Forger claims Da Vinci masterpiece "La Bella Principessa" is supermarket checkout girl

"I drew this picture in 1978 when I worked at the Co-op (supermarket)," wrote Greenhalgh in new book "A Forger's Tale," extracts of which appeared in the Sunday Times.

LONDON- One of Britain's most notorious art forgers has claimed responsibility for what is believed to be a Leonardo Da Vinci masterpiece, saying it was inspired by a supermarket checkout girl, the Sunday Times reported. Experts agree that Da Vinci created "La Bella Principessa" in the 15th century, but Shaun Greenhalgh, who has spent time in jail for art forgery, claims he made the chalk and ink drawing when he worked at a supermarket in Bolton, northern England. "I drew this picture in 1978 when I worked at the Co-op (supermarket)," wrote Greenhalgh in new book "A Forger's Tale," extracts of which appeared in the Sunday Times. "The 'sitter' was based on a girl called Sally who worked on the checkouts," he added. "Despite her humble position, she was a bossy little bugger and very self-important."

Experts concluded in 2008 that the profile of a blonde-haired woman was a "remarkable drawing by Leonardo", and it has since been exhibited as a da Vinci in Italy and valued at £100 million ($150 million, 142 million euros). Greenhalgh, who was arrested in 2006 and jailed for four years and eight month, claims he used an 1587 council document for the canvas and schooldesk lid as the backing. While executing the artwork, he turned it 90 degrees clockwise to mimic da Vinci's left-handed style, he wrote. However, a laboratory recently released evidence suggesting the chalk pigment was at least 250 years old. Greenhalgh claimed he made his own pigments from organic materials of an appropriate age, digging up iron-rich clay.

© 1994-2015 Agence France-Presse
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Missing Anish Kapoor 'Water Pendant' found and resolved thanks to The Art Loss Register

The American tourist reported the loss to his insurer who paid out on the claim. Photo: Bonhams.

LONDON.- The Art Loss Register has successfully resolved the case of a lost Anish Kapoor ‘Water Pendant’ which sold at Bonhams this week for £8,125, exceeding its estimate. The pendant was bought by an American tourist as an anniversary gift for his wife in 2013. The pendant, one of an edition of just five, is made from polished white and rose gold. It features mirrored concave and convex surfaces similar to those often seen in Kapoor’s monumental sculpture. It was bought from the London-based Louisa Guinness Gallery, which works with leading sculptors and painters to create jewellery. The pendant was lost immediately after purchase - the buyer had not even returned to his hotel room. It had been left in the original box in the back of a London taxi.

The American tourist reported the loss to his insurer who paid out on the claim. Soon afterwards, the insurance company registered the missing pendant with the ALR, the world’s largest private database of lost and stolen art. In May 2015 a search was made for the pendant on the ALR’s database. The searcher had innocently acquired it by buying the contents of an abandoned storage unit, and hoped to establish whether there was any claim to the pendant by checking it with the ALR. The ALR was able to negotiate the recovery of the pendant on behalf of the insurer, and with their authority provided a small reward in recognition of the holder’s honesty in searching the item. The ALR finalised the process by selling the pendant at Bonhams on behalf of the insurer.

http://artdaily.com/news/83224/Art-Loss-Register-successfully-resolves-case-of-Anish-Kapoor--Water-Pendant-#.VltDM79lbh4

Suspect in Cuban Museum Heist Arrested in Greece

The Cuban National Fine Arts Museum. Photo: cubadebate.cu

ATHENS — The latest major art theft from the Cuban National Fine Arts Museum now has a suspect, arrested in Greece, reported the official Havana press on Wednesday. According to the Athens police, the 36-year old Cuban man was arrested in connection with the heist of dozens of modern art works, first made public in February 2014. The suspect’s name was not released. Most of the stolen works are from Cuban artists including several by the famous painter Leopoldo Romañach (1862-1951). The Athens Police said the man will appear before a prosecutor on Thursday in the Greek capital.

