Displaying items by tag: art crime

Nine Warhol prints of Jewish icons including Sigmund Freud and Gertrude Stein have gone missing from the walls of a movie editing studio in Los Angeles. The works are thought to be valued at $350,000, or £226,854 each, have been surreptitiously replaced by an industrious individual who had reportedly created fakes to replace the originals versions of the works and secretly installed the new works in place of the originals, according to TMZ.

This particular art crime only came to light when a member of the business took the works to a framer who realized that the works were indeed fake, leading to a police investigation.

A brazen art crime has been uncovered in Uzbekistan. As the "Guardian" initially reported, several employees from the Uzbek State Art Museum have been found guilty of systematically selling original artworks and replacing them with fakes over a 15 year period.

Mifayz Usmanov, the chief curator of the central Asian country's premier art museum, was sentenced to nine years behind bars for his involvement in the daylight robbery. Two restorers were sentenced to eight years each.

The presumed mastermind of a brazen art theft from a French Riviera museum involving four paintings by Monet, Sisley and Breughel denied any role as he went on trial on Monday.

The Miami-based Bernard Ternus, who is in his sixties, was sentenced in the United States to five years in prison in 2008 over the theft at Nice's Jules Cheret museum a year earlier.

Transferred to France last year after serving his sentence, Ternus -- who is being held in custody -- told the court in Aix-en-Provence in southern France that he had been framed.

Southern Methodist University’s Meadows School of the Arts will present the seminar “The World of Art and the Fine Art of Crime” this fall from October 14 to October 18, 2013. The seminar will be helmed by retired art crime specialists from the FBI and Scotland Yard and will explore issues relating to art management, operations and collecting, famous art crimes, and international repatriation efforts.

The seminar will include lectures by two renowned art crime investigators – Richard Ellis, a former detective with New Scotland Yard who helped lead the Art & Antiques Squad for over a decade, and Virginia Curry, a former FBI undercover agent and Art Crime Team member who has worked on a number of high profile cases. The daily talks will be complemented by trip to museums, galleries, and auction houses to speak with various arts managers. Topics will include security and provenance issues, Nazi thefts during World War II, the looting of Native American art, and issues of rightful ownership.

“The World of Art and the Fine Art of Crime” has been made possible by the Meadows School’s division of Arts Management and Arts Entrepreneurship.

As of yesterday, a Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) painting that was stolen during an armed robbery at a Houston home last September has been named one of the FBI’s top ten unsolved art crimes. A private insurance company has offered a $50,000 reward for any helpful information leading to the work’s recovery.

The painting, Madeleine Leaning on Her Hair, was completed by the pioneering Impressionist in 1918 and has an estimated value of $1 million. The painting has also been added to the Art Loss Registry, the National Stolen Art File, and Interpol’s Works of Art System. Interpol, an international police organization, encourages cooperation between law enforcement agencies in different countries. By taking these measures, the thief will most likely be unsuccessful if he/she attempts to take the painting to a knowledgeable dealer or gallery or tries to sell it at auction as most members of the art world regularly check these databases.

The other top unsolved art crimes on the FBI’s list include the notorious Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist in which four Rembrandts, five Degas drawings, and one Vermeer (among other works) were stolen. Also on the list is the theft of two Gloria Vanderbilt Whitney commissioned Maxfield Parrish paintings from a Hollywood gallery, the 2002 van Gogh Museum robbery in which two paintings valued at $3 million, and the 1969 theft of a $20 million Caravaggio from Italy’s Oratory of San Lorenzo.