Museum Security website statistics; over 1000 hits per week

November 12, 1999

CONTENTS:

- Paintings returned 21 years after California heist
- 2000 National Conference Theme & Agenda:
"Challenges and Opportunities: Year 2000 and Beyond"
- Stolen Art and Antiques on the Web (Jonathan Sazonoff)

Paintings returned 21 years after California heist

By Andrew Quinn
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -
Three Dutch Old Master paintings stolen 21 years ago in a daring Christmas Eve heist from a San Francisco museum have been returned anonymously to a New York auction house, officials said Thursday. The 17th-century paintings, one of them attributed to Rembrandt, were left in a box at the William Doyle Galleries on Nov. 2 and were quickly recognized as works taken from San Francisco's M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in 1978.
"We have no idea who did it," Carolyn Macmillan, a spokesperson for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, said Thursday. "The mystery hasn't been solved, but at least the paintings have been returned. We are grateful that they will be back in their proper place." The most famous of the paintings is "Portrait of a Rabbi," which art specialists originally believed to be a Rembrandt but which some experts now think may have been painted by one of his students or a skilled copyist.
The other recovered works include Aert van der Neer's "River Scene at Night" and "Interior of the Church of Saint Lawrence, Rotterdam" by Anthonie de Lorme.
The whereabouts of a fourth painting stolen in 1978, Willem van de Velde's "Harbor Scene", is not known. Auction house officials said an unidentified man dropped off the three paintings during a weekly open house for walk-in appraisals. No one got a good look at the man, who vanished before the package was noticed.
Alerted by an anonymous telephone call, auction house employees called the police to open of the box, which they feared might contain a bomb. Instead, they found the three paintings, which Alan Fausel, the galleries' director of paintings and a former San Francisco museum employee, recognized as belonging to the de Young. "We are proud to have had a role in the recovery and return of the paintings to the de Young," Fausel said in a statement. The Federal Bureau of Investigation was called in to examine the paintings, and on Wednesday evening the FBI informed the director of San Francisco's city museums that the works had been found. Museum officials tempered their euphoria over the return of the works by noting that all three had been seriously damaged, including "Portrait of a Rabbi", which someone had apparently attempted to clean.
That painting, if it were in perfect condition and proven to be an actual Rembrandt, could be worth as much as $20 million, but museum officials said Thursday they suspected that, given its condition and dubious authenticity, it could be worth less than the $1 million estimated in 1978.
The other three stolen paintings were estimated to be worth a total of $75,000 in 1978.
Macmillan said the three recovered paintings were currently being held as evidence by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but that they were expected to be returned to the museum within the next couple of weeks.
Then, curators and art historians will take a fresh look at "Portrait of a Rabbi", using testing technology not available in 1978 in an attempt to verify its authenticity.
"One thing we're going to try to find out is if it is really a Rembrandt or not," Macmillan said. "It was billed as a Rembrandt for 30 years, it traveled as a Rembrandt, but we just don't know. It's now a matter of us getting our hands on it and having it looked at." The artwork's return marked an appropriately mysterious final chapter to a high-profile art theft that has puzzled San Francisco for years. The Christmas Eve thieves dropped in from the skylight, removed the paintings and escaped the same way, using a valuable 18th century chest as a stepladder. No alarms sounded, and the theft was not noticed until the next day.
After the theft, museum officials installed some $1.2 million in security devices and offered a $50,000 reward for the return of the paintings.
They also counted themselves lucky. While the thieves made off with four paintings, others had been removed from their places on the museum walls but left behind. Among these was "Portrait of Joris de Caullerii," a genuine Rembrandt now worth between $25 million to $30 million.
Reuters/Variety
http://news.excite.com/news/r/991111/18/art-heist

2000 National Conference Theme & Agenda:

"Challenges and Opportunities: Year 2000 and Beyond"

http://natconf.si.edu/
This year's Conference theme, "Challenges and Opportunities: Year 2000 and Beyond," explores the issues, obstacles and technologies that cultural property protection professionals will face in the next millennium.
Leading authorities from the public and private sectors will offer hands-on and lecture-style sessions in a wide-range of topics. These tentatively include: http://natconf.si.edu/

From: Jonathan Sazonoff saz@kwom.com
Subject:

Stolen Art and Antiques on the Web

Dear Subscribers,
Following the proliferation of web-sites featuring stolen art & antiques; one notices there are a number of private efforts in the field. For those who follow the subject, in addition to "major" listings http://www.saztv.com/page9.html, we've also compiled a list of "minor" web-sites concerning stolen art.

Hope you find this information useful.
Jonathan Sazonoff
Pres., SAZ PRODUCTIONS, INC.
Http://www.saztv.com
Contributing US Ed.
Museum Security Network
http://www.museum-security.org/saz.html

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