See below the report when the initial story of the theft broke:

Big Time Theft at Cuba Fine Arts Museum - February 27, 2014
By Ivette Leyva Martinez (Cafe Fuerte)

HAVANA TIMES — Nearly a hundred paintings have been stolen from Havana’s National Fine Arts Museum in what could well be the most serious misappropriation of Cuba’s artistic heritage of recent decades. “Dozens of works are missing from storage,” a source employed by the museum told Cafe Fuerte. “Most are vanguard pieces.” The paintings were kept at the warehouse of the former headquarters of Cuba’s Technical Investigations Department (DTI), which has belonged to the museum following its remodeling in 2001. Police officers were in charge of the local’s security.

The thefts were detected last week, when a number of the missing pieces began to be offered to art dealers in Miami. An investigation by Ministry of the Interior and art heritage experts is underway. According to the information secured by Cafe Fuerte, the pieces are works by Cuban painting masters. Apparently, news of the theft came from US art dealers. “Someone noticed that the works they were being shown belonged to Cuba’s collection and notified the Fine Arts Museum of what was happening,” the source, who chose to remain anonymous, declared. At least two art dealers in Miami reported seeing works by Cuban painter Leopoldo Romañach (1862-1951), pieces which began to circulate in the South Florida market recently.

Though the exact number of works stolen is unknown, reports suggest that it could be close to a hundred. It is believed most of the pieces belong to the avant-garde movement of the 1920s and 30s. Cuban authorities and the country’s media do not generally report on the theft of artworks, and many haven’t even been registered by Interpol.

Assuming Responsibility: Art heritage dealers and experts around the world believe the museum should assume the responsibility of immediately reporting the stolen pieces, so that the Cuban art market can protect itself and prevent the works and objects stolen from being sold and turning their potential buyers into the direct victims of the perpetrators. This is not the first time the museum’s collection suffers a massive theft of this nature. In 1995, Cuban authorities dismantled a network of art smugglers headed by Arquimides Matienzo, a former museum administrator, and detained an additional five culprits, including an Italian citizen. The group had stolen 40 paintings from the museum.

Founded in 1913, the National Fine Arts Museum is the institution tasked with storing and conserving works belonging to Cuba’s visual arts heritage. The facility holds the largest collection of Cuban art produced between the 16th century and the present day. Its current director is Moraima Clavijo Colom. Also read: Major Cuba Art Theft Confirmed

http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=115170

Dictator Ferdinand Marco jewelry hoard is reappraised by Philippines

An official from the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG) shows diamond jewellery seized by the Philippine government from former first lady Imelda Marcos, at the Central Bank headquarters in Manila on November 24, 2015. Philippine authorities on November 24 showcased a dazzling collection of jewels seized from the family of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos appraised in preparation for a possible auction. The long-hidden collection, seized in three batches after Marcos was overthrown in 1986, also provides a stark look at how the Marcos family enriched itself while the nation sank deeper into poverty. AFP PHOTO / NOEL CELIS

MANILA - Philippine authorities on Tuesday showcased necklaces with diamonds the size of marbles and other jewels seized from the family of late dictator Ferdinand Marcos in preparation for a possible multi-million-dollar auction. White-gloved appraisers from Christie's auction house examined about 600 pieces of jewellery including gold chains covered with sparkling gems, a huge circlet of rubies and a necklace dripping with pink and yellow diamonds at a special vault at the Philippine central bank.

The Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG), a body created to recover the millions stolen by Marcos and his allies, said that "due to the vast quantity of jewellery to be appraised, it will take at least five days" for teams to go over it. After the appraisal by Christie's, a team from Sotheby's will have their turn. Previous appraisals of the jewels in 1988 and 1991 estimated their worth at between five and seven million dollars, but the PCGC said this is no longer current. "This (appraisal) will significantly open the way to determining a final resolution on the said assets including the possible auction of the same," the PCGG said in a statement, but added it was also open to putting the jewels on display. It said a final decision required the approval of other agencies, and that Marcos's widow, flamboyant former first lady Imelda Marcos, and her children, were still disputing the ownership of part of the collection before the Supreme Court.

