AN internationally acclaimed sculptor has demanded that two of his stone figures be removed from public display after discovering that one had been decapitated and the other's feet had been broken off. Professor Glyn Williams, head of fine art at the Royal College of Art, is demanding damages from the local authority to whom the £20,000 sculptures had been loaned. Mr Williams, 60, says the damage and "crude" repairs to the works at Margam Park, near Port Talbot in South Wales, left the sculptures virtually worthless. The stone sculptures are called Pick a Back, depicting a mother with a child on her back, and Stone Rise East, the figure of a man on his back with his legs in the air. The sculptor said yesterday: "I'm afraid both works are in a terrible mess. The woman in Pick a Back was decapitated and the feet broken off the man in Stone Rise East. There are chunks of stone missing from both and fingers have been chipped off. I'm very upset and I am seeking damages." Officials at Neath and Port Talbot Council say the damage was the result of "natural wear and tear". Mr Williams disagrees: "In my opinion this sort of damage is probably the result of vandalism." The sculptures had been on display at Margam since they were loaned to the council in 1992. Around 20 other works, including a bronze bust by Dame Elizabeth Frink, are also on display at the 850-acre country park. Mr Williams is furious that his sculptures were repaired by an unknown hand without his permission and insists they must be taken off display. A spokesman for Neath and Port Talbot Council leisure services department said: "Negotiations are ongoing with Professor Williams's legal representatives and insurance investigators."
http://www.the-times.co.uk/
BLANTYRE, Scotland (AP) -- A Zulu spear collected by the 19th-century Scottish missionary and explorer Dr. David Livingstone during his African travels has been stolen from a center named after him in Blantyre, his birthplace in southwest Scotland. ``We're very upset about what's happened and we just hope we can get the spear back,'' the center's retail manager, Marion Reid, said Wednesday. ``The spear is a unique item which Dr. Livingstone brought back from Africa and, as such, is priceless.'' Livingstone acquired the spear in Matabeleland, the southern part of what is now Zimbabwe, in the mid-19th century. It is not known who gave it to him. A volunteer staff member Sunday noticed the spear was missing from its hanging place, about 6 feet high on a wall, but thought a regular staff member had removed it for cleaning. The theft was reported to police Monday. Livingstone, a physician, went to Africa in 1840 as a medical missionary in Bechuanaland, now called Botswana. But he is best known as an explorer in central and east Africa. He was the first Westerner to see the magnificent Victoria Falls on the border between Zimbabwe and what is now Zambia, he explored widely in what is now Malawi, and he ranged between lakes Nyasa and Tanganyika trying to find the source of the River Nile. He also was the subject of one of the world's most famous greetings. Journalist Sir Henry Morton Stanley, who went to Africa in search of Livingstone, found him Nov. 10, 1871, in Ujiji, in what is now Tanzania. With Victorian formality -- because they had never been introduced -- Stanley said, ``Dr. Livingstone, I presume?'' Livingstone died in Zambia in 1873, at age 60. He is buried in Westminster Abbey, London.
