Displaying items by tag: law

A plan by internationally-renowned artist Christo to hang miles of fabric over the Arkansas River is moving forward.

United States District Judge William Martinez ruled Friday that the Bureau of Land Management did not violate federal law in its November 2011 approval of the artist's Over The River project.

Opposition group Rags Over the Arkansas River (ROAR) claimed that the BLM's decision violated the Federal Land Policy and Management Act and the National Environmental Policy Act.

After a trove of Nazi-looted masterpieces were found in a Munich apartment, the German state of Bavaria has drafted a national law that would ease the return of stolen art to its rightful owners. The new legislation would eliminate the statute of limitations applied to stolen property, which is typically 30 years. Some art collectors have used the law to hold onto artworks with troubled provenances. The draft will go before Germany’s upper house of parliament on February 14.

Back in November 2013, German authorities announced that they had found approximately 1,500 artworks worth around one billion euros in a dilapidated apartment belonging to Cornelius Gurlitt. Gurlitt’s father, Hildebrandt, had been put in charge of selling stolen artworks by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda. Gurlitt’s father secretly hoarded the works, which included paintings by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Marc Chagall, later claiming that they were destroyed in the bombing of Dresden. Throughout his life, Gurlitt, an unemployed recluse, sold a number of the paintings and lived off of the profits.

German authorities came under fire when it was revealed that they had known of Gurlitt’s stash since February 2012 but failed to make it public until the following year. They have since posted pictures of more than 400 of the works, inviting rightful owners to stake claims. 

The New York Court of Appeals reversed a decision that could have forced auction houses to reveal the identities of consignors. The original ruling was made by the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court in 2012 and declared that state law required that buyers be allowed to know the names of sellers in post-auction paperwork in order for the sale to be considered official.  

The ruling stems from a lawsuit filed against New York auctioneer William J. Jenack. After Jenack sold a Russian antique in 2008, the buyer refused to pay, claiming that the post-sale documentation had not identified the seller. The ruling on Tuesday, December 17, stated that Jenack had provided sufficient information to the buyer for the sale to be considered binding.   

Two organizations affiliated with the Secession building in Vienna where Gustav Klimt’s masterpiece, Beethoven Frieze, is housed, have spoken out against the heirs of the work’s former owner. The heirs of Erich Lederer, who fled Vienna when the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938, filed a request with Austria’s Art Restitution Advisory Board under a law that regulates the return of Nazi-looted artwork. The claim was made possible after Austria expanded the law in 2009 to cover instances where previous owners were forced to sell their artworks for unreasonably low values following World War II.

In response to the heirs’ claims, the Association of Visual Artists Vienna Secession and Friends of the Secession filed a statement saying that after studying the historical record and their consciences they had determined that the “claimants are in the wrong” adding that restitution would “trivial real injustice and debase any other genuine claims.”

Lederer’s Klimt painting was seized by the Nazis and later returned following World War II. Austrian officials would only allow Lederer to export other restituted artworks if he sold Beethoven Frieze for $75,000; half of what Christie’s estimated the painting to be worth at the time. 

Olga Dogaru, a Romanian woman who told investigators that she burned seven modern art masterpieces to protect her son, denied her claim in court on Monday, July 22, 2013. Dogaru’s son, Radu, was one of six suspects involved in the Kunsthal Museum heist, the biggest art-related robbery to take place in the Netherlands in years.

During the hearing, Dogaru alleged that she “made up” the story about incinerating $130 million worth of art in a desperate attempt to guard her son, who had admitted to stealing the paintings last October. If she is found guilty of “destruction with very serious consequences” Dogaru could serve up to 30 to years in prison under Romanian law. Last week, news circulated that forensic investigators had found trace evidence in the ash in Dogaru’s stove.

The heist took place on October 16, 2013 and proceeded to shake the art world. The six suspects made off with Pablo Picasso’s Tete d’Arlequin, Claude Monet’s Waterloo Bridge, London and Charing Cross Bridge, London, Henri Matisse’s La Liseuse en Blanc et Jaune, Paul Gauguin’s Femme devant une fenetre ouverte, dite la Fiancee, Meyer de Haan’s Autoportrait, and Lucian Freud’s Woman with Eyes Closed in less than 90 seconds. The works were on loan from the Triton Foundation to celebrate the Kunsthal Museum’s 20^th anniversary.

The suspects will stand trial next month.    

Edgar Degas’ (1834-1917) La Masseuse (The Masseuse), which was once owned by the German-born British painter Lucien Freud (1922-2011), has been given to the Walker Art Gallery as part of the British government’s Acceptance in Lieu (AiL) of law. The AiL is a provision under which inheritance tax debts can be written off in exchange for the acquisition of objects of national importance.

The Degas sculpture was one of three works by Degas bequeathed to England following Freud’s death. The Walker Art Gallery, which is located in Liverpool and houses one of the largest art collections in England outside of London, was granted the sculpture after a competitive process with other UK museums and galleries. La Masseuse, Degas’ only two-figure sculpture, will join the artist’s painting Woman Ironing at the Walker.

Xanthe Brooke, Curator of European Art at the Walker Art Gallery, said, ‘We’re very grateful to Arts Council England for allocating the sculpture to the Walker Art Gallery, where it will be appreciated by an enthusiastic and diverse audience.”

The descendants of a Parisian art dealer are demanding that the Henie Onstad Art Center near Oslo, Norway return Henri Matisse’s (1869-1954) Blue Dress in a Yellow Armchair (1937) to them. Nazis seized the painting from its owner, Paul Rosenberg, prior to the outbreak of World War II. Ultimately, Rosenberg, one of the most prominent French art dealers and a personal friend of Pablo Picasso and Matisse, fled to New York and survived the war.

The painting in dispute has been a celebrated part of the Onstad’s collection since the museum was established in 1968. The work was donated to the fledgling institution by art collector Niels Onstad and his wife Sonjia Henie, an Olympic figure skater. Museum Director Tone Hansen attests that Onstad and Henie bought the painting from the Parisian Galerie Henri Benezit in 1950, unaware of its troublesome provenance. Hansen was unaware that Nazis had stolen the painting until the Art Loss Register, an organization that tracks lost and stolen paintings, notified him in 2012.

Art Registry documents show that Rosenberg purchased Blue Dress in a Yellow Armchair directly from Matisse in 1937. Following World War II, Rosenberg attempted to re-establish his business and tried to recover the 400+ works that had been taken from him by the Nazis. The painting was marked on Rosenberg’s personal documents as missing after the war. He also reported the painting missing to French authorities in 1946.

While Rosenberg’s heirs hope that the painting will be returned to their family, Norwegian law states that if a person has had an item in good faith for over 10 years, they are deemed the rightful owner. However, the argument is in contrast to the Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art, which Norway is a part of.