Imelda Marcos's lawyer Robert Sison said in a statement that ownership of the jewels was still subject to litigation. He described the appraisal as a "very obvious political stunt." The long-hidden collection, seized in three batches after Marcos was overthrown in 1986, has been cited by critics as proof of how his family enriched itself while the nation sank deeper into poverty during his 20 years in power.

Imelda Marcos amassed a huge collection of jewels, valuable art works and shoes even as other Marcos relatives and allies gained fortunes during the Marcos years, critics have said. The PCGG has been charged with recovering this wealth which it dubs "ill-gotten." But since the late dictator died in exile in 1989, the family has made a political comeback with many members elected to prestigious positions. The son of the late dictator, Ferdinand Marcos Junior, is running for vice-president in next year's elections, raising fears the family will regain its influence.

© 1994-2015 Agence France-Presse

France to offer 'asylum' for ISIS threatened artworks to help STOP the flow of Trafficking Antiquities on the Black Market!!

French President Francois Hollande (R) greets General Director of UNESCO, Irina Bokova (L) after delivering a speech for the 70th General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, on November 17, 2015. AFP PHOTO/ YOAN VALAT.

PARIS - President Francois Hollande announced Tuesday that France planned to implement a "right to asylum" for artworks at risk from the Islamic State group which has destroyed heritage sites in Syria and Iraq.

Addressing the UN's cultural body four days after 129 people were killed in jihadist attacks on Paris, Hollande said "the right to asylum applies to people... but asylum also applies to works, world heritage", indicating it would be part of a law to be considered by parliament. He said that Islamic State jihadists were "at this very moment" issuing archaeological permits and slapping taxes on the items that would then feed the global black market, "transiting through free ports which are havens for receiving stolen goods and laundering, including in Europe".

France will also introduce customs checks on the importation of cultural goods and incorporate UN Security Council resolutions into its legislation banning the transport, transit and trade of cultural heritage having illegally left certain countries, Hollande told the UNESCO conference in Paris. IS seized control of Syria's ancient city of Palmyra in May and has realised international fears by destroying some of the most prized sites in the UNESCO World Heritage listed ancient city.

The militants have carried out a sustained campaign of destruction against heritage sites in areas under their control in Syria and Iraq, including the important Iraqi sites of Hatra, Nimrud and Khorsabad, an ancient Assyrian capital. Islamist militants are also accused of being behind attacks on 10 religious and historic monuments in the Unesco World Heritage city of Timbuktu in Mali.

© 1994-2015 Agence France-Presse

http://artdaily.com/news/82988/France-to-offer--asylum--for-IS-threatened-artworks--French-President-Francois-Hollande#.VlBmP79lbh4

Stolen Andy Warhol prints handed to L.A. police? Or were they?!?

I found this article to my surprise I had not heard about the Andy Warhol switcheroo, so I started to research on the developments in recovering the artworks... The article below states two of the prints have been returned the; Siberian Tiger and Bighorn Ram. However on the LA Police Art Theft unit webpage the two artworks are still listed as missing?!

- http://www.lapdonline.org/paintings_and_prints_w_/content_basic_view/58945

- http://www.lapdonline.org/paintings_and_prints_w_/content_basic_view/58946

Is this a mistake or is their something more to this investigation that is not being revealed ie. did the owners of the artwork do the switcheroo and are hoping to score the insurance money meanwhile selling the real artwork themselves - cashing in twice?! Seems logical who else would have that type of access to make such a grand theft go unnoticed for years?

