November 14, 1999

''Still, the fact that [the San Francisco paintings] were returned may be a reflection on the difficulty of selling stolen art,'' said David Shillingford, marketing director for the Art Loss Register, in New York. ''There's no question that it's increasingly difficult to market this sort of thing.''

Rare books stolen from university in Poland (Missing manuscripts humiliate famed school)

From: Tony Clarke tonyc@tepapa.govt.nz
Subject:

Fire suppression

Te Papa is in the process of building a storage room for a large and important stamp collection. Can anybody recommend a published reference on suitable fire protection for philatelic collections? At present a gas system has been installed together with a sprinkler system (sprinklers were not part of the original plan). To remove the sprinklers now will be very costly but may be necessary. I understand the adhesive surface on stamps to be a very significant part of the object, damage to the adhesive is not reversible therefore, I am not in favour of sprinklers or plumbing within this area as it presents a potential threat to adhesives. I would add I am in favour of sprinklers in other areas, and all other areas within the museum and storage areas are sprinklered.
Tony Clarke
Preventive Conservator
Te Papa
Museum of New Zealand
PO Box 467
Wellington
New Zealand
+64 4 381 7206
Fax: +64 4 381 7070

S.F. Art Heist Gone Bust

Thieves' failure to sell paintings may have led to dumping

Stacy Finz, Dan Levy, Chronicle Staff Writers
c1999 San Francisco Chronicle
URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1999/11/12/MN71604.DTL

It's not easy to fence a hot Rembrandt. What's an art thief to do -- sell it on eBay?

That's why some missing art pieces are stashed away in attics, others held for ransom -- and perhaps why the ``Portrait of a Rabbi'' and two other Dutch Master paintings, stolen from a San Francisco museum almost 21 years ago, were mysteriously dumped at a New York auction house last week.
``Just the fact that it has been returned says a lot,'' said Sharon Flescher, executive director of the International Foundation for Art Research in New York. ``The more famous and prominent the work, the more difficult it is to sell.''
Reports of art thefts in the United States and overseas have more than tripled in the last 20 years, according to the Australian Institute of Criminology. But unless an art collector has hired someone to steal a well- known work, big-ticket items are difficult to unload, say art world insiders. For starters, the thefts are well- publicized. Stephen Turner, director of online auctions and appraisals at Butterfield and Butterfield in San Francisco, said his gallery receives three or four publications a year alerting them of what has been stolen. Authorities do not know who took ``Portrait of a Rabbi'' and three other artworks from the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in Golden Gate Park on Christmas Eve 1978. And they can only speculate where they have been for the last 21 years. But Turner, for one, does not think that the bandits who took the 17th century paintings knew what to do with them. ``Obviously, whoever did this botched it,'' he said. ``They probably didn't have a buyer for the paintings, and for 21 years, they've been carrying around this monkey on their backs.'' From the beginning, museum officials believed that the theft -- though daring -- was carried out by amateurs. After climbing through the de Young's skylight, the thieves grabbed a Rembrandt whose authenticity was in question, along with less noted paintings. Collectively, they were worth at least a million dollars, but left behind was artwork worth much more.
It is also apparent that the paintings were not cared for properly after they were stolen. ``Portrait of a Rabbi'' is now marred by a large, rectangular splotch over the face, apparently caused by a bungled attempt to clean the painting's varnish, said Lynn Orr, curator of European painting for the de Young.
In addition, the canvas was frayed in some parts and had become detached from its frame. The other two recovered works -- Aert van der Neer's ``River Scene at Night'' and Anthonie de Lorme's ``Interior of the Church of St. Lawrence,'' both painted on wooden panels -- have split and buckled in several places.
Alan Fausel, the director of art at William Doyle Galleries in New York City, where the paintings were dropped off anonymously, attributes the damage to bad storage. He says for proper preservation, the artworks should have been kept in a climate- controlled environment.
Fausel said it is not uncommon for art that falls into amateurs' hands to receive less than ``museum treatment.'' Just 10 years ago, he found a Rembrandt etching stashed in an old attic in a house on Long Island. The piece was restored and later sold for $990,000. He said historians did not know whether the etching had been passed down from generation to generation or whether it had been stolen and hidden in the attic when it could not be sold. Sometimes thieves will steal pricey pieces of art with the hope of holding them for ransom. That was the fear nine years ago, when two men posed as police officers, gained entrance into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and left with $200 million worth of art. Authorities never recovered the works, and some suspect the pieces may have been moved overseas to wealthy collectors who commissioned the heist. The belief is that those pieces, like most stolen art, will eventually turn up.
``It may take a generation or it may take five generations,'' Fausel said, ``but they're bound to be recovered at some point.'' Flescher points to a late Impressionist piece painted by Camille Pissarro. The 1902 painting was stolen from a wealthy home in Worcester, Mass. But it turned up 21 years later at an auction house in Cleveland.
The fourth painting stolen from the de Young, Willem van de Velde's ``Harbor Scene,'' is still missing. It is not as well known as ``Portrait of a Rabbi,'' and Fausel believes that it may have been sold on the black market. The recovered de Young paintings are expected to return to San Francisco in two weeks, after the FBI finishes examining them for clues. At that point, museum officials plan to restore the works. One of the questions to be answered about ``Portrait of a Rabbi'' is whether Rembrandt really painted it. Art historians said yesterday there is a strong possibility that the piece was not painted by the master.
``It was normal practice in any great studio to have help from students or assistants,'' said Svetlana Alpers, a retired professor of art history at the University of California at Berkeley. ``Rembrandt didn't do every painting. That's the way he conducted his business and his art.''
Works purportedly by Rembrandt have been particularly controversial in recent years. During the last decade, a Dutch research group has been trying to authenticate the artist's entire body of work. One of the most notable cases of misattribution involved the famous ``Man with a Golden Helmet.'' It was determined in 1985 to have been painted by someone other than Rembrandt. Authentic or not, ``Portrait of a Rabbi'' will eventually be hung at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, said Dede Wilsey, president of the Fine Arts Museums board.
``For us, the important thing is to try to restore the painting and have it on display,'' she said. ``Even if it turns out not to be a Rembrandt, people will come see it for the curiosity factor.'' Wanda Corn, chairwoman of Stanford University's art and art history department, said, ``I think it's wonderful that we have our paintings back. It shows that someone felt guilty or desperate to get rid of the hot property.''
c1999 San Francisco Chronicle

Return of art stolen in '78 raises hopes for Gardner

By Judith Gaines, Globe Staff, 11/13/99
The mysterious reappearance this month of three masterworks stolen from the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco in 1978 improves prospects that art treasures taken from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990 may be returned, art specialists and investigators said yesterday.
''This occurrence should hearten those who want to see the artworks returned, all the officials at the Gardner and others who have worked so hard on this case all these years,'' said Brien O'Connor, a former assistant US attorney who handled the investigation of the Gardner heist from 1992 until May 1999.
On St. Patrick's Day 1990, at 1:24 a.m., two men talked their way into the Gardner Museum, telling guards they were police officers. They bound and gagged the guards and left them in the basement then stole 11 paintings, a bronze Chinese beaker, and a finial from a Napoleonic flag, valued at a total of $200 million to $300 million. The stolen paintings included Vermeer's 17th century masterpiece, ''The Concert,'' Rembrandt's ''Storm on the Sea of Galilee,'' his only known seascape; a Rembrandt self-portrait; and ''Chez Tortoni,'' a painting by Edouard Manet.
O'Connor said agents have received thousands of tips about the theft and tracked down leads that pointed to the Irish Republican Army, a Japanese collector, a rock musician, antiques dealers and more - but they have yet to make an arrest in what is considered the world's most expensive art heist.
O'Connor and others said the return of the San Francisco paintings, valued at $75,000, provides one answer to the question asked about the Gardner theft: Why were they stolen? ''Artworks are often stolen by thieves who think they'll have a much easier time making money, or trading them for value, than they do,'' O'Connor said. Richard Benefield, assistant director of the Harvard University Art Museums, said, ''It makes it pretty clear, if after 21 years the thieves couldn't find a home for those paintings, how difficult it is.''
A package containing ''Portrait of a Rabbi,'' an oil painting attributed to Rembrandt, and two other European paintings was left at the William Doyle Galleries in New York on Nov. 2, with an anonymous note saying they had been stolen from the San Francisco museum, officials at the Doyle revealed this week. Art authorities were quick to note investigations into the San Francisco and Boston heists are still underway. ''Still, the fact that [the San Francisco paintings] were returned may be a reflection on the difficulty of selling stolen art,'' said David Shillingford, marketing director for the Art Loss Register, in New York. ''There's no question that it's increasingly difficult to market this sort of thing.''
Publicity concerning art appropriated as loot during World War II and other military actions also has raised public consciousness about the difficulties of selling art with fraudulent or unclear ownership titles, Shillingford said.
But he said that a $1 million reward has been offered for return of the items stolen from the Gardner museum ''makes it unlikely that somebody would just leave the goods on someone's doorstep,'' as they did in New York.
This story ran on page B07 of the Boston Globe on 11/13/99.
c Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company.