http://www7.mercurycenter.com/premium/world/docs/spear09.htm
SAINT PETERSBURG, Dec 9, 1999 -- (Agence France Presse) Sixteen paintings dating from the 18th and 19th century that were sliced out of their museum frames and stolen over the weekend have been recovered in a city flat, local police announced on Thursday. A police spokesman said the apartment owner and another man suspected of being his accomplice were arrested. The spokesman gave no further details. Art experts estimated that the value of the weekend haul from Saint Petersburg's Academy of Fine Arts -- Russia's oldest art school, founded in 1757 -- stood at around 1.1 million dollars (euros). The stolen canvasses included two by Ilya Repin, along with works by Ivan Kramskoye, Ivan Shashkin and Vasily Tropinin. ((c) 1999 Agence France Presse)
THE mystery of an Indian dancer's missing toe has returned to haunt the British Museum, after former staff have disclosed a farcical series of "accidents", writes John Harlow. The issue has been raised by the Museums and Galleries Commission, a government watchdog, which is worried about inadequate insurance in the country's museums. Artefacts, it emerges, are being damaged by sloppy staff and over-exuberant visitors. Suzanne Taverne, the museum's new managing director, is ordering an audit of the 6m objects in the Bloomsbury museum to assess the damage. One victim is the carving of Indian dancers displayed on an 11th-century Gujarati temple column base in the British Museum's Hotung Gallery. One of the eight dancers has been missing a toe since the eve of the gallery's opening by the Queen in 1992. A former warder has confessed that the digit was dislocated by a cleaner's bucket. He said last week: "The cleaner was a keen royalist and insisted on doing a last-minute dust and shine hours before Her Majesty arrived. But then disaster struck. She was rushing past the statue when the bucket grazed it and cracked off the end of the foot. "It was too late to do anything, so someone pocketed the fragment and we turned the base around so that the pale patch did not catch the Queen's eye. It has never been repaired." Most damage is inflicted by visitors, and warders say they have come to dread French school parties, which delight in sticking chewing gum on statues. However, insiders say that curators, restorers, cleaners and builders are almost equally culpable. Many accidents are hushed up and never recorded. A former restorer at the British Museum admitted: "I was repairing a medieval silver spoon when the phone rang. I turned sharply, knocking the spoon onto the floor, and its handle bent. It looked like the work of Uri Geller. I fixed it and it is on display today, but the spoon will never be the same." n another incident, a restorer dropped a chalice lent by a foreign government down the museum's grand marble staircase. The source said: "I heard a bump-bump-bump, followed by a loud wail. It was someone I knew chasing a chalice which had slipped out of her fingers. She was deeply upset, but we repaired the dents and nobody noticed." On another occasion a workman barged into an Assyrian bull with a piece of scaffolding, chipping off a chunk of the 3,000-year-old statue. A spokesman for the British Museum said it repaired or restored more than 18,000 objects a year. "A tiny fraction might be damaged by staff, but I don't think you can insure against that. So much is priceless," he said. At the Victoria and Albert Museum an employee told how she faced disaster as she removed an 18th-century shirt from a display case: "Moisture had seeped in, drying and stiffening the linen, so when I tried to move it the shirt ripped straight up the back. "I was inexperienced, so instead of telling the curator I stuffed it into a gym bag, took it home, stitched it up and returned it the next morning. So far no one has said anything." At the neighbouring Natural History Museum, a former curator told how he had accidentally snapped off the arms of a desiccated starfish: "It just crumbled away, so I buried the fragments at the bottom of a waste paper bin."
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/
A MULTIMILLION-dollar industry using backpackers to paint fake didgeridoos has been uncovered in north Queensland. An investigation by The Sunday Mail unearthed a stockpile of phoney didgeridoos on the outskirts of Cairns. Thousands of didgeridoos are being stored in readiness for the flood of Olympic tourists next year. The didgeridoos are being painted in secret factories and sold for $200 to $400. The Federal Government is about to launch an investigation. Arts Minister Richard Alston told Federal Parliament he knew of factories producing didgeridoos in Cairns and in Indonesia. "They are quite clearly attempts to defraud consumers," he said, and authorities would be informed. The situation is rife in the Cairns region, with one dealer employing backpackers to help cut trees to make didgeridoos. The timber was then machined and painted with a design copied from Aboriginal artwork. At one factory near Mt Molloy out side Mareeba, at least 1000 didgeridoos were stacked against a shed. They had been cut, shaved with angle grinders and coated with plastic