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December 1, 1998

Stolen Mondrian painting found in Antwerp

Police have recovered the Mondrian painting that was stolen from a Middelburg (The Netherlands) museum two months ago. The painting was found in Antwerp (Belgium). Three suspects have been arrested. They tried to get a ransom from the insurance company. The painting was recovered in a good condition.

From: "William A. Heidecker"
Subject:

Art Transportation

When Art Hits the Road, Moving Priceless Treasures Calls for Maximum Security

By Lynn M. Ermann
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, November 29, 1998; Page G01
The truck disappears easily into the stream of moving vans and cars on the highway. No markings, sirens or police escorts indicate the priceless cargo on board.
That's the idea.

At this moment, millions of dollars' worth of art and artifacts are in transit, identifiable only to those who need to know. The treasures are carried in temperature- and humidity-controlled trucks that may be shadowed by unmarked cars and even tracked by satellite. Or they travel incognito, by rail, sea or air, under a courier's watchful eye. A high-stakes and well-oiled operation, this business can at times seem like a slick spy thriller. Glen A. Campbell, the executive director of Wonders, which organizes traveling exhibits, actually handcuffed himself to a briefcase containing the Topkapi dagger. Army guards escorted Campbell to the airport and, at the last minute, switched him to a commercial flight. "I was going through metal detectors with this big knife," he says. The more discreet Therese Chen, director of registration at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, bought a first-class seat for her Faberge egg, which was packed in a bulletproof case.
Many museums are reluctant to disclose their procedures and would only discuss past experiences. Spokesmen for the Smithsonian Institution and the Metropolitan Museum of Art were even more tight-lipped and refused to comment for this article.
The public only sees the inner workings when something goes wrong, like last year's public standoff between Russia and the organizers of the Romanov show, or the Swissair crash with a Picasso on board. As a rule, loss, damage and theft are rare. Out of 567 exhibitions, the Arts and Artifacts Indemnity Program has had just two claims. Smith Adjusters, an insurance company whose clients include a lot of museums, handles only 10 to 15 claims a year related to objects stolen or damaged in transit. The Art Loss Register reported two recent thefts, one involving the 1992 disappearance of a mirror and two Egyptian statues returning to New York City from the Midwest. Over the past 20 years, the transportation of art has become an industry, due mainly to the increase in lending and traveling exhibitions. (In 1998, more than 600 exhibitions were on the road, according to Museum Premieres, a nationwide guide to museums.) It started in 1974 with the King Tut exhibit, which set priceless art in motion. The following year, the National Endowment for the Arts started the Arts and Artifacts Indemnity Program to cover some of the costs of insuring these huge international shows. The trucking industry, which was looking for new customers for its temperature-controlled trailers, answered the call for safe transportation. Conservators, meanwhile, were studying the effects of shock and vibrations on art and changing the way it was packed. Museum registrars, who are responsible for the physical well-being of the works, started handling the logistics of getting art on the road. Registrars start with a deceptively simple task: getting a piece from "hook to hook." Yet every detail must be planned far in advance, often with the help of consultants and in accordance with insurance and indemnity policies. For example, the indemnity program limits each conveyance to a maximum of $50 million. To avoid catastrophic losses, museums also can't put an entire period of an artist's work in one vehicle. Registrars must outline the methods of security, keep condition reports at all stages and arrange transportation. Packing is key. "You hope that you are prepared for everything," says Nancy McGary, former director of collections management at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Could your box be dropped at the airport? Sloshed with water on a boat in Venice? Left out on the hot runway in India? Too much foam can crush the object, too little won't protect it. It is a science -- and there is always a nagging problem to be solved.
For the Whitney, it involved "The Rose," a Jay DeFeo painting 129 inches high, 92 wide and 11 thick. Not only was it enormous, it also was wet -- only the top layer of the thick paint had dried. Atthowe Fine Arts, a California crating-packing-shipping company, worked with conservators to design a special cage for the unwieldy 3,100-pound painting, as well as a system of chains and pulleys to lift and transport it.
Two years ago, the National Gallery of Art's chief registrar, Sally Freitag, had to find a way to move an 11-ton stone Olmec head from Mexico. The solution: a box built around the head to make it easier to lift.
Import and export regulations are another morass. Because of the embargo with Iran, the Brooklyn Museum of Art had to apply for an entry permit for every work in its current exhibit "Royal Persian Paintings: The Qajar Dynasty: 1785-1925." "We had to show that no money pertaining to the artwork was returned to Iran since 1987," explained curator Layla S. Diba. Ironically, the U.S. government loosened the embargo, allowing for artwork, last summer.
Almost anything can come up at customs -- especially when you're dealing with modern art. In 1926, U.S. Customs officials refused to recognize a Constantin Brancusi sculpture -- a simple bent rod of metal -- as a work of art, and they charged an import tax, declaring it "miscellaneous goods." Brancusi took the case to court and won: His "Bird in Space" was declared "art" and therefore tax-exempt. he classic "but is it art?" issue is even more complex today. For example, how do you convince a customs official that cow embryos in formaldehyde are "art"? Matthew Siegal, now a registrar at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Connecticut, once dealt with a work that consisted of a couple of gallons of pig's blood and a few hundred glass pipettes. He could transport the pipettes, but the overseas museums had to come up with their own pig's blood. (Does the artist get credit for his concept?)
The rest of the registrar's job is trouble-shooting -- on the road. Registrars often act as couriers, traveling alongside their precious cargo to handle crises and keep an eye on things. They make sure that the pilot doesn't forget to put a crate back on the plane after a stop or that the forklift operator doesn't drop it. They guard the art in a drafty cargo plane while the crew takes the required eight-hour break. Years ago, Cordelia Rose, now registrar of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, had to figure out a way to retrieve sculptures from a museum on a remote island off Kenya. Because there were no freight planes available, Rose first persuaded the Kenyan air force to do a training run to the island. But once they got there, the pilot found the landing strip was in poor condition and Rose was dropped off at a nearby uninhabited island. From there, she swam out to the nearest boat and got a lift to her destination. Now she takes a bathing suit along on every courier mission.
Janice Klein, a registrar at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, has transported everything from a mummy (in a protective cavity carved out of hard foam) to Sue the Dinosaur (by truck, in many boxes). She sums up her role this way: "If I'm doing my job right, nobody notices."
© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company

Italian police recover stolen Canaletto painting

ROME, Nov 27 (Reuters) - Italian police said on Friday they had recovered a $2.4 million oil painting by 18th century Venetian painter Canaletto which was stolen last month.
The painting, called ``Il Fonteghetto della Farina'' (The Flour Wharf), was recovered near Rome on Thursday after the two thieves who had taken it from a private collection in Venice's Giustiniani Palace turned themselves in.
Two less valuable paintings which had also been taken in the heist were also recovered.
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.

From: w_robinson@globe.com
Date sent: Mon, 30 Nov 1998 08:37:20 -0500
This and other related stories can be found on Boston Globe website at www.boston.com/globe/nation/packages/paintings/
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Forwarded by Walter V Robinson/Editorial/GLOBE on 11/30/98 08:46 AM
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Walter V Robinson
11/30/98 08:35 AM

Monet in MFA show believed Nazi plunder

By Walter V. Robinson, Globe Staff, 11/30/98

A Monet waterlily on loan for the ''Monet in the 20th Century'' exhibition at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts was almost certainly plundered in 1941 by Hitler's art looters from French Jewish collector Paul Rosenberg, whose family is now poised to claim the valuable artwork, the Globe learned yesterday.
Jonathan Petropoulos, an expert in Nazi art looting, was even able to pinpoint for the Globe where the painting was during the war. Petropoulos said the painting at the MFA is identical to a Monet that was part of the plundered art collection put together for Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. Alerted to the evidence by the Globe, MFA director Malcolm Rogers last night issued a statement saying he will consult with the French museum system, which loaned the painting for the exhibition. Rogers said the MFA plans to retain the painting as part of the exhibition, which concludes Dec. 27.
Paul Hayes Tucker, the curator for the MFA show and a Monet expert, confirmed yesterday that the photo of von Ribbentrop's Monet in Petropoulos's book, ''Art as Politics in the Third Reich,'' matches the waterlily on exhibit in Boston.
Sarah Jackson, the research director in London for the Art Loss Register, used a Rosenberg family photo of the missing work in mid-September to match it to the Monet, which is normally housed in the collection of a French museum in Caen. Tucker, without having seen the Rosenberg family photo, said the evidence disclosed this weekend ''leads me to believe that the painting in the exhibition had been confiscated from the Rosenberg collection.''
The painting's tainted history came to light after the Globe reported on Saturday that the MFA had not disclosed on its exhibition label that the signature Monet waterlily was one of 1,955 artworks now in French custody that were in German hands during the war; most of those are believed to have been confiscated or sold under duress. The MFA had referred to the Monet only as ''recovered after World War II.'' Last night, Rogers declined to say whether the MFA would now add more detailed information to the painting's label.
One clue that the painting at the MFA was looted appears in lists of unrecovered French wartime losses from the National Archives, copies of which are in the Globe's possession. They include a record of the looting of a Monet waterlily owned by Paul Rosenberg, with dimensions of 35 by 36 inches. That matches the dimensions of Monet's ''Water Lilies 1904'' on exhibit here.
Unknown to the MFA, Rosenberg's American descendants were alerted by Jackson of the Art Loss Register that the Monet painting they have long sought was in the custody of the Musee des Beaux-Arts at Caen, in Normandy. The Caen museum loaned it to the MFA. The family had asked the Register, an art industry-created agency that catalogs art thefts, to help locate 58 missing paintings. After Jackson's discovery, the family has yet to lodgeits claim, nor had it said anything about the painting until after the Globe contacted Petropoulos on Saturday. The discovery of the painting, according to art experts, is likely to be a major embarrassment for France at tomorrow's opening of a 45-nation conference in Washington that will focus on unrecovered Holocaust-era assets, including how to identify and restitute the thousands of artworks that remain missing. Already, the World Jewish Congress has said it will demand at the conference that France sell the 1,955 artworks, whose owners it has been unable to locate, and donate the proceeds to Holocaust survivors.
But French officials have acknowledged making no serious effort to find the owners after the artworks were retrieved from Germany at war's end, and farmed the artworks out to various public museums, including the one at Caen. If a Monet from such a prominent collector as Rosenberg could remain unidentified for a half-century, that is likely to add weight to the views of dissenting art experts. They believe that the remaining works should not be sold because many owners or their heirs may still be found.
Willi Korte, an art investigator who has uncovered many looted artworks in recent years, said the news about the Monet find also represents an embarrassment for American art museums. Though the MFA and other major art museums have pledged to comb their collections for looted paintings and to refuse loans of suspect paintings, Korte said, ''This case proves once again that American museums are much more interested in acquiring and exhibiting beautiful artworks than they are in insuring that those artworks do not have questionable backgrounds.''
The Monet, if proven to be Rosenberg's, will be among the most important looted artworks discovered in the United States since the war, and one with an exotic wartime pedigree: In addition to von Ribbentrop, Reichsmarshal Hermann Goering and Hitler amassed collections of plundered art, many of them taken from prominent Jewish collectors like Rosenberg.
Petropoulos, a historian at Loyola College in Baltimore, said that when he saw a photo of the painting on the front page of Saturday's Globe, he recognized it instantly. Petropoulos had included a photo of the painting, from German archives of von Ribbentrop's illicit wartime collection, in his book. Though Monet painted 48 waterlilies, the painting in Petropoulos's book is identical to the work on exhibit at the MFA. ''There is little doubt from the records that this painting was looted and was in the hands of the Third Reich's foreign minister during the war,'' Petropoulos said.
The Monet represents yet another case where Petropoulos, Jackson, and other researchers have often been able to find archival records pointing to stolen artworks - records that many museums did not know existed until recently.
This Friday, for instance, the National Archives is holding a seminar, in conjunction with the international conference, on how researchers can use its archives to find records of wartime thefts. Last week, a National Archives official said the MFA is one of the few art museums not sending a representative. Relying on the archives, several scholars have chronicled the looting of the Rosenberg collection, one of Europe's finest. The scholars include Lynn Nicholas, writing in her ground-breaking book, ''The Rape of Europa''; and Hector Feliciano in ''The Lost Museum,'' which focuses principally on looting in France.
It was uncertain last night what course the painting may take on its apparent voyage back to the Rosenbergs. The Monet exhibition is scheduled to go on to the Royal Academy of Arts in London when the Boston show ends. Art law specialists said the family might choose to file a claim against the MFA, to keep the painting in the United States. But since the French museum system does not claim to own the ''heirless'' painting, such an action seems unlikely. Last year, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau threw the art world into turmoil when he subpoenaed two Egon Schiele paintings from an Austrian loan to the Museum of Modern Art after descendants of the artworks' Jewish owners asserted they were looted during the war. The case is tied up in the courts, and the paintings remain in storage at MoMA.
The Monet now on loan to the MFA was apparently among five Monets in a group of 162 valuable Rosenberg paintings that were stored in a bank vault in Libourne in southern France to hide them from the Nazis, according to ''The Rape of Europa.'' According to an account in Feliciano's book, the Nazis seized the artworks in September 1941, and then shipped them to Paris, where Goering and other Nazi leaders looked them over.
But with such masterpieces at stake, the German art looting unit, known as the ERR, had competition from German diplomats seeking their own share of the plundered art. Chief among those, according to Nicholas's book, was Otto Abetz, Germany's ambassador in Paris. Nicholas, citing archival documents, said Abetz kept 74 paintings from the looting unit. Twenty-one of those, including ''works by Utrillo, Monet, Degas, Bonnard, and Bracque, were reserved `for decoration of the house and offices of the Foreign Minister.''' Petropoulos, in his book, cited records showing that Abetz took control of several Jewish art collections. Petropoulos, who researched German records of the collections of officials like von Ribbentrop and Goering, found evidence that von Ribbentrop and his wife acquired two Monets, including the painting ''Water Lilies 1904.''
In an interview yesterday, Petropoulos said there is documentation that the von Ribbentrops bought some of their paintings before the war. But, he said, there is no documentation they purchased either Monet. ''That's suggestive,'' he said. Von Ribbentrop was executed for war crimes on Oct. 16, 1946. Dawn Griffin, the MFA spokeswoman, insisted that there was no embarrassment for the museum in having an apparently looted artwork as part of such a blockbuster exhibition. More than 350,000 people have seen the Monet show since it opened in September. Another 120,000 tickets have already been issued.
''There is nothing but positives associated with every aspect of this show, including this discovery,'' Griffin said. Rogers, in his statement, said he was ''delighted that the rightful owners of this masterwork may have been found.'' Tucker, the curator, said he saw no risk in taking the work on loan, despite its unknown and potentially troubling past. ''This painting has been in the public realm, and often on loan,'' he said, including to the Art Institute of Chicago for a 1995 Monet exhibition. ''So it seemed legitimate for us to accept it. To me, it seemed unfettered by the darkness that surrounds other paintings in that category,'' Tucker said.
Maureen Goggin of the Globe Staff contributed to this report.
This story ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on 11/30/98.

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