Rare books stolen from university in Poland

Missing manuscripts humiliate famed school

Saturday, November 13, 1999
By MONIKA SCISLOWSKA
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
KRAKOW, Poland -- For serious scholars, the Jagiellonian University library evokes the heady smell of precious pages from the past -- works by such Renaissance giants as Copernicus and Galileo. Serious thieves smelled something else in the prestigious Polish library's aging stacks: cold cash. In an unsolved caper that has humiliated guardians of the renowned medieval collection, at least 58 manuscripts disappeared six months ago.
A few surfaced last month as they were about to go on sale at a German auction house. But that has done little to ease the embarrassment and pain at the Jagiellonian University, a 600-year-old center of learning named for King Wladyslaw Jagiello, who greatly expanded it.
The library houses more than 3.5 million works, including some of the nation's most precious manuscripts. Copernicus studied at the Jagiellonian, as did a young Karol Wojtyla, now Pope John Paul II. Today their bags would be subject to searches and they would have to go through rigorous bureaucratic channels for permission to examine even one old title.
"This is the price that thousands of library users are paying," university spokesman Leszek Sliwa said last week. "Library patrons would skin the thief alive because now it is much more difficult to get to the books."
Library officials are not sure how much the books might bring on the antiques market, where valuation is highly subjective. One missing manuscript alone -- a 1543 copy of Copernicus' planetary motion theory -- is believed to be worth a half-million dollars. It isn't clear how the books were smuggled out, but there are some clues.
The head of special collections, Zdzislaw Pietrzyk, said a librarian noticed some oddities last April in the library's inner sanctum: a book sticking awkwardly out of a row, another stored upside down. A frantic inventory of the medieval collection's 300,000 volumes ensued. Most of the missing titles had been removed from protective covers and replaced with less valuable books. Library staff members make only $190 to $285 a month, leading to speculation that it would have been easy to bribe an insider.
Pietrzyk bristles at suggestions it could be someone from his select staff of 35, saying he could "not imagine" anyone among them "would try to violate the sanctity" of the library. Prosecutors are hoping for some answers from a Bulgarian student who was arrested last month after about 60 books from the Jagiellonian were found in his Krakow apartment. So far, no evidence has emerged linking him to the missing medieval manuscripts. Inevitably, Poland's 10-year struggle with post-communist economic reforms gets some blame for the lax security. Pleas for more money from the cash-strapped government have gone unanswered for years, said Krzysztof Krolas, head of finance at the university. But the scandal has prompted some changes. A U.S. security system -- including remote cameras and alarms -- costing $171,000 is being installed a year earlier than planned.
Polish investigators say they have identified 18 Jagiellonian titles that were to go on sale at the Reiss and Sohn auction house in Koenigstein, Germany, including a 15th-century copy of a work by astronomer Ptolemy. Krakow prosecutors want the books back, but prospects are uncertain. Frankfurt prosecutors have only approved the confiscation of 11 of the 18 titles claimed by Polish investigators, and say it will be up to the German courts to determine ownership. "What has happened is that now auction houses in Germany that have a Kepler, a Copernicus or a Galileo immediately come under suspicion," said Friedrich Ziska of the Ziska F. and Kistner R. auction house in Munich.
"These people just cannot understand that there is more than one copy" of such works, he said.
http://www.seattlep-i.com/national/pole13.shtml

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