sealant by non-Aboriginal workers. After being painted, they were destined to be sold as authentic Aboriginal didgeridoos to tourists. Some dealers in Cairns had leased sheds on a short-term basis to produce a batch before quickly moving on. Backpackers and some local Aborigines were being paid as little as $10 to paint a didgeri doo. However, dealers willing to work in bulk and arrange overseas freight could get the work done for $3 in Indonesia. Some Indonesian producers were selling fakes in Europe for 100 times the cost price. Palm Cove Aboriginal artist Greg Singh showed The Sunday Mail a catalogue his European dealer had been given in Amsterdam featuring fake didgeridoos, including several bamboo designs. Mr Singh said stockpiles in Cairns and on the Gold Coast were under armed guard. He said: "600,000 moved out of Cairns in 1998." Criminologist Ken Polk, a specialist in art crime, said up to 90% of didgeridoos sold in Australia used Indonesian timber. That claim is backed by the number of didgeridoos being moved around Australia - far more than could be created by traditional methods. Cairns dealer Glenn Geerlings admitted producing didgeridoos in a factory, using both white and black artists. He said there was no such thing as an "authentic" didgeridoo outside museums - his customers knew this and still bought from him. Some other dealers prominently displayed the names and pictures of their Aboriginal artists but Mr Geerlings said he had documentation to show they bought their didgeridoos from his factory. Belgian artist Ann Gion, now a resident of Cairns, said she had employed non-Aboriginal "kids off the street" to paint didgeridoos because she thought they also had the right to do it. She denied using back packers. "I don't go out there saying these are original," she said. "I got all these kids off the street. We told them to stick to fauna and flora and we did them different." Outside Kuranda, The Sunday Mail visited a group of houses where backpackers and Indonesians were allegedly employed to paint didgeridoos. A large shed had several unpainted didgeridoos lying outside. What appeared to be hostel-style accommodation was nearby. Kuranda Aboriginal artist Wayne Peckham, who uses traditional methods, said he was being forced out of business by the people selling fake didgeridoos. A Cairns backpacker hostel manager said he had seen brochures advertising for backpackers to paint didgeridoos. Executive officer of the Association of Northern, Kimberley and Arnhem Aboriginal Artists, Marie Munkara, said fake didgeridoos were rife in Cairns. "It's shocking. A lot of the stuff is going overseas and people aren't even aware it's fake," she said. "Unfortunately it's our own indigenous people who are doing it."
http://news.com.au/news_content/state_content/4265622.htm
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) - A British art distributor was sentenced to 21 months in federal prison after pleading guilty to brokering a stolen 17th century replica of Leonardo da Vinci's ``The Last Supper.'' The painting was taken from above the altar of historic St. Mary's Church in Purton, England. It originally was thought to be by Flemish master Jacob Jordaens and possibly stolen from Windsor Castle. Richard Cawthorne, 47, said he paid roughly $1,000 for it and another painting stolen from the same church. He was sentenced Friday. He and accomplice Graham Lee were arrested in November 1998 when they tried to sell the painting for $57,500 to an FBI informant. Lee pleaded guilty last month and received five-years probation and four-months house arrest. Prosecutor Deb Stewart said Cawthorne withheld important information, including the location of the second painting.
When archaeologist Ian Graham heard last year that a U.S. art collector planned to sell a 1,000-year-old Mayan artifact, he thought immediately of the saw marks on the front of a limestone monument he unearthed in Guatemala in 1971. The 7 1/2-foot monument of a standing man was missing a rectangular section that had once decorated its chest. The one about to be sold sounded a lot like the stolen fragment. "I knew that that was the piece," said Graham, who works at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. He immediately notified the Guatemalan consulate, which announced recently that the piece had been recovered and would be returned soon to its Central American homeland. "For us, it's an invaluable treasure because it is a part of our history," said Guatemalan Consul General Fabiola Fuentes Orellana. "It's priceless." Graham discovered the damaged statue in 1971 in northern Guatemala. Where its carved stone chest ornamentation should have been, he found just the flat surface left by thieves' saws. The chest piece had probably been stolen about five years earlier, along with other items, he said. The Guatemalan consulate had its lawyers alert U.S. Customs. Howard Spiegler, a lawyer for the Guatemalan government, then spoke to the collector, who agreed to return the piece, Spiegler said. Spiegler would not discuss how the American collector, whom he did not identify, had obtained the artifact. Neither he nor Graham could estimate the value of the recovered piece.
