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July 16, 1999

CONTENTS:

- Rembrandt Stolen from French Museum
- Risk assessment
- New York agency obtains return of Holocaust art
- Thieves are plundering rare and valuable cultural pieces, and institutions are powerless to stop them (S.A.)
- online most wanted, list of stolen, lost, looted or censored works of art from around the world
( http://www.artresources.com/departments/hot.sheet/)
- Disaster plans

Wednesday July 14 12:43 PM ET

Rembrandt Stolen from French Museum

PARIS (AP) - Thieves managed to break in through the back door of a small museum in southern France and steal a Rembrandt painting worth more than $3 million, police said Wednesday.
The 17th-century painting, ``Child with a Soap Bubble,'' was the only work stolen from the municipal museum in Draguignan, near Toulon in the Var region, police said.
About 10 p.m. Tuesday night, an alarm went off, alerting the museum guard, who lives on the premises.
Initially, police believed the thieves entered the museum by scaling its gates. Later they decided they had broken in through the back door - and escaped the same way.
The museum did not answer its phone on Wednesday, a national holiday.

ConsDisList: From: Harold Holland hholland@gov.nb.ca
Subject:

Risk assessment

Presently we have an engineering student preparing background material to assist smaller institutions such as museums and archives to complete inhouse risk assessments. We would like to rank each potential threat (fire, neglect. inappropriate environmental conditions, physical forces etc.) and probable amount of damage to a collection between 0.0 and 1.0 as published by Robert Waller. For example if there is a 50% chance of an earthquake with a seismic force of 5.0 in a region, are there readable identifiable parameters to help determine the probable degree of shaking resistance and impact upon a collection. Likewise suggestions for developing a ranking system for each of the major threats for each general category of collection (items easily broken such as glass or susceptible to low heat, etc.) will be appreciated.
Harold Holland
Preservation Manager
Provincial Archives NB
PO Box 6000
Fredericton NB E3B 5H1
506-444-4142
Fax: 506-453-3288

New York agency obtains return of Holocaust art

NEW YORK, July 12 (Reuters) - The first artwork to be recovered by a New York state agency set up to facilitate the return of property seized by the Nazis during the Holocaust was given to its rightful owner on Monday.
``The Seamstress,'' a painting by Lesser Ury, considered one of the most important German artists of the early 1900s, was recovered after protracted negotiations between the Holocaust Claims Processing Office of the New York State Banking Department and officials of Linz, Austria.
Expressing gratitude for the return of the painting, which had been in the collection of his grandfather, Louis Loewenthal, Michael Loewenthal of Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, said ``The Seamstress'' had put him in touch with his past. ``It is the only link I have with my grandparents,'' he said.
Loewenthal's grandfather was forced to sell his art collection to Berlin dealer Wolfgang Gurlitt, who had been hired by the Reich Propaganda Ministry, around 1940, a Banking Department spokesman said. The Loewenthal family had been trying to get the painting back since 1951. Michael Loewenthal said he was told the rest of his grandfather's collection was destroyed in a 1943 air raid.
``The Seamstress'' had been on display in the New Gallery of Linz since the city bought the painting from Gurlitt in 1956. Loewenthal said he planned to exhibit it at a Jewish-affiliated museum.
The Holocaust Claims Processing Office was created in 1997 by New York Gov. George Pataki.
Copyright 1999 Reuters Limited.

(Sunday Times South Africa)

Our vanishing art heritage

Thieves are plundering rare and valuable cultural pieces, and institutions are powerless to stop them

HENRY LUDSKI
SOUTH Africa is being stripped of its national heritage by art thieves who have already bagged cultural treasures worth millions. Their latest haul includes three paintings by Gerard Sekoto, who is regarded as South Africa's top black artist. The works have a combined value of more than R500 000. The plunder of African cultural heritage throughout the region is so serious that it is one of the leading issues for discussion at the South African Development Council's arts and culture conference being held in Malawi this week.

the Other irreplaceable items on an international lost art register are:

More than R10-million worth of items have been stolen from galleries and museums around the country, according to a police inventory shown to the Sunday Times. But the real figure is believed to be much higher because many institutions don't report their losses. The list has yet to be updated to include the diamond ring, estimated to be worth in excess of R200 000, which recently went missing from Parliament.
The Endangered Species Unit in Pretoria now has an investigating officer dealing specifically with the theft of cultural property. But police have had limited success in the past. Only a handful of people have been prosecuted in 10 years. Lionel Mtshali, the Minister of Arts and Culture, has pledged to upgrade security at museums. But those institutions must take greater responsibility for "what belongs to the people", said Gillian Berning, the past president of the South African Museums Association. "It's always easy to pass the buck. Many institutions are taking seriously the issue of due diligence and are coming up with creative ways of monitoring the situation."
John Gribble, the marine archaeologist at the SA Monuments Council, confirmed that the organisation was pushing ahead with its battle in the British High Court for the return of 1 200 gold coins it believes were recovered from the Doddington East Indiaman, which was shipwrecked on Bird Island, off Port Elizabeth, on July 17 1755. The hoard belonged to Robert Clive, the founder of the British Empire in India who was known as "Clive of India". A London coin auctioning house put them up for sale three years ago, but the council succeeded in stopping the event.
Sekoto's The Garden Worker, The Street Scene and The Hotela Bantu were stolen from the University of Fort Hare's new Centre for Cultural Studies.
Regarded as one of the best designed and most secure archive facilities of its kind in Southern Africa, it houses the documentary history of the ANC.

http://www.artresources.com/departments/hot.sheet/

Missing from View!

Cases from the Hot Sheet

Missing from View! Cases from the Hot Sheet is an online most wanted list of stolen, lost, looted or censored works of art from around the world. Through the images and information presented here, we hope to raise the awareness of art lovers the world over to be on the look out for works that have been stolen from museums or collections, lost or looted from places of worship or homes during civil unrest, poverty, war or tyranny or art that can't see the light of day or be displayed in public because someone has deemed its content as objectionable. Few of these events catch the notice of the news media or governments despite the impact it has on the culture and identity of a nation or a time in history. These works can no longer be shared with the public or used in research -- leaving gaps in our knowledge and understanding of the past. To some this may sound like we are blowing this way out of proportion but think about what remains of past civilizations, of the treasures that fill museums. It is not the stuff of governments, it is the artistic creations of those civilizations that we study to define them. It is the architectural fragments, the pieces of tapestries, the remnants of decorated scrolls, the faded mosaics and murals, the painting on walls, ceilings and canvas, the shards of clay pots and pitchers. It is the ornamental jewelry, the sculpture, statuary. An endless list of works through which we have come to know more about those who came before. This is why the stealing, looting, loss and censorship robs us all and future generations. Remove the artistic achievements, the cultural objects and what remains will be forgotten or replaced.
We do not put information on this site lightly. We have done our best to insure that each item listed is indeed stolen, lost, looted or censored. We hope that you will find the information interesting and informative. And possibly, as you wander through a market or store or into an auction - maybe something that was lost can be found.
As reports age past 90 days, they are not discarded, but moved to The Archives:
http://www.artresources.com/departments/hot.sheet/archives.ihtml?y=1998
To have your report included, check out our information page for requirements:
http://www.artresources.com/departments/hot.sheet/information.ihtml

(ConsDisLIst)
From: Sarah-Jane Rennie rennie@eagles.com.au
Subject:

Disaster plans

We are currently writing a guide for developing disaster preparedness plans for small mostly volunteer run museums in Australia. The guide is intended to assist people without previous experience in Disaster Preparedness Planning to produce a plan for their museum. Initially we were avoiding the use of templates as we felt this is would be less interactive. However, discussions with conservators and others involved with similar projects has led to a rethinking of this approach.
Have people had any experience of either guides or templates used to create Disaster Preparedness plans, particularly with small museums? What were the pros and cons of the system you used? What would you do differently?


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