Kherson's museums now display shattered cases and missing treasures

A smashed display case at the regional history museum in Kherson, Ukraine, on Sunday Nov. 20, 2022. The museum is another cultural institution ransacked and looted by Russian forces before they withdrew from the city in defeat. (Lynsey Addario/The New York Times) by Lynsey Addario

KHERSON, UKRAINE.- The principal artist designing the exhibitions at Kherson’s regional history museum, Anatoliy Gryaznov, was near tears. The collection to which he had dedicated a lifetime was mostly gone, he said, another cultural institution ransacked and looted by Russian forces before they withdrew from the city in defeat.

Glass display cases were smashed. Deep gouges in the floor marked the paths along which Russian soldiers had dragged tombstones and other heavy objects.

“I spent my whole life working in this museum,” Gryaznov said. “And now it is all gone. Twenty years of my life — gone.”

According to the head of the culture department at its City Council, Svitlana Dumynska, Kherson had “one of the most impressive collections of regional museums in Ukraine.” They are now in ruins. At the regional history museum, the section on guns and weapons was decimated, the Russians taking everything they could carry. A few heavier objects remained, alongside the whole of the nature exhibit.

At the nearby Kherson Art Museum, local officials said, religious paintings from the 17th and 20th centuries were torn from the walls. Ukrainian art from the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries was missing, along with contemporary art from the last 100 years. The Kherson police have opened a criminal investigation, classifying looting as a war crime.

Ukraine’s minister of culture, Oleksandr Tkachenko, said about 80% of the museums’ collections were gone: “Mostly the most valuable things were stolen.” The deputy governor of the Kherson region, Serhii Khlan, told journalists on Monday that there were reports that a second branch of the regional history museum — in Kakhova, east of the Dnieper River, near an important hydroelectric plant — had also been robbed.

The Russians also cleared out the entire section of Kherson’s history museum that was dedicated to World War II, including the identification documents and medals of a Nazi soldier bearing Hitler’s signature. They seem to have done little to conceal what they were taking.

Days after their soldiers fled the city, images circulated on Ukrainian social media that appeared to show objects from the Kherson Art Museum being unloaded at a museum in Crimea, the peninsula that Russia unlawfully annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

Museum experts identified several works of art in the pictures, including paintings by Ukrainian modernists Ivan Pokhitonov and Mykhailo Andrienko-Nechitaylo.

In an interview this month with the news outlet The Moscow Times, the Crimean museum’s director, Andrei Malgin, confirmed that the artworks had come to his institution, the Central Museum of Taurida in Simferopol. “I have been instructed to take the exhibits of the Kherson Art Museum for temporary storage and ensure their safety until they are returned to their rightful owner,” he said.

https://artdaily.cc/news/152010/Kherson-s-museums-now-display-shattered-cases-and-missing-treasures#.Y3--D3bMKUk
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

A $100 Million Willem de Kooning Painting Finally Returns to the Arizona Museum It Was Stolen From 37 Years Ago

The work suffered significant damage from the theft but has been carefully restored at the Getty Museum. Jo Lawson-Tancred, September 28, 2022

University of Arizona staff at the inspection and authentication of the recovered Willem de Kooning painting Woman-Ochre (1954–55), ©the Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo by Bob Demers/UANews, courtesy of the University of Arizona Museum of Art.

A Willem de Kooning painting that was stolen from the University of Arizona Museum of Art in 1985 has finally returned home. A New Mexico gallery called Manzanita Ridge Furniture and Antiques found Woman-Ochre (1954-55) in 2017 among the possessions of Jerry and Rita Alter, whose estate it had bought for $2,000 after they both died.

The museum’s interim director, Olivia Miller, recalled the moment she arrived in Silver City to see the long-lost work. “I was able to kneel down on the floor in front of it and take it in. It was a really special moment.” “Seeing it come back was this moment of relief and peace of mind,” she said. “Everyone on campus is excited, everyone at the Getty is excited. The fact that one painting can make all these people come together is—I don’t know—there really are not words for it.”