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- LA - Two of the nine Andy Warhol prints stolen from a Los Angeles movie business in a theft that went unnoticed for years have been turned over to police, an attorney for a man who had the artwork said on Tuesday. Attorney Harland Braun said he arranged to have police come to his office on Monday and pick up Warhol prints titled "Siberian Tiger" and "Bighorn Ram," which he said were among three prints his client bought several years ago from a man involved in commercial construction. Braun represents Bryan Calvero, who he said works at apparel company Crooks & Castles and was named in court documents in the theft case. Braun said Calvero was unaware the two prints - as well as a third one that he sold through an auction house - were reported stolen until a journalist contacted him last week.

Los Angeles police art detail detective Don Hrycyk declined to confirm the prints were returned or comment on the case. The two pieces were among nine original Warhol prints quietly stolen from Los Angeles movie business Moviola and replaced with color copies in a burglary reported in July, police said in documents submitted to a court for a search warrant.

The nine pieces are worth an estimated $350,000. They include three prints from Warhol's 1983 series "Endangered Species" and six from his 1980 "Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century," according to a police report. In the affidavit, police said the theft was so seamless it was only was discovered years later after one piece was taken for reframing and staff noticed it lacked a print number and signature. "The idea that you can have a stolen piece of art and no one knows it's stolen, even the owner, that's a hard concept to wrap your head around," Braun said. "Bald Eagle" was sold through auction house Bonhams in October 2011. Braun confirmed Calvero sold "Bald Eagle" through Bonhams and said Calvero had little experience in art collection and relied on the auction house to ensure the piece was not stolen.

Bonhams spokeswoman Kristin Guiter said the firm has its catalogues checked against databases of stolen and lost art. She said Bonhams asked about specific provenance "and also obtained from the consignor relevant written representations and warranties, including to the effect that all information provided by him about provenance was true and correct." (Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis; Editing by Daniel Wallis and Bill Trott)

Read more at Reutershttp://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/16/usa-arttheft-california-idUSL1N11L2KR20150916#EYKD30m27ybp7mev.99

Monaco gives go-ahead to million-dollar art fraud trial between Dmitry Rybolovlev and Yves Bouvier

On Thursday, the Monaco appeals court rejected Bouvier's request that the case be dismissed, and ruled he should face fraud and money-laundering charges. Photo: Anouk Antony

MONACO- The fraud case against a Swiss art dealer accused of swindling up to a billion dollars from the owner of Monaco football club should go ahead, a court ruled Thursday. Russian billionaire and club owner Dmitry Rybolovlev bought a total of 37 masterpieces worth two billion euros ($2.1 billion) through art dealer Yves Bouvier over the space of a decade. But their relationship disintegrated last year after he accused Bouvier of inflating prices, rather than finding him the best price, and taking a commission. Rybolovlev's lawyers say Bouvier pocketed "between $500 million and $1 billion" from the inflated prices.

On Thursday, the Monaco appeals court rejected Bouvier's request that the case be dismissed, and ruled he should face fraud and money-laundering charges. The woman who introduced the two, Tania Rappo, Rybolovlev's translator and godmother to his youngest daughter, will also face prosecution for taking a commission on the sales, her lawyer confirmed. "I have been betrayed," Rybolovlev told Le Parisien in September. "(Bouvier) made us believe he was negotiating the price in our interest... while today he claims he was negotiating for himself as a salesman." 'I'm not crazy' Rybolovlev's lawyers say he became aware of the problem over dinner in New York, when an art consultant told him he had overpaid by $15 million for a Modigliani painting.

In another twist, Bouvier was in September charged with handling stolen goods for selling two Picasso watercolours to Rybolovlev. Picasso's daughter-in-law, Catherine Hutin-Blay, claims that "Woman Arranging her Hair" and "Spanish Woman with a Fan" were stolen from her collection and never approved for sale. Rybolovlev handed them over to authorities, saying he was unaware they were stolen. But Bouvier has maintained his innocence, saying he bought the watercolours, along with 58 drawings, from a trust in Liechtenstein that claimed to represent Hutin-Blay. "I am not crazy," he told the New York Times. "I'm not going to sell stolen art to someone who has bought two billion in art from me. He was my biggest client."

Bouvier is not only an art dealer, but also one of the leading organisers of offshore storage facilities for wealthy collectors, shuttling masterpieces between high-tech storage facilities in low-tax countries such as Switzerland, Luxembourg and Singapore. Rybolovlev, who made his fortune in the fertiliser business after the collapse of the Soviet Union, has an art collection to rival major museums, featuring works by artists like Van Gogh, Monet, Rodin, Matisse and da Vinci.

© 1994-2015 Agence France-Presse

Stolen Chokwe masks and a rare statue to be returned to Dundo Museum in Angola

LUANDA.- Fundação Sindika Dokolo has acquired two ancestral female Pwo masks and a rare statue representative of the male figure of the Chokwe people from private European collections .The classical works, which have been identified as looted from Angola during the civil war, will be repatriated to the Dundo Museum in Angola, their original home and where they were last exhibited. These masterpieces, created around the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century, hold historic and cultural significance for the Chokwe people. The Chokwe people inhabit north eastern Angola, the southern part of Congo (Kinshasa) from the Kwango River to the Lualaba and, since 1920, the north western corner of Zambia.

The ‘found’ pieces belonged to the Dundo Museum which held one of the most distinguished collections of ethnographic art from wooden traditional masks and wooden sculptures of the local heterogeneous Chokwe people to recordings of local folk music and a photographic collection dating to the 1880s. Located in a mining town in north-eastern Angola about 15 miles (24 km) south of the Democratic Republic of the Congo border, the museum saw many of its art works ‘disappear’ during the Angolan civil war from 1975–2002 and due to lack of archival documentation, the number of missing works and their whereabouts remain a mystery. The recovered works have been slightly altered from their original state: on both of the Pwo masks, the cord hair has been removed and the surface of the wood has been retouched and altered to hide original carved motifs visible on the surface of the wood; this is thought to be have been done to render the pieces unrecognisable and untraceable. They were sold on to private dealers and acquired by various collectors in the intervening years.

The return of the Pwo masks and sculpture is the result of diligent research by Brussels-based gallerist Didier Claes and Parisian dealer, Tao Kerefoff, both specialists in classical African art. The works were traced thanks to several publications by noted Belgian art historian Marie-Louise Bastin (1918-2000). Her publications remain a principal and definitive source in identifying the different cultures and styles of Chokwe art and its people.

The provenance of both Pwo masks were established through photographs in her book, Art Décoratif Tshokwe: Museu do Dundo (1961). Both masks are illustrated in the book: a photograph taken of an exhibition of “Sala da Crença Animista" or “Animist Belief Room” at the Dundo Museum at the end of the 1950s depicts one of the looted masks in a line-up of 30 Pwo masks belonging to the museum collection. The Chokwe statue is documented in an essay Les Entités Spirituelles des Chokwe (The Spiritual Existence of the Chokwe) written by Bastin and published in the academic paper Quaderni Poro in 1988.

This pioneering project to recover classical works of African art enables Fundação Sindika Dokolo to advance a local and a global dialogue of the epic story of African civilizations. Inspired by his father Augustin Dokolo Sanu, a great collector of classical African art, Sindika Dokolo created his foundation to document the journey of arts and culture from Africa with the aim of empowering future generations of Africans with the knowledge of their own cultural history. “We are honoured to be returning these symbolic works,” Mr Sindika Dokolo said. “Locating the works and negotiating their return to their homeland are the result of the strong collaboration between Fundação Sindika Dokolo and dealers Didier Claes and Tao Kerefoff.”

Before their return to the Dundo Museum, these important works will travel to Luanda where they will be exhibited at the new Currency museum as part of La Triennale di Luanda at the end of November. The occasion will also celebrate forty years of Angolan Independence.

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