Displaying items by tag: Stolen

Eight Nigerian artifacts that were probably stolen decades ago and illegally sent to the United States have been returned to the West African country by the Museum of Fine Arts, according to museum officials, who said Nigerian authorities planned to announce the transfer on Thursday.

The decision to return the artworks, including a 2,000-year-old terra-cotta head, was the culmination of an 18-month pursuit through dusty records and old gallery brochures, untangling an art-world mystery that spanned several continents. Along the way, the MFA discovered that one item, a brass altar figure, had probably been stolen from the royal palace in Benin City as recently as the 1970s.

Israel and Germany have agreed to conduct joint research in museums in both countries aimed at determining the original ownership of Jewish-owned art looted by Nazis, officials said.

Under an agreement signed Sunday by Israeli culture ministry director general Orly Froman and German Culture Minister Monika Gruetters, art experts from the two countries will undergo training and coordinate the formation of joint data bases.

Since the discovery of a long-hidden trove of masterworks in Germany last year, advocates have sought to shine a spotlight on looted artworks hiding in plain sight.

In other words, those hanging on the walls of Europe’s great museums.

Enter France, known as the art attic of Europe before World War II and where tens of thousands of works were taken from Jewish families by the occupying Nazis. Today, more than 2,000 pieces returned to France after the war — including canvases by Claude Monet, Peter Paul Rubens and Max Ernst — remain in the custody of the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay and other celebrated French institutions.

Troubled Manhattan art dealer Helly Nahmad, who was thrown in prison in April for running an illegal gambling ring, is being sued for allegedly hiding a $20 million painting stolen by the Nazis.

Frenchman Phillippe Maestracci, whose grandfather Oscar Stettiner was a Jewish art dealer when he fled Paris before Hitler’s army invaded in 1939, is suing Nahmad and his billionaire art dealer dad David Nahmad in Manhattan Supreme Court.

The closest comparison is Swiss cheese: holes in vast swaths of land where looters, armed with machine guns and bulldozers, take to ancient archaeological sites in search of international paydays. To the untrained eye, these holes, visible in satellite images, seem haphazard. But to experts, these deep pits, spanning acres of land, are the work of sophisticated traffickers.

It’s exactly the kind of looting that worries Mohamed Ibrahim Ali, Egypt’s minister of state for antiquities.

A housekeeper has been charged with stealing £500,000 of antiques and art including a Picasso sketch from her aristocratic boss.

Kim Roberts, 58, of Colyton, Devon, is accused of taking valuable items from the Dowager Countess Bathurst, while working at her grand Cotswolds estate and Kensington home.

Roberts appeared at Gloucester Crown Court on Friday facing three counts of theft, including one count from another previous employer.

She is accused of theft between April 30 and May 21 last year of of art and antiques to the value of approximately £500,000 from Gloria, the Dowager Countess Bathurst at her Cirencester home.

The late German recluse who hoarded a priceless art trove, some of it suspected Nazi loot, left two wills, a court said Tuesday, adding however that they "complement each other".

The Munich court did not reveal the beneficiary but said both documents named the same recipient or recipients of the spectacular estate of Cornelius Gurlitt, who died last week aged 81.

The art treasure of Gurlitt, the son of a Nazi-era art dealer, came to light last year, with many works believed to have been stolen or extorted from Jewish collectors, sparking claims by some of their descendants.

Yet another ancient statue looted in the 1970s from a single remote temple in the jungles of Cambodia has turned up in the United States, this time at Christie’s, which is voluntarily paying to return it to its homeland.

Christie’s sold the statue, a 10th-century sandstone depiction of a mythological figure known as Pandava, to an anonymous collector in 2009, but bought it back earlier this year after officials determined that the sculpture had been looted.

Italy’s heritage police, global experts in finding stolen artworks, have launched a smartphone app that encourages the public to help solve art-related crimes. Users who come across artworks they suspect have been stolen can take a photograph of it and send it directly to the police who check in real-time whether it matches any of the missing works listed in their archives. Users are also encouraged to add any artwork they may own to the database so they can be readily tracked down if stolen in the future.

The app, which is named iTPC with “TPC” being the Italian acronym for “Protection of Cultural Heritage,” will be available to download from AndroidMarket and AppleStore. Users will also have access to information on artworks that the police are actively searching for as well as a list of heritage police offices for those looking to report a crime or submit a claim for an artwork in person.

Italy’s heritage police manage the largest database of stolen art in the world, with details on approximately 5.7 million objects. The special department opened in 1969 and is headquartered in a Baroque palace in Rome.

An oil painting by Claude Monet of London’s Waterloo Bridge is among the 180 artworks recently found in Cornelius Gurlitt’s home in Austria. Monet painted the Waterloo Bridge repeatedly between 1900 and 1908, often using a limited palette of blues, yellows, and greens to capture the bridge in the dreary London weather at various times of day. 

In November 2013, it was reported that in 2012, over 1,400 artworks, many of which were stolen from their owners by Nazis, were discovered in Gurlitt’s apartment in Munich. The subsequent investigation led authorities to Gurlitt’s other home in Salzburg, where two additional troves were discovered. A total of 238 works were found in Austria and are currently being held in a high-security storage unit. In addition to the Monet painting, the recently discovered works include a bronze sculpture by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and drawings by Paul Gauguin, Paul Cezanne, and Pablo Picasso.

Gurlitt, 81, is the son of the art dealer Hildebrandt Gurlitt, who supposedly acquired the works in the late 1930s and 1940s. Gurlitt’s father had been put in charge of selling the stolen artworks abroad by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, but secretly hoarded many of them and later claimed that they were destroyed in the bombing of Dresden. Gurlitt sold a number of the paintings over the years and lived off of the profits.
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German authorities have formed a task force that is responsible for establishing the ownership histories of each artwork. While many of the works were looted, a number of pieces were acquired legitimately by Gurlitt’s father both before and after the war. Last week, Gurlitt’s lawyers said that their client would return any stolen artworks to their original owners or their heirs.

Authorities have been photographing and uploading each artwork to Germany’s Lost Art Internet Database.