http://www.bergen.com/morenews/mayan199912129.htm
Unless the person who stole three Picasso artworks from a Vail area restaurant last month just wanted a pricey bauble, the thief probably will need to head out of Colorado to make any money off the loot. Gallery operators and art dealers are on the alert and have an instinct for cheap deals. "We have a pretty good sense if something is not right," said Norman Anderson of David Cook Fine Art in Denver. "If I were thinking like a thief, the best thing to do is go outside the area." Even if the price is low. The Cook gallery in October helped police catch a New Mexico pair who had offered to sell American Indian artifacts for less than half their $100,000 value. In the murky world of art resales, asking too little can be as risky as asking too much. Working in the Picasso thief's favor is the fact that the artworks, stolen Nov. 20 from a restaurant wall at the Cordillera Lodge, are multiples -- part of an edition. They are not one-of-a-kind pieces. That makes tracing them more difficult. "Picasso was very prolific," said Mikkel Saks, owner of Saks Gallery in Denver. "There are so many Picasso items on the market, nobody is going to pay major attention. It would be easy to slip it into the market -- and years before anybody found out. It would be different if it were a major painting." Even so, Saks said, gallery owners tend to pay attention -- even though it's not rare to be offered a low price and variations of "My mother just died and she had some Picasso prints." "I don't want things bouncing back to me," said Saks, who appraised the stolen Picassos for the Cordillera's owner a decade ago. The works are valued at $41,500, according to the Eagle County Sheriff's Department, which is spearheading the investigation. No arrests have been made. A $10,000 reward has been offered by officials of the lodge, which is west of Vail. Art dealers and galleries have been notified of the theft and urged to aid authorities. All this may force the thief to try to sell the works in another state. That might be possible if publicity is not extensive or after a considerable wait, even for a high-profile work. It also might occur if the thief found a private buyer who didn't care about the work's origin. Eventually, though, much stolen work is uncovered when it comes up for auction or for sale. Then the trail backward begins. The three works stolen from the Picasso restaurant at Cordillera are valuable, but they are less prominent because they're multiples. One was a partly glazed 1968 ceramic tile, titled Visage d'hote. Picasso tinkered in clay in the early 1900s, but most of his work in that medium was in the late 1940s and during the 1960s. The market in Picasso ceramics over the past few years has been brisk. There also has been continued interest in the other two stolen pieces. They are part of the Vollard Suite, which Picasso made in 1933-34 with French printer Ambroise Vollard. It includes 100 images that tell the story of a sculptor working in his studio. Eventually a minotaur --one of the bull figures that captivated Picasso -- enters the scene. The Suite has been printed in various versions, with different width margins -- and, in the case of at least one plate, with the artist using a red crayon rather than pencil for his signature. The plates taken from the lodge are No. 42, Deux Models Vetus, and No. 56, Le Pepos de Sculpteur Devant une Bacchanale Taureau. That the works were reported stolen at all is a positive move, said Sharon Flescher, executive director of the New York-based International Foundation for Art Research, or IFAR. IFAR began a stolen-art database in the 1960s, then turned it over to the London-based Art Loss Registry in 1991. The registry's list of stolen works has grown from 35,000 to more than 100,000 in eight years, though "only a percentage get reported," Flescher said. "The more publicity and actual concrete information, the more difficult it is to market an item. "But there's no answer to what people will do with a piece of stolen art."
http://insidedenver.com/news/1212pcso5.shtml
ROME, Dec 7, 1999 -- (Reuters) The first of five Alitalia Boeing 747 all-cargo jets landed at Fiumicino airport on Monday carrying part of a one billion dollar collection of art destined for one of Rome's millennium shows. The works of art, consisting of 80 paintings and 20 drawings, by modern masters including Van Gogh, Matisse, Cezanne, Monet and Gauguin, are on loan from St Petersburg's Hermitage museum to an exhibition in Rome's Quirinale building, the carrier said on Monday. The second aircraft was due to land at midnight on Monday and three more flights are scheduled for later this week, bringing in a collection that Alitalia claims is the most valuable cultural air shipment ever made. Alitalia said the art would fill 35 crates and weigh four metric tons, with the remaining space on each of the five flights left unoccupied. Splitting the load would "minimize the danger of losing the whole shipment" and has kept the cost of insuring it down. The collection is insured with Lloyd's of London for 1,800 billion lire ($950 million), a figure that Alitalia called a "low estimate" of the true value of the art. Alitalia said the art will pass straight through Fiumicino without stopping until it is secure in a safe at the Quirinale.
http://www.russiatoday.com/news.php3?id=116247