MASTERPIECES by Rembrandt and Bellini have been recovered by Danish police in a dramatic raid on a Copenhagen villa six months after they were stolen from an art gallery.
The combined value of Rembrandt's 1632 Portrait of a Lady and Bellini's 1490 Portrait of a Young Man is said to be around £18 million. Such is their importance that Interpol listed them among the world's top six most wanted stolen works of art. Rescued by police, they emerged largely unscathed, and two men in their twenties were arrested and remanded in custody after a court hearing. Five alleged accomplices were detained by police earlier. All are Danish, although it is believed that they were about to sell the pictures to a buyer overseas. The paintings disappeared in January from the Nivaagaard Collection, housed within a secluded manor house at Nivaa, 15 miles north of Copenhagen. The art gallery, a private institution, is famous for its Dutch and Italian Renaissance art.
Two men had overpowered an elderly security guard in the gallery and drove away with the paintings in a car with Swedish number plates. Despite their value, the pictures were not protected by sensors, surveillance videos or alarms. A £32,000 reward was offered for information or assistance in tracing the stolen paintings, but because the police investigation led to their recovery, no one will be claiming it. Niels Ohrt, curator of the gallery, said the paintings were recovered in crates and appeared to be undamaged. He said that they would be put back on display after the police had carried out technical tests and new surveillance equipment had been installed at Nivaagaard. A seven-month investigation into the Copenhagen theft led investigators to a suburban basement where they found the paintings: they were within a specially-made box, suggesting to police that they were about to be transported. The suspects are known to have held several meetings with potential buyers overseas, though police were unable to elaborate while investigations continue.
After every major art heist, experts opine that there is no criminal mastermind amassing the world's greatest paintings in a Jamaican hideaway. In that case, say David Frohnsdorff and Andrew Cranwell of Southampton Institute, collectors ain't what they used to be... What motivates a true collector? I don't mean a casual treasure hunter such as we see today, trawling boot sales or the internet to unearth the odd item of interest, but a real monomaniac. Any single theory of collecting does not seem to fit perfectly and fails to account for the many disparate types of collector. The study of the psychology of collecting and the evolution of collections is a fertile field of academia. Indeed, much careful, objective, systematic study as well as a more innovative, individualised and multi-disciplinary approach, to the collectors themselves is long overdue.
++Moderator's comment++Dear subscribers,
Below you will find the aswer Mr. Triebold sent me in reply to my request for more information. I still did not get an access code to enter his site, so it is impossible for me to review it. I consider a $. 400,00 access code for a 3000 items database a lot of money. It is up to you to decide if you want to support this.Subject: your e-mail ART-PROTECT
Ton Cremers
You are asking about the quantity of items listed on our database: The actual status is about 2500 - 3000 pcs. all with photographs and description. There are more than another 3000 pcs. waiting to be filed which we definitely will bring by the end of the year. We will show our project at the CULTURA art fair in Basel/Switzerland in November. Our customers at the moment are mainly in Europe. The Archaelogical seminary of the University of Basel, The public library of the Basel University, The Zurich Police dept., Galeria Serodine Ascona Switzerland, etc. are customers of us and use our service permanently. We have close contacts to museums and the Swiss cultural department in Bern looking at our project with great interest because of the coming ratification of the UNESCO treaty by the Swiss government. What we actually do here is to describe every single item with academic and basic topics, physical measurements and provide a contact address for every single item in case of positive identi- fication. More, so the customers wishes, his queries on the data base can be stored for many years and because of his personal acces code we can provide him with all the information to prove his good faith in case of later legal problems. The aim of all is to force a better and faster information not only for the trade but also for scientific purpose which means also that better inventories should be kept in any way. Our company is a private company financial completely independent working for special purposes with IBM, The blue window (Swiss Internet provider) and the editor WELTKUNST from Germany. There many things to say but I hope to have you served with this information. In case of questions do not hesitate to contact me. I'll be glad to help you.
yours,
Alexander E.R. Triebold
managing director
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In 1939, as German forces swept across Europe, they were followed by special units whose only duty was to plunder the continent's art treasures. Over the next four years, owners were threatened with the death camps if they refused to sell, or watched powerless as Old Masters were ripped from their walls. Abandoned museums were emptied. The best of the best gathered by Hitler's battalions was destined for a new museum in the Führer's boyhood hometown of Linz in northern Austria.
It was a good time to be an art dealer, as the looting revived a stagnant market. Prices reached record levels, particularly for the works most highly valued in Germany. But behind the feeding frenzy lurked one of this century's greatest conmen. Hans van Meegeren was a huckster and then some, a man prepared to risk his life to make fools of the critics who ended his own career as a painter. His is a story that infuriated dealers, had Hermann Göring in tears and left van Meegeren himself teetering on the edge of the gallows. And it has now found its way to Hollywood, where Nicholas Hytner is to direct a movie about van Meegeren's life.