Willem de Kooning’s Woman-Ochre (1954–55) in August 2017, shortly after it was recovered in New Mexico and returned to the University of Arizona Museum of Art. ©2019 the Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

The Alters, who were schoolteachers, are now believed to have stolen the work in broad daylight, the day after Thanksgiving, with Rita distracting the security guards so that Jerry could cut the painting out of its frame. The heist only took 15 minutes.

This rough treatment came at a cost, causing significant harm to the painting which is today valued at $100 million. The painting underwent a complex restoration process, performed free of charge by the Getty. “The brutal way in which it was ripped from its lining caused severe paint flaking and tears, not to mention the damage caused by the blade that was used to slice it from its frame,” said the Getty’s senior paintings conservator, Ulrich Birkmaier.

The process involved removing several layers of varnish, re-bonding the flaking paint, and using precise dental tools and minuscule quantities of paint to fill in the rips and tears. Afterward, it went on public display at the Getty over the summer.

Woman-Ochre is from the artist’s “Woman” series. It will be publicly exhibited at the Arizona museum from October 8 and will appear In a documentary film, The Thief Collector, which offers further insight into the Alters, and will be screened at Centennial Hall at 7 p.m. on October 6.

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/stolen-de-kooning-returns-arizona-museum-2182926

Churchill portrait disappears in art heist in Canada

Yousuf Karsh’s famous portrait of Winston Churchill, taken in December 1941 in Ottawa.Credit. Photo: Yousuf Karsh.

NEW YORK, NY.- It is among the most famous photographic images of a statesman. Winston Churchill, the British prime minister, glowers, hand on hip. For decades, an original signed print of the image has hung on a wall in a landmark hotel in Ottawa, Ontario.

But on Friday, an employee noticed that something was off with the photograph, shot by renowned portraitist Yousuf Karsh.

The frame was askew. It did not match the others on the wall. When the hotel, the Fairmont Château Laurier, called Jerry Fielder, director of Karsh’s estate, he thought there was “no chance” that the picture could have been replaced by a copy.

Then they sent him a close-up picture of what was supposed to be Karsh’s signature. “I was stunned,” Fielder said, noting that it had been forged. “This was a heist.”

The photograph, taken in 1941 after Churchill addressed the Canadian Parliament during World War II, is known as the “Roaring Lion” for the fierce gaze of the British leader, and the defiance that many said it captured as the Allied forces forged ahead in a difficult and bloody war. It catapulted Karsh, an Armenian Canadian then 33, to international fame. He went on to photograph Ernest Hemingway, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Georgia O’Keeffe and Nikita Khrushchev.

Karsh had a special relationship with the Fairmont hotel: In 1936, he held his first exhibition there. In 1972, he opened his photography studio in the building. Later, he and his wife, Estrellita Karsh, moved in. “We traveled so much it was difficult to keep up a big home,” Estrellita Karsh, 92, said by phone Tuesday evening. “I loved it,” she added, “because a hotel is like a little city.” She and her husband, who died in 2002, gave the original print of Churchill, along with several others, to the hotel, after living there for nearly two decades. Karsh said that when she learned that the picture was missing, she was incredulous.

“Churchill was important in his life; he was important in everybody’s life,” Karsh said. “When he photographed him, Britain was on the verge of giving up.” Her husband, she added, had practiced making the image on a man who “looked like Churchill from the neck down.”

In a news release Tuesday, the Fairmont hotel said that it had informed local authorities of the picture’s disappearance, and, as a precautionary measure, had removed other photographs that were hanging in the reading lounge of the building. “We are deeply saddened by this brazen act,” said Geneviève Dumas, the hotel’s general manager, adding that the hotel was incredibly proud to house the Karsh collection. In an interview with CTV News, she said the public had sent in photographs of themselves in front of the famous image, which revealed that it had been taken sometime between Dec. 25 and Jan. 6.

The hotel is asking anyone who saw or noticed anything unusual at the hotel during that time to contact them, Dumas said. Fielder said the print was an original made from the original negative by Karsh in his Château Laurier studio. He said it was 20 by 24 inches, printed on photographic paper and mounted on archival board.

