apparently destroyed in the two days of looting. Some say that was an attempt on the part of professional art thieves to cover their trail. The hope is that smashed computer hard drives can be salvaged. But even if the information can be retrieved, Kouchoukos says the computerized records included only a small fraction of the collection -- the museum's access to software and hardware was extremely limited during the 12-year embargo against Iraq. The database is being populated with images from published books and museum exhibition catalogs, as well as unpublished images from scholar's notes and from institutions that excavated artifacts in Iraq and documented them before turning them over to the museum. Copyright laws also complicate the task, requiring the permission of those who have photographed these items. Reichel, the project's coordinator, said publishing houses have granted permission to publish their copyrighted images, and museums and researchers will permit the display of previously unpublished images.
Kouchoukos says the group will watermark each image, both visibly and digitally, to make sure that copyright holders don't lose control of their images. "We will never be able to fully recreate what was in the museum," said Reichel. Perhaps the second biggest unknown is whether Iraq Museum officials approve of the idea. "We still don't know whether the Iraqi curators want us to do this," said Oriental Institute Professor McGuire Gibson, who has been involved in archaeological digs in Iraq since 1964. "If they don't want the entire catalog on the Web, then we won't publish it." The group has not been able to contact any museum employees -- the only communication in and out of the country presently is through satellite phone. However, Dr. John Curtis of the British Museum is in Baghdad to meet with museum officials and survey the damage. On May 8th, a group of archaeologists will travel to Baghdad to meet with officials in order to address what Kouchoukos calls "key ethical questions." For instance, how much should the public be allowed to see? Nobody wants the site to aid the illegal sale of artifacts by verifying their authenticity. Kouchoukos stresses that these conversations will be essential to determining the format and content of the system, given that the long-term goal is to turn the database and the website over to the museum.
In the meantime, Kouchoukos is using PostgreSQL, an open-source Unix database application developed in Berkeley in the 1980s, to create the database's backend. A self-described "dedicated open-sourcer," Kouchoukos says he chose the application because he thinks it is the most stable and balanced database application. He also worries that a database built on commercial platforms could be subject to export restrictions. Kouchoukos wants the database to be much more than a law-enforcement tool. "This is something we want to hand over as the information technology backbone for the museum as it rebuilds," said Kouchoukos. The database could run on Linux or Mac OS X. Because of the need for quick action, the project is currently relying on donations from individuals and some money from the University of Chicago. However, the group is searching for grants from foundations and hopes to get funding from government agencies, such as the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. But "the government moves too slowly," as one archaeologist dryly noted, a reference to the lack of U.S. response when the treasures were looted. So far, the much criticized State Department has not been involved in the project, though its International Cultural Property Protection office, which works to prevent the illegal sale of cultural artifacts, does link to the project from its website. On April 14, Secretary of State Colin Powell issued a statement that said that individuals in possession of looted items from Iraqi museums or archaeological sites would be prosecuted under the National Stolen Property Act. Both Interpol and the FBI have teams of agents heading to Iraq to start tracking down the stolen artworks. For its part, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO, held a meeting of 30 experts in Paris on April 17th and is planning to send a delegation to Iraq as soon as possible.
But according to Dr. Ellen Herscher, an anthropologist with the Archaeological Institute of America, all these efforts may be too late. Although Herscher supports the image database project, she doubts whether much of the looted heritage will be recovered by the FBI or by Customs. "First of all, these professionals will launder it, then go through a couple of middlemen and get fake papers," said Herscher. "And these people are willing to sit on this stuff for years and years. They aren't going to be bringing it in this week or next week." "Right now, Customs and the FBI are being very vigilant about looking for these works," continued Herscher. "But how long are they going to stay vigilant?"
http://www.wired.com/
Experts urge U.S. to seal Iraq's borders to save antiquities
By Jill Lawless, Associated Press, 4/29/2003 12:11
LONDON (AP) The world's top museum curators urged U.S. authorities to seal Iraq's borders to stop the flow of looted antiquities, a loss that one said was the worst calamity for a national art collection since World War II.
Delegates to Tuesday's meeting at the British Museum also urged the U.N. Security Council to ban trade in Iraqi artifacts. ''American control at the border is almost zero,'' said Donny George, research director of Iraq's National Museum in Baghdad. ''Anyone can take anything and go out. .... the bleeding of antiquities is still going on.'' The British Museum and UNESCO brought experts from the Louvre in Paris, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, Russia's Hermitage and the Berlin Museums to hear a report from George and British Museum Near East curator John Curtis, who returned Monday after a week in Iraq. ''This is without question the greatest disaster to a national collection since the Second World War,'' British Museum director Neil MacGregor told BBC radio earlier. After Saddam Hussein's government fell to a U.S.-led coalition this month, looters stole and smashed priceless archaeological treasures from the Baghdad museum. The museum in the northern city of Mosul also was pillaged, and Baghdad's Islamic Library was set afire.
With funding offered from individuals and governments, the British Museum will oversee the training of experts who will go to Iraq and help piece the country's archaeological heritage back together, MacGregor said after the meeting. UNESCO said it would soon send a panel of experts to Iraq to begin compiling a database of the country's missing artifacts, that would be shared with police around the world, said assistant director-general Mounir Bouchenaki. Many Iraqis criticized U.S. troops for doing little to stop the theft, and museum experts echoed that view. The United States has said it was surprised by the rampage and said American troops were too occupied by combat to intervene when they reached Baghdad. George said museum staff members begged U.S. troops to park their tanks nearby to discourage looting. ''They told him they did not have orders for that. Was it done intentionally? I don't know,'' he said. ''You should ask them why they did not protect a place they knew contained the heritage of mankind.'' George said he saw no U.S. presence when he recently crossed the Iraqi-Jordanian border, but that Jordanian border officials said they had confiscated 12 boxes of objects and documents. ''It's very extraordinary ... that with American troops in Baghdad, American troops almost at the gates of the museum, this was allowed to happen,'' MacGregor said. He said it was unclear whether the looting had been carried out to order by thieves acting for private art collectors.
''It's clear that there is a flourishing trade in illicit Mesopotamian antiquities, so I think a lot of it would have been stolen for the trade,'' he told the BBC. ''That's not the same as for a specific collector.'' Ancient Mesopotamia modern-day Iraq was the cradle of civilization, and Iraq's museums held priceless, millennia-old collections of Babylonian, Sumerian and Assyrian artifacts. Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of coalition forces in Iraq, said Monday that Iraqis had begun to respond to American appeals to return looted goods. Over the weekend, U.S. forces had began broadcasting radio messages offering rewards for the antiquities' return. The U.S. Central Command said more than 100 items had been handed in, including priceless manuscripts, a 7,000-year-old vase and one of the oldest recorded bronze bas relief bulls. In an interview with The Associated Press, Franks said it did not appear that the looting had been carried out by an organized network of thieves. ''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 from coalition headquarters in Doha, Qatar. But Professor Peter Stone, who advised the British military on Iraq's historic sites, disagreed, saying some of the items were probably stolen for specific clients.
''I would be very surprised if it were not the case that some of it had been stolen to order although I have no cast-iron evidence of that,'' said Stone, an archaeology expert at Newcastle University. Among the items believed lost from the Baghdad museum are an alabaster vase from 3200 B.C. and bronze reliefs from 3500 B.C.
http://www.boston.com/
UNESCO to send experts to Iraq to compile data on looted antiquities
29 April – Striving to recover priceless antiquities looted from Iraq's museums, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) announced today that it was sending an expert team to Baghdad to help establish a database and prevent international trafficking in the stolen artefacts.
In a message read to a meeting of international experts in London, UNESCO Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura said a database combining all archives, lists and inventories relating to Iraq's heritage was essential to enable customs and police authorities as well as dealers to identify the status of particular objects. "That is why I am about to send, in the days ahead, a first mission of eight high-level experts in order to make a preliminary assessment of the situation and identify immediate actions to be taken so as for UNESCO to ensure the appropriate institutional framework and its coordination role in the safeguarding of cultural heritage in Iraq," he added. In the message, read out by UNESCO's Assistant Director-General for Culture, Mounir Bouchenaki, who co-chaired the meeting with the Director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, Mr. Matsuura outlined the measures he had already taken. These included contacts with the international police organization Interpol, the World Customs Organization and the International Confederation of Art Dealers. He has also asked UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to submit the question of illicit traffic to the Security Council for a resolution to impose a temporary embargo on the acquisition of all Iraqi cultural objects and to call for the return of such goods to Iraq if acquisitions or exports of this kind have already taken place.
The session followed an earlier meeting at UNESCO headquarters in Paris on 17 April in the wake of the looting of major museums, libraries and other Iraqi cultural centres, principally in Baghdad and Mosul, with the loss of antiquities stretching back 7,000 years. The list of participants included 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.