Van Meegeren was born in 1889 in Deventer, 80 kilometres from Amsterdam. A keen artist as a child, he was ordered to abandon his sketches by his domineering father and sent to study architecture in Delft. His first deception was in never enrolling but pursuing a career with brushes and pencils.
But although van Meegeren had sell-out shows in 1916 and 1922, his career drew to a close almost as soon as it had begun. By the second of these exhibitions, when he was in his early thirties, the traits that would undermine his health and standing were becoming apparent. He was an inveterate womaniser, despite having two children and a doting wife. Praised by the art critic C.H. de Boer for his "admirable exact and conservative style", van Meegeren responded by seducing de Boer's wife, Jo Oerlemans. She later became the second Mrs van Meegeren.
Just as quickly as they had recognised van Meegeren's talents, the critics kicked him out of fashion in favour of the new abstract style. He slid into alcoholism and morphine addiction, before his vengeful streak came to the surface. He turned his hand to forgery with a friend, the art restorer Theo van Wijngaarden. They were initially successful, but then a "Frans Hals" was denounced as a fake by the connoisseur Abraham Bredius.
Not only did Bredius recognise technical errors in the work; he also realised that the forgers had used two paints that were not developed until the late 19th century, and nails that were 200 years younger than the supposed Old Master. Van Meegeren split with his accomplice and left Holland vowing never to make the same mistakes again. He set up home in Roquebrune on the Cote d'Azur. Ostensibly, his business was painting portraits of society figures, but this was merely a cover while he developed his next forgeries. He had brought with him 17th-century canvases upon which to apply the next layers of his deceit. He had also purchased several books on his next subject, Johannes Vermeer.
Vermeer was a convenient target. Not only had he produced few works - only 30 pictures in all - but little was known about a whole decade in his career.
Van Meegeren applied his mind as well as his eye to his work. As a child he had been taught by teachers to grind his colours using the same methods as the Masters; later he had baked his canvases to achieve a look that suggested centuries of cracking. In 1937, with the rejection of his "Hals" still fresh in his mind, van Meegeren directed his first "Vermeer", Supper at Emmaus, at Bredius, who was now in his eighties and nearly blind. He must have been delighted by Bredius's verdict, published in Burlington magazine later that year. "We have," he concluded, "the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft." Bredius convinced his colleagues in Holland that such a national treasure should be returned to its country of origin. It was swiftly purchased for 520,000 florins - the equivalent of $5 million in today's prices - and put on display in Rotterdam.
The fraud was not uncovered until another unknown "Vermeer", Christ with the Adulteress, was recovered among Göring's possessions in a salt mine at Alt Aussee, the northern Austrian location for the largest single cache of Nazi art looted, traded or bought by the Nazis. Inquiries by the Netherlands' Field Security Service established that the Reichsmarschall had exchanged 200 paintings for it, including, ironically, another van Meegeren "Vermeer". Göring had valued it above all the other art treasures he had acquired, legally or illegally.
In May 1945, further checks led to van Meegeren's door. He could not explain where he had obtained the masterwork and was charged with collaboration. Facing a possible death sentence, he took his biggest risk to date. He was, he declared, a forger who should be treated as a hero for hoodwinking the Germans. Göring learnt he had been tricked while at Nuremberg awaiting trial as a war criminal. "He looked," said one eyewitness, "as if for the first time he had discovered there was evil in the world."
The American press applauded van Meegeren's deception. In January 1947, journalist Irving Wallace penned an account of van Meegeren's exploits, entitled The Man Who Cheated Hermann Göring. Yet the Americans themselves were being kidded: van Meegeren was far from being a saint. In the '30s, this fervent right-winger had written racist articles attacking the dealers who cut short his official career.
But the faker still had to escape the death penalty. To prove his claim, van Meegeren was put in a room with six witnesses where, in little over a month, he knocked out another "original" Vermeer called Young Christ. The work was never completed, however. The charge of collaboration was dropped, but one of forgery substituted. Van Meegeren refused to age and bake his painting, in the hope that this might get him off the hook.
It was not to be. A commission of inquiry under Belgian art expert Dr P.B. Coremanns, and including specialists from the British Museum and London's National Gallery, examined works that van Meegeren had owned up to and those found at his home in southern France. They were, it concluded, indeed fakes.
At his trial in October 1947, van Meegeren sat cowed as he was sentenced to a year in prison for forgery. Around him hung his new Old Masters. Even though his paintings had sold for the 1945 equivalent of more than $20 million, he insisted that he was not motivated by money: "I did it only from a desire to paint." In the event, van Meegeren never served a day of his jail term. Admitted to an Amsterdam clinic suffering from the effects of long-time morphine and alcohol addiction, he died on December 30, 1947. But the question he posed at his trial lives on, to be repeated by each fresh wave of fakers: "Yesterday, this painting was worth millions of guilders and experts and art lovers would come from all over the world and pay money to see it. Today, it is worth nothing and nobody would cross the street to see it for free. But the picture has not changed. What has?"-
Brendan Pittaway is co-author of The Lost Masters: The Looting of Europe's Treasurehouses, published by Victor Gollancz.The Guardian