When Karsh closed his studio in 1992, his negatives were given to Library and Archives Canada, he said. No copies were allowed, Fielder said; the only prints in existence were those made by Karsh himself before 1992. The Ottawa Police are investigating the disappearance, according to the CBC. The authorities did not respond to a request for further comment on Tuesday. Another signed copy of an original print of Karsh’s “Roaring Lion” photograph was sold for $62,500 at a Sotheby’s auction in 2020.

The famous picture Karsh took of Churchill came after the photographer was invited by Mackenzie King, the Canadian prime minister, to hear Churchill’s “electrifying” speech to Parliament on Dec. 30, 1941. Karsh, eager to photograph Churchill, had set up his lights and camera the night before, according to Karsh’s website.

Churchill was apparently taken aback. “What’s this, what’s this?” he barked as Karsh flipped on the floodlights. Though irritated that he had not been told about the photo session, Churchill lit a cigar and told Karsh that he had one shot. Karsh held out an ashtray but Churchill kept puffing. “Forgive me, sir,” Karsh recalled saying as he snagged the cigar. “By the time I got back to my camera, he looked so belligerent he could have devoured me,” Karsh said. “It was at that instant that I took the photograph.”

While Karsh said he knew he had taken an important picture, he could “hardly have dreamed that it would become one of the most widely reproduced images in the history of photography.” In 2016, the image went on to be featured on the British 5 pound note, according to the International Churchill Society. Estrellita Karsh said it was “a sad and stupid thing” to steal the photograph. “I hope they apprehend the person.”

She said that it was amazing that these many years later, the Churchill portrait still resonated. The power of her husband’s images, she said, was that they captured the person behind the mask, including Churchill.

“The relationship and the bond that he shared with many of his sitters made them lose their numbness in front of the camera,” Karsh said. “They allowed him to see, if only for a moment, which he caught, something real in them, something authentic,” she said. “The main element in his relationship to his sitter was trust.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

https://artdaily.cc/news/149322/Churchill-portrait-disappears-in-art-heist-in-Canada#.YwfKqnbMKUk

For Years, Art Dealer Georges Lotfi Helped Investigators Root Out Antiquities Traffickers. Now Prosecutors Are Hunting for Him Investigators say the tipster became too assured of his own self-importance.

Eileen Kinsella, August 9, 2022

Iphigenia & Orestes Mosaic. Image via Manhattan District Attorney


What better way to distract from criminal activity than to point the finger at others?

That’s essentially the premise of a criminal case against longtime antiquities dealer and collector Georges Lotfi, which is outlined in a 36-page felony arrest warrant issued by the Department of Homeland Security and New York assistant district attorneys Taylor Holland and Matthew Bogdanos.

Lotfi provided information to investigators for years as they pursed looted antiquities and even provided a “hand-drawn” diagram of how international smuggling networks operate. It was a tip from Lotfi in 2018 that led to the seizure of the gilded coffin of Nedjemankh from the Metropolitan Museum of Art that was eventually repatriated to Egypt the following year.

The gilded coffin of Nedjemankh. Photo courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Investigators say Lotfi’s role as a whistleblower gave him an inflated sense of confidence that his own illicit activity would never be uncovered.

Now Lotfi, who is 81 years old, is charged with criminal possession of stolen property. A total of 24 objects were seized from him, including 23 mosaics from Syria and Lebanon and a 1,500-pound carved limestone sculpture referred to as the Palmyra Stone. The individual items range in value from $20,000 to $2.5 million, the affidavit said.

Artnet News was not immediately able to contact Lotfi for comment. But he told the New York Times: “I was fighting with them for 10 years to stop illicit trading, and they turned against me. I am not a smuggler. I am a collector.”

The address listed on the warrant is a post office box in Tripoli, but Lotfi at one time owned an apartment on Fifth Avenue so he could be close to the Met, according to the Times. (The Met’s address is 1000 Fifth Avenue, and an online search for Lotfi turned up an address at 1001 Fifth Avenue, though the associated phone number listed is not in service.)

According to the extensively detailed warrant, a copy of which was provided to Artnet News, the Manhattan district attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit’s (ATU) investigation into Lotfi began “indirectly” in July 2017, when the unit applied for a search warrant to seize a $12 million marble bull head from the Met.

The head had been excavated from the archeological site of Eshmun in Lebanon amid its decades-long civil war, and was subsequently loaned to the Met. According to the warrant, Lofti was listed on loan paperwork as “the first documented possessor” of the artwork.

Palmyra Stone. Image courtesy Manhattan District Attorney.

It isn’t the only stolen Lebanese antiquity possessed by him, investigators say. Later the same year, a $10 million marble torso appeared on the market. Like the bull’s head, it had also been excavated from Eshmun during the civil war before Lotfi took possession of it. In November 2017 the ATU seized the object from his Fifth Avenue apartment after obtaining a search warrant. Both the bull’s head and the torso were repatriated to Lebanon in December of that year.

Then, in 2018, a third Eshmun antiquity with the same provenance was recovered by Lebanese customs officials from a container that Lotfi had shipped from New York to Tripoli. In an email from January that year, Lotfi told the ATU that he purchased the three objects in the 1980s from a dealer named Farid Ziade. Lotfi also told Homeland Security special agent Robert Mancene that he purchased other antiquities from Ziade during the civil war, including five of the 24 in total that were seized.

Over its years-long investigation, the ATU ”has developed additional evidence that the Defendant knowingly possessed stolen antiquities,” the warrant states.

Telete Mosaic. Image via Manhattan District Attorney

Mancene said that during his numerous interactions with Lotfi, the dealer demonstrated not only his intimate knowledge of the illegal trade in antiquities from the Middle East and North Africa, but also his “acute awareness” of the hallmarks of looted antiquities. He also knew from Lotfi that the hundreds of antiquities in his collection were scattered across across apartments in New York, Paris, Tripoli, and Dubai, as well as at several storage units in New Jersey.

Over the course of the investigation, Mancene said he learned that between 2008 and 2011, Lotfi “trafficked in Libyan antiquities; specifically, the distinctive legless funerary statues originating from the region of Cyrenaica, on the coast of eastern Libya.”

Furthermore, to facilitate selling the looted Libyan antiquities, Lotfi allegedly created a false paper trail using the Art Loss Register.

“I know, based on my experience in prior investigations, that antiquities traffickers often use the ALR to increase the value of their looted goods,” according to Mancene.

Mancene also says photographs of one of Lotfi’s shipping containers depicted objects “on a dirt ground surrounded by earth and rubble and with its surface encrusted with dirt,” a tell-tale sign of having been looted. Another photo showed mosaics on sheets of cloth which “are used to lift mosaics from the ground,” according to the warrant.

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/georges-lofti-2157763

Convicted British Art Fraudster Angela Hamblin Has Been Arrested in Germany After Living on the Lam for More Than a Decade

73 year old, British art fraudster Angela Hamblin (pictured) was caught in Frankfurt on a flight back to Edinburgh, after 13 years on the run from the US in Frankfurt
Photo from daily mail:https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10921003/Art-fraudster-nearly-500-000-fake-Turner-painting-tracked-13-years.html

Artnet - Amah-Rose Abrams, June 17, 2022
According to residents of a small town in northern Scotland quoted in the Daily Mail, Angela Hamblin seemed like an eccentric, outgoing, lovely woman. But it turns out that she was a fugitive who was living on the lam after pleading guilty to fraud in the U.S. for selling nearly £500,000 ($610,000) work of fake art.

Confessed fraudster Angela Hamblin disappeared in 2009 after being sentenced to 12 months in prison by a New York court for peddling fakes privately and on eBay. While living in Massachusetts with her husband, an Ivy League professor, Hamblin sold works she claimed were by fine artists including Franz Kline, Milton Avery, Juan Gris, and J.M.W. Turner. When her buyers discovered the works were fake, she would simply refund them and sell the paintings to someone else, prosecutors said.

When she was caught by authorities, she initially denied the charges but eventually pleaded guilty to two counts of mail fraud and one count of wire fraud. Hamblin said she turned to crime because she was under pressure to meet her mortgage payments.

“She had been carrying out her scheme for years,” U.S. prosecutors said in 2007, according to the Daily Mail. ”But she was arrested in a sting after. She continued her fraud relentlessly.”

And while she showed up for her sentencing hearing in 2009, where she was handed a sentence of one year and one day, she did not turn herself over to authorities as ordered, fleeing to the U.K. instead.

Hamblin was recently detained in Germany on an international arrest warrant, after she changed flights in Frankfurt on her way back to Scotland from a trip to Vienna, the Daily Mail reports. She now faces extradition to the U.S., where she would likely have to complete her prison sentence.

Locals in the small town of St. Boswells on the Scottish Borders, where she and her husband had been living, seemed divided in their opinions of her—although no one was shocked that she had been involved in a fraud.

“They are highly eccentric,” local barman Alex Gilham said of Hamblin and her husband, according to the Daily Mail. ” She’s really outgoing, they’re mad in their own way but they’re really lovely. It doesn’t surprise me that she could have done something unusual, they’re not really the type to have an office job,” he added.

Amah-Rose Abrams, June 17, 2022 https://news.artnet.com/art-world/angela-hamblin-art-fraudster-arrested-2132424

Former head of Louvre is charged in artifact trafficking case

Jean-Luc Martinez, director of the Louvre, at the museum’s conservation center in Lievin, France, Feb. 9, 2021. Martinez, who led the museum from 2013 to 2021, has been charged with complicity in fraud and money laundering in connection with an investigation into Egyptian artifacts that were trafficked over the past decade, French prosecutors said on May 26, 2022. Dmitry Kostyukov/The New York Times.
by Aurelien Breeden

PARIS.- The former president of the Louvre has been charged with complicity in fraud and money laundering in connection with an investigation into Egyptian artifacts that were trafficked over the past decade, French prosecutors said Thursday.

Jean-Luc Martinez, who was the president and director of the Louvre from 2013 to 2021, was released under judicial supervision after he was charged, the Paris prosecutor’s office said.

The prosecutor’s office did not provide more details about the investigation, which was first reported by Le Canard Enchaîné and Le Monde.

Under the French legal system, the charges against Martinez indicate that investigators suspect him of involvement in a crime but he may not necessarily stand trial. The charges could be dropped at any point if the police uncover new evidence. Complex legal investigations often take several years to unfold in France.

Representatives for the Louvre declined to comment Thursday. Lawyers for Martinez were not immediately reachable for comment but told Agence France-Presse that he firmly disputed the charges.

“For now he is saving his statements for the judiciary, and he has no doubt that his good faith will be established,” Jacqueline Laffont and François Artuphel, Martinez’s lawyers, told the news agency.

The charges were a stunning turn of events for Martinez, who is France’s official ambassador for international cooperation on heritage issues and spearheaded efforts to safeguard artifacts at risk of looting and destruction in conflict zones during his time at the Louvre.

Martinez had written a report that France presented to the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in 2015 that included 50 proposals to protect antiquities from looters.

Two French Egyptologists were also questioned by the police in connection with the case but were released without charges, the prosecutor’s office said. According to Le Monde, in 2019, a colleague of the Egyptologists alerted them that he had grown suspicious of the provenance of a Tutankhamen stele that ended up at the Louvre Abu Dhabi.

The Louvre Abu Dhabi said it was unable to comment on the specifics of the case because of the ongoing investigation.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
https://artdaily.cc/news/146775/Former-head-of-Louvre-is-charged-in-artifact-trafficking-case#.YpDhkajMLIU

Finland Seized $46 Million Worth of Art en Route to Russian Museums, Including a Titian and a Picasso, Enforcing E.U. Sanctions

The sanctions prevent the transport of luxury goods, including art
Sarah Cascone, April 6, 2022

Finnish customs officers seized these crates loaded with works of art in transit back to Russia. Photo courtesy of Finnish Customs.

Finnish customs officials have impounded artworks valued by insurance at over €42 million ($46 million), preventing them from returning to Russia, under European Union sanctions imposed in response to President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Finland intercepted three shipments of art at the Vaalimaa border crossing between Finland and Russia last weekend, impounding one vessel. The Finnish Heritage Agency will oversee the storage of the confiscated items until the sanctions are lifted, according to Reuters. The artworks are still Russian property, and are being held as evidence.

A spokesperson for the Russian foreign ministry, Maria Zakharova, confirmed that on April 5, diplomats from the Russian embassy in Finland accompanied the works’ transfer to facilities at the Ateneum state museum in Helsinki. They advised Finnish authorities that breaking the seals on the packaging was “unacceptable.”

“Professionals have been consulted in the moving and storage of the goods,” customs enforcement director Hannu Sinkkonen said at a press conference, reports Agence France-Presse. “We are not going to open the packages.”

The shipments “include works which cannot be valued; they are priceless,” he added..

Giovanni Cariani, Giovane donna con vecchio di profilo (ca. 1516–18). Collection of the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia.

E.U. sanctions introduced in mid-March prohibit the sale, supply, transfer, or export of luxury goods—including artworks—to Russia, due to the invasion. Authorities say there are 10 people suspected of having violated the sanctions to transport the art.

The works, which include paintings, statues, and antiques, had been on loan to Italy from the collections of the Hermitage and Tsarskoye Selo state museums in St. Petersburg and the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, the Russian ministry of culture told the Russian news agency Moskva. The artworks returning from Japan belong to Moscow’s Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts.

“The enforcement of sanctions is part of our normal operations and we always direct our controls based on risks. The shipments that have now come under criminal investigation were detected as part of our customary enforcement work,” Sami Rakshit, head of the enforcement department of Finnish Customs, said in a statement.

Titian, Young Woman with Feather Hat (ca. 1536). Collection of the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia.

In early March, the Hermitage had requested that three Italian institutions return loaned works ahead of schedule. At that time, the Gallerie d’Italia in Milan was exhibiting Antonio Canova’s Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss (1787–93); the Palazzo Reale, also in Milan, had displays of Titian’s Young Woman with Feather Hat (ca. 1536) and Giovanni Cariani’s Giovane donna con vecchio di profilo (1515–16); and Rome’s Fondazione Fendi had Young Woman (1909) by Pablo Picasso on view.

Finland has been strict in enforcing sanctions against Russia, also prohibiting 21 luxury yachts from departing Finnish waters last month amid suspicions that the vessels belong to sanctioned individuals.

“As for the arrested paintings, they will return and pay a penalty,” the Russian State Duma Speaker, Vyacheslav Volodin, said in a statement. “Those who did this in Finland probably do not remember their history well.”

Zakharova, of the Russian foreign ministry, told Artnet News: “Basically, the situation can be described as legal anarchy. We are talking about the seizure, in violation of international law, of artwork owned by the Russian Federation that temporarily was on display abroad under the governmental guarantees of the countries where these items were exhibited on a nonprofit basis and in cooperation with our museums. We are waiting for the Finnish authorities to act with due haste to ensure that all these works are returned to the Russian Federation.”

This week, France agreed to return 200 paintings on loan to Paris’s Fondation Louis Vuitton for the show “The Morozov Collection: Icons of Modern Art” to Russia, despite calls to confiscate the works.

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/finland-seizes-russian-art-under-sanctions-2095012?utm_content=from_&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Morning%20US%20Newsletter%204%2F7%2F22&utm_term=US%20Daily%20Newsletter%20%5BMORNING%5D

Stolen Darwin notebooks, missing for decades, are returned

A photo provided by the Cambridge University Library in England shows one of the two notebooks of Charles Darwin that were anonymously returned 22 years after they went missing. Pictured is Darwin’s famous “tree of life” drawing, which maps out how related species could diverge from a common ancestor. Cambridge University Library via The New York Times. by Daniel Victor

NEW YORK, NY.- Twenty-two years after a pