ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) - A federal magistrate blocked the Museum of Modern Art from sending a painting back to Austria because of claims that Nazis stole it from its Jewish owner. The move came hours after a state court said the painting could go back. U.S. Magistrate Judge James C. Francis issued a seizure warrant late Tuesday for Expressionist artist Egon Schiele's painting ``Portrait of Wally'' after finding probable cause it was stolen property. ``It is an important policy of the United States and other countries to return Holocaust-era looted property,'' said a release from U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White, who sought the warrant. It was not known whether a seizure warrant would be sought for ``Dead City III,'' a second Schiele painting whose origin has been questioned. Earlier Tuesday, the state's highest court cleared the way for the paintings to be returned to the Leopold Foundation of Vienna, Austria. The New York Court of Appeals threw out a subpoena for the works, saying museum art was immune from seizure in criminal or civil proceedings. The paintings were among more than 100 loaned to the museum. Three days after the exhibit ended last year, Henry Bondi of Princeton, N.J., Kathleen Rief of Vancouver, British Columbia, and Rita Rief of New York City filed claims saying the paintings had been taken from their relatives when Germany annexed Austria in 1938. The museum argued that it was contractually obligated to return the paintings. Leopold Foundation board member Elisabeth Leopold said the board was positive that both paintings were legitimate acquisitions and that both had to be returned. ``That will also emerge in the current investigation because it is evident that the picture was not stolen,'' she said. Bondi said ``Portrait of Wally'' was taken from his late aunt, Lea Bondi, a Jewish-Viennese art dealer who was pressed by a Nazi art dealer to leave the work behind when she fled to London in 1938. The Riefs said ``Dead City'' was taken from Fritz Grunbaum, who died in a concentration camp. The paintings were collected by Rudolf Leopold, who sold them to the Austrian government in 1993 and has argued that they were legally acquired. While the Museum of Modern Art successfully fought the state, it will take a back seat this time. ``The Leopold Foundation must now take the lead in ownership issues,'' museum officials said in a statement.
New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is fighting a controversial exhibit scheduled to open at the Brooklyn Museum of Art October second. The show includes a picture of the Virgin Mary smeared with elephant dung, and animal carcasses sliced in half. Giuliani, who is Catholic, says he'll work to cut funding to the museum unless the show is called off.
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) - It's been a starry, starry nightmare for van Gogh lovers.
Art experts long have questioned the authenticity of some Vincent van Gogh paintings in prestigious museums, or have cast doubt on whether those that sell for stratospheric prices are authentic or brilliantly executed fakes. Frustrated at seeing so many works brushed off as bogus, Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum launched a pre-emptive strike Thursday, declaring as genuine a controversial painting in its newest exhibition - and vowing to use the latest in high-tech, forensic sleuthing techniques to conclusively settle other disputes. Museum director John Leighton said he hopes to stay a step ahead of the critics and skeptics who have thrown the origins of more than a half-dozen van Goghs into question. ``If you look at a painting too closely, you risk losing some of the magic,'' he said. ``But since we sometimes have to make pronouncements, we'll be paying more attention to the technical aspects of investigation. It will keep us sharp.'' Though other masters have had works falsely attributed to them, van Gogh is particularly prone to fakes. In the creative dementia of his last days he became almost rabidly prolific and broke from his usual style, making it difficult to keep track of those works. Some experts say it is unlikely that all 1,100 works attributed to van Gogh are authentic, though many of them are not in dispute. Despite the controversy over van Goghs, it was the artist's ``Portrait of Dr. Gachet'' that garnered the highest price ever paid for a painting at auction when it sold for $82.5 million at the height of the art boom in 1990. The van Gogh museum, which houses the world's largest collection of the Dutch master's works, went on the offensive Thursday. It announced the results of an elaborate probe it said proved beyond a doubt the authenticity of a long-suspect version of van Gogh's ``The Garden of Saint Paul's Hospital,'' the asylum in St. Remy, France, where the troubled artist sought treatment a year before he committed suicide. One version of ``The Garden'' is in the Amsterdam museum's permanent collection; the other is there on loan from Germany's Folkwang Museum as part of an exhibition opening Friday of 17 van Goghs on display for the first time in the Netherlands. The loaned version has never been in doubt, but the Amsterdam painting is different enough to have aroused suspicions for decades. Some catalogues even list it with a question mark. It was donated to the Van Gogh Foundation in 1954 by Paul Gachet Jr., a Frenchman whose physician father cared for van Gogh in the last 70 days of the artist's life. Van Gogh, who did the bulk of his work in France, painted ``The Garden'' in 1889, a year before despondency and dementia drove him to shoot himself in the chest in a French wheat field. Using X-rays, ultraviolet light, high-powered microscopes and chemical analysis of tiny scrapes of van Gogh's signature thick dabs of paint, museum technicians were able to show that the paints and canvas were of the same types and hues as those favored by the master. They also examined the way the canvas was stretched and mounted, and found marks indicating that whoever handled it used the same specific kind of toothed pliers employed on other van Gogh canvases. Finally, museum experts analyzed letters written by van Gogh at the time and found a reference to ``the study of the house and park, of which there are two versions.'' Their conclusion: As with other paintings, van Gogh was simply unhappy with his first version - the one nobody disputes as authentic - and set to work on a second version in which he struggled to improve and refine his technique and his selection of colors. ``He had wanted to break out of his mold,'' the museum said in a draft report released Thursday. ``It is one of the ironies of history that he apparently failed to convince some people of the necessity of this artistic aim.'' Leighton, the museum director, knows he'll never persuade everyone. Though he does not deny the existence of fake van Goghs, Leighton hopes science will help put to rest unfounded attacks on authentic works so the public can enjoy them. Despite the scope of ``The Garden'' inquiry, some experts still doubt it's the real thing. Dr. Gachet was an amateur painter himself, and many critics believe he produced copies of paintings he received as gifts from van Gogh. ``It may well convince everyone, but not me,'' French art historian Benoit Landais told the Amsterdam daily Het Parool. ``The Gachets were fakers, and people don't know the half of it.''