A Hacker Posing as a Venerable British Art Dealer Swindled a Dutch Museum Out of $3.1 Million

The museum sued the dealer in a London court. Artnet News, January 30, 2020

Dickinson's lawyer, Bobby Friedman, says the Rijksmuseum should have independently confirmed the legitimacy of the account before wiring the money, adding that his client, a specialist in Old Master paintings, was never aware any fraud was taking place. Each side is accusing the other of being of having been hacked.

John Constable, A View of Hampstead Heath: Child’s Hill, Harrow in the Distance (1824).

The Rijksmuseum Twenthe in Enschede, the Netherlands, was in the midst of a months-long email negotiation with dealer Simon C. Dickinson to purchase a prized John Constable painting when hackers hijacked the exchange, posing as Dickinson and convincing the museum to funnel the money into a Hong Kong bank account.

Now the museum is attempting to sue Dickinson, claiming the dealer should have known about the fraud, according to Bloomberg.

In a London commercial court this morning, Gideon Shirazi, a lawyer representing the museum, argued that negligence on the part of the dealer’s team allowed the thieves to steal the museum’s money. Shirazi claimed that Dickinson’s negotiators were aware of emails between the museum and the hackers, but did nothing to stop the transaction.

“By saying nothing, they said everything,” he said.

Dickinson’s lawyer, Bobby Friedman, said the museum should have independently confirmed the legitimacy of the bank account before wiring the money, adding that his client, a specialist in Old Master paintings, was never aware any fraud was taking place. Each side is accusing the other of having been hacked.

“Instead of accepting the reality of the situation, the museum has reacted by pursuing a series of hopeless claims against [Dickinson], in the hope of pinning the blame for the museum’s mistake on [the dealer],” Friedman wrote in a submission to the court.

Meanwhile, the museum is holding onto the painting and preventing Dickinson, who is still unpaid, from selling the work to another buyer. A London judge has thrown out the museum’s attempts to sue for negligence, but left open the possibility that the museum could pursue amended claims. The judge is now weighing who will have ownership of the painting.

“This unfortunate event highlights the dangers of cybercrime in the art world, which is regrettable for both the museum and Dickinson, especially when both are victims in this instance,” Emma Ward, Dickinson’s managing director, said in a statement to Artnet.

Arnoud Odding, the museum’s director, first became interested in Constable’s 1824 painting A View of Hampstead Heath: Child’s Hill, Harrow in the Distance upon seeing it at Dickinson’s TEFAF booth in Maastricht in 2018.

The Rijksmuseum Twenthe did not respond to Artnet News’s request for comment.

Clarification: This article has been amended to clarify that a London court has dismissed the museum’s initial negligence claims.

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The Getty Bought an ‘Exceedingly Rare’ Gauguin Sculpture for a Reported $5 Million. There’s Just One Problem: It’s Fake

The sculpture was thought to be the largest and most unusual of Paul Gauguin's sculptures, of which he made very few.

Kate Brown, January 28, 2020

Head with Horns was formerly attributed to Paul Gauguin. Photo by: Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images. A prized and rare sculpture by Paul Gauguin that was acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum for a reported $3 million to $5 million has been deemed a fake.

The sculpture, titled Head with Horns, has been reattributed by researchers to an unknown artist and pulled from the museum’s permanent display, according to the Art Newspaper and Le Figaro. The institution acquired the work in 2002 from Wildenstein & Company, the powerful French-American art-dealing dynasty that is embroiled in a litany lawsuits.

Researchers made the change in attribution quietly last December, and the work was noticeably absent from recent Gauguin blockbusters at Ottawa’s National Gallery of Canada and the National Gallery in London.

The prime pieces of evidence linking the work to Gauguin were two photographs of the sculpture by the artist included in his Tahitian travelogue, Noa Noa. A 2002 press release from the Getty drawing attention to its resemblance to the artist suggested that it may have been a symbolic self-portrait.

“Sculpture by Gauguin is exceedingly rare, and this intriguing work stands out as a superb example,” Deborah Gribbon, then the director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, said at the time of the acquisition. “We feel especially fortunate to be able to display Head with Horns, which will become a natural centerpiece of our installation of symbolist art.”

After being bought by Getty, the piece circulated the world, traveling to shows at Tate Modern in London, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, MoMA in New York, and the Museo delle Culture in Milan.

But the sculpture was never signed by Gauguin, and his photographs of it showed it atop a pedestal not carved in any of how known styles. Originally dated to between 1895 and 1897, which lines up the artist’s time in Tahiti, it is now thought to be from 1894, a time when Gauguin is known to have been in France.

The work has long been questions by some experts. Shortly after the Getty acquired it, Fabrice Fourmanoir, a collector of 19th-century Tahitian photography, found a picture of the sculpture by Jules Agostini captioned “Idole Marquisienne” (Marquisian Idol), suggesting that Agostini thought the piece was by an indigenous artist from the Marquesas Islands, then a part of French Polynesia.

In Agostini’s photo album, Head with Horns is shown next to a portrait of George Lagarde, a collector of ethnographic art who may have been the owner of the sculpture. The photographs both date to 1894.

The sculpture’s provenance was always a bit murky. It was included in a show at the Fondation Maeght in 1997 after being purchased, four years earlier, by Wildenstein & Company from a private Swiss collector.

The work was first attributed to Gauguin by Daniel Wildenstein, the author of a Gauguin catalogue raisonné of painting focusing on the years 1873 to 1888. Another volume, covering the years 1888 to 1903, is due at the end of 2020 but will not include sculptures, the Wildenstein Plattner Institute tells Artnet News. They said that, to date, the sculpture has not been submitted to the WPI’s Gauguin committee for research and examination.

This would not be the first time that the Wildensteins have been caught in a public controversy.

The French art-dealing family has been accused of evading taxes in France, hiding missing or stolen artworks, and even of trading artworks with the Nazis during World War II, all claims the family denies.

The Getty is now researching the sandalwood sculpture and its lacewood base to try to learn more about its origins. Some Polynesian art experts say its devilish horns suggest the iconography is not local, but comes from Christian and European sources. Another theory, floated by Fourmanoir, is that it was carved by a European tourist.

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Art experts warn of a surging market in fake prints

John Szoke, a dealer and specialist in Picasso, holds a real print by the artist, in his Manhattan office on Jan. 18, 2020. Spurred by advances in photomechanical reproduction, forgers are increasingly selling unauthorized copies of famous works on the internet, and elsewhere. Kyle Johnson/The New York Times.

by Milton Esterow

NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE ).- In Basel, Swiss authorities are prosecuting a local art expert who they say sold hundreds of fake prints that he passed off online as the work of Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso and others over 10 years.

In New York, Adrienne R. Fields now spends much of her workweek scanning the internet for forged prints that pop up at website after website. She is head of the legal department for the Artists Rights Society, which protects the intellectual property rights of artists and their estates.

“It happens every day that Adrienne sends a ‘take down’ notice to a website,” said Ted Feder, president of the society.

The two cities, almost 4,000 miles apart, are both on the front lines of the fight against the sale of fake prints.

Since the dawn of the internet, the problem of phony art being sold has only grown, experts say, and the primary coin of the forgery realm has long been the fake print, which is relatively easy to create, often difficult to detect and typically priced low enough to attract undiscriminating novice buyers.

But now the problem seems to be escalating, according to law enforcement officials in the United States and Europe.

Timothy Carpenter, supervisory special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s art crime team, said that the proliferation of online art sales has deepened the problem. “Before, you had to find a way to get it to the market but e-commerce has changed the game,” he said.

The most prevalent fake prints are those falsely attributed to Lichtenstein and Warhol, experts said. But forgers have also brought to market multitudes of fake Picassos, Klees and Gerhard Richters, as well as phony works attributed to Marc Chagall, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí and Henri Matisse.

Improvements in photomechanical reproduction techniques have made it easier for forgers to produce deceptive fake prints. “A real good reproduction can fool a lot of experts,” said John Szoke, a Manhattan dealer in Picasso and Edvard Munch prints. Detecting the forgeries is not simple, he said.

“It’s the color of the paper, the quality of the printing, the condition of the print, all of which you compare with the original,” he said. “And then you need years and years of experience.”

© 2020 The New York Times Company

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In a Twist, Two Serial Art Thieves Confess to Having Hidden Klimt’s ‘Portrait of a Lady’ Inside a Wall So That It Might Be Recovered

"We have given a gift to the city by returning the canvas,” the men, who are charged in a separate burglary spree, wrote.

Naomi Rea, January 21, 2020

Gustav Klimt's Portrait of a lady (1916-1917). Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images.

In a stunning twist in an already strange tale, two men have confessed to stealing, and then sneakily returning, a Gustav Klimt painting to a gallery in Italy. The missing painting was recently uncovered by gardeners inside an external wall of the same gallery from which it was stolen some 24 years ago.

The extraordinary series of events occurred at the Ricci Oddi Modern Art Gallery in the Italian city of Piacenza. The police closed in on the pair of criminals after they wrote a letter to the local newspaper, Libertà, confessing to the decades-old crime.

“We are the authors of the theft of Klimt’s Portrait of a Lady, and we have given a gift to the city by returning the canvas,” the men, who are in their 60s, wrote. The pair were part of a crime ring that has been responsible for a number of burglaries in the area. The letter was written to one of the paper’s reporters, Ermanno Mariani, who had interviewed one of them when he was being tried for burglary several years ago.

The painting was discovered on December 10 by gardeners who were clearing ivy from an external wall. It was hidden in a trash bag inside an alcove behind a secret panel. On Friday, experts appointed by Italian prosecutors confirmed the authenticity of the work, and the pair were taken in for questioning.

The pair’s lawyer, Guido Gulieri, tells the Guardian that they claim to have returned the painting four years ago, and have given police the address of the house in which they say it had been stored before that time. “They have been obscure about the details but have always maintained that the painting was not in the cavity all of that time,” the lawyer said. “I’m not a technical expert, but it would have been damaged if it had been there for all those years.” (Artnet News reached out to Gulieri for comment but did not immediately hear back.)

Their story is corroborated by the findings of the conservation team, which reported the painting to be in good condition. It would be unlikely for a painting that had been stored in the alcove for 23 years to be completely undamaged.

The thieves made the recent confession more than 20 years after the February 22, 1997 theft, timing it to come after the expiration of the statute of limitations on the crime. Facing jail time for a separate burglary spree, they may have been attempting use the Klimt painting’s whereabouts as a bargaining chip in gunning for a reduced sentence. In their confession, they wrote that they had decided to tip off the public only after they were “sure not to incur further crimes,” and added that they “did not foresee the intervention of the gardener who, however, only anticipated us a little.”

The confession was timed alongside an imminent sentence from Italy’s Supreme Court. They will now serve seven years and two months, and four years and eight months, respectively, for “theft and receiving stolen goods” from targets including villas, apartments, and companies, according to Libertà.

While the police are still investigating the crime—it was reported on Friday that there was forensic evidence on the painting—their lawyer says they will not go to prison for the theft of the Klimt. “It is a very strange story,” Gulieri says. “They could have sold it or burned it… But the good news is, we have found the painting.”

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/klimt-thieves-confess-to-returning-the-stolen-painting-found-by-gardeners-in-an-italian-gallery-1757958?utm_content=from_&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=US%20News%20Morning%2010%20a.m.%20for%201%2F22%2F20&utm_term=New%20US%20Newsletter%20List

High-Flying Art Heiress Angela Gulbenkian Has Been Slapped With a New Lawsuit Claiming She Cheated a Collector Out of an Andy Warhol

The embattled art dealer is facing a multitude of charges.
Sarah Cascone, January 22, 2020

Angela Gulbenkian. Photo by Angela Gulbenkian via Instagram.

Fresh allegations of fraudulent art dealing by Angela Gulbenkian, a German woman who married into one of Europe’s wealthiest and most renowned art-collecting families, have cropped up in Germany.

In a complaint filed in Munich this month on behalf of an anonymous London art dealer, lawyer Hannes Hartung says Gulbenkian sold his client an Andy Warhol Queen Elizabeth II print for £115,000 ($151,000). But she failed to give that money to the seller, according to the suit—which Hartung’s client only realized when the owner showed up demanding payment. The story was first reported by the Art Newspaper.

These are not the first such accusations levied against Gulbenkian. In March 2018, Hong Kong-based art advisor Mathieu Ticolat claimed to have paid $1.4 million for a Yayoi Kusama pumpkin sculpture that was never delivered. Ticolat enlisted Christopher Marinello of Art Recovery International to get his money back in late 2017. The case has yet to be resolved, but criminal and civil charges are pending against Gulbenkian in both Germany and the UK, with trials scheduled for March and May.

Angela Gulbenkian arranged for the sale of this Andy Warhol print, but never delivered the payment to the original owner. Courtesy of Art Recovery International. According to a new lawsuit, Angela Gulbenkian arranged for the sale of this Andy Warhol Queen Elizabeth II print, but never delivered payment to the original owner.

Courtesy of Art Recovery International.

“I assure you that if these cases took place in the United States, she’d be sitting in jail next to Anna Delvey,” Marinello told Artnet News. “There are other victims. I get calls from people all the time who were swindled by her, or who were about to be, but backed out after they read about my client’s case.”

“It’s exactly the same scam,” Hartung writes in the new complaint. “Gulbenkian again fails to complete an art transaction and again retains a large sum of money which she is clearly not entitled to.” He says “an international arrest warrant [should] be issued” due to “the seriousness of the offenses.”

Marinello says Gulbenkian banked on the Gulbenkian family name, which is synonymous with arts philanthropy, to trick unsuspecting collectors. “She’s still using the Gulbenkian art collection to lure in victims,” he said. “She’s trying to put deals together at this very moment. This woman is going down swinging, but anybody in their right mind would not do business with her.”

“We’re going after the money wherever we can find it, whether it’s her family or friends—whoever has touched these funds, we’re going to go after them,” he added. Artnet News’s attempts to reach Gulbenkian were unsuccessful.

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Painting found in Italy wall is stolen Klimt

The 55 by 65 cm (21 by 26 inches) expressionist work could be worth between 60 and 100 million euros ($67-111 million).

PIACENZA (AFP).- A painting found stashed inside a wall at an Italian museum has been confirmed as the stolen "Portrait of a Lady" by Austria's Gustav Klimt, prosecutors said on Friday, two decades after the artwork went missing.

The century-old painting was discovered concealed in an external wall by gardeners at the Ricci Oddi Gallery of Modern Art in Piacenza, northeast Italy, last month.

The museum estimates that the 55-by-65-centimetre (21-by-26-inch) expressionist work could be worth between 60 and 100 million euros ($67-111 million), but notes the difficulty in estimating the work as it has never been sold on the market.

"It is with no small emotion that I can tell you the work is authentic," prosecutor Ornella Chicca told reporters. Museum officials had initially said they could not immediately determine whether the painting was indeed the stolen Klimt until scientific tests were undertaken. Painted in 1916-1917, the expressionist work depicts the face and torso of a young woman with brown hair, over an emerald green background.

The painting went missing in February 1997 while the museum was closed for work.

Wrapped in a bin bag
In December, gardeners removing ivy from a wall found a small ventilation space and discovered the painting inside, without a frame and wrapped in a black garbage bag.

The ivy covering the space had not been cut back for almost a decade. Chicca said further tests would determine whether the painting had been lingering inside the wall space since it was stolen, or whether it had been hidden there at a later date. "At the moment, we can't say whether it has been there all along," the prosecutor said.

Once those tests were completed, the painting will hopefully be returned to the gallery's walls, she said. Art expert Guido Cauzzi studied the work under infrared and ultraviolet light, comparing images to those taken during tests performed in 1996.

"The correspondence between the images allowed us to determine that it's definitely the original painting," Cauzzi said. The condition of the painting was "relatively good," he said. "It's gone through a few ordeals, but only needs some routine care, nothing particularly complicated," Cauzzi added. Fellow art expert Anna Seller has examined the picture's frame, as well as the seals and labels at the back and says all appear to be authentic.

In 1996, it was determined through X-ray analysis that the painting covered up another, that of the face of a different woman. The Ricci Oddi Gallery of Modern Art takes its name from a rich art collector originally from Piacenza, some 70 kilometres (45 miles) from Milan, who entrusted a collection of 450 mostly 19th-century paintings to the municipality in 1931.

The museum's president Massimo Ferrari had told AFP, after the lost painting was first discovered in the wall in December, that there were "positive signs" that this was the genuine Klimt.

© Agence France-Presse

https://artdaily.cc/news/120160/Painting-found-in-Italy-wall-is-stolen-Klimt

Billionaire Banker Jaime Botin Gets an 18-Month Prison Sentence and a $58 Million Fine for Smuggling a Picasso Out of Spain

Banker stashed the Picasso on his yacht despite being denied an export permit.

Eileen Kinsella, January 16, 2020

Members of the French and Spanish Police with the seized Picasso, Head of a Young Woman (1906). Courtesy Douane Fraçaise.

Jaime Botin, a Spanish billionaire and member of the dynasty that has run Santander SA bank for more than 100 years, was sentenced today to 18 months in prison and received a €52.4 million ($58 million) fine for smuggling a celebrated work by Pablo Picasso out of Spain.

Botin, who was formerly head of Spanish lender Bankinter SA, was found guilty of contraband in culturally important goods. He was also forced to surrender the artwork itself, Picasso’s Head of a Young Woman, which is valued at €26 million ($29 million). (He has a net worth of $1.7 billion, according to Forbes,)

The Picasso was seized from Botin’s yacht in Corsica, after he took it there in defiance of court orders mandating that he keep it in Spain. Now, the painting is in the custody of the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid, until further notice.

According to a Reuters report, Botin, 83, has ten days to appeal the decision. He is unlikely to serve the prison time ordered due to his age and the fact that he is a first-time offender, the report notes.

The yacht Adix, owned by Spanish Santander banking group and flying a British flag, sails off Testa beach on August 4, 2015, in Pianottoli Caldarello, Corsica, four days after French customs seized a Picasso on board considered a national treasure by Spain. Photo: Pascal Pochard Casabianca/AFP/Getty Images.

Spain’s laws on the protection of cultural heritage are said to be among the strictest in Europe. Any work of art older than 100 years is considered a national treasure and thus requires an export permit. Botin applied for an export permit for the Picasso, but was rejected.

Botin acquired the Picasso in 1977, Bloomberg reported, citing UK website Artlyst. It hails from the artist’s pre-Cubist “Rose” period.

Spanish authorities seem to have been observing Botin for some time. They had long suspected him of planning to sell the painting, according to Bloomberg. In 2012, he authorized Christie’s auction house to seek an export permit from Madrid to London, Spanish judge Elena Gonzalez concluded in her ruling.

Internal email at Christie’s presented as evidence during Botin’s trial show the painting was being billed as one of the top draws at an auction scheduled for February 2013.

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Russian billionaire loses Monaco battle with art dealer

In this file photo taken on March 29, 2018, Monaco's football club Russian President Dmitri Rybolovlev arrives for a training session at training camp in La Turbie near Monaco. Court decision on request to cancel fraud trial of Monaco FC owner, Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev, is expected on December 12, 2019. VALERY HACHE / AFP. by Claudine Renaud

NICE (AFP).- Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev has lost a case in Monaco against a top art dealer he accused of swindling him out of hundreds of millions of dollars, his lawyers said on Thursday.

Rybolovlev, who owns AS Monaco football club, accused Swiss dealer Yves Bouvier of charging him inflated prices on dozens of artworks he acquired for more than $2.1 billion (1.9 billion euros). The Monaco court of appeal said the "entire investigation was carried out in a partial and unfair manner" -- a major setback for Rybolovlev, whose five-year feud with Bouvier has played out in courts in five countries.

Bouvier hailed it as "yet another victory" after favourable court rulings in Singapore, Hong Kong and New York. His lawyer Franck Michel accused Rybolovlev of concocting a case against the art dealer in Monaco as part of a plot to destroy Bouvier's art shipping and storage business. However, one of Rybolovlev's lawyers, Herve Temine, stressed that Bouvier was still being investigated in Switzerland and promised to appeal against the Monaco ruling.

"Mr Bouvier should not rejoice because this in no way affects the substance of the case for giant fraud of which he is accused," he said. Rybolovlev commissioned Bouvier to help build up an art collection to rival a small museum -- including works by Van Gogh, Picasso, Monet, Rodin, Matisse and Leonardo da Vinci's "Salvator Mundi", which Rybolovlev sold at auction in 2017 for a record $450 million. But their relationship soured when Rybolovlev accused Bouvier of overcharging him.

Rybolovlev was himself charged with bribery and influence peddling and Monaco's justice minister was forced to retire over claims he accepted bribes. Rybolovlev made his fortune in the fertiliser business after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Forbes business magazine ranks him number 224 on its list of the world's richest people for 2019, with a net worth of $6.8 billion.

© Agence France-Presse
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Man charged with 'Picasso' art attack in London: police

Bust Of A Woman was ripped while on display at the central London gallery www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7840393/Vandal-attacks-20m-Picasso-painting-Tate-Modern-man-20-charged-criminal-damage.html

LONDON (AFP).- Police in London on Tuesday said a man was charged with criminal damage after reports of an attack on a Picasso painting at the Tate Modern art gallery.

The Metropolitan Police said a 20-year-old man from northwest London appeared in court on Monday and was remanded in custody until another hearing on January 30. No other details were released, other than the incident happened on Saturday.

The gallery also did not specify the work in question but said the suspect was "swiftly apprehended" and that conservation experts were assessing the artwork.

British media identified the work as Picasso's "Bust of a Woman", an oil painting depicting the artist's lover Dora Maar. He painted it in Paris in 1944 during the final days of the Nazi occupation.

The Daily Telegraph said the painting was torn but there was no immediate confirmation.

© Agence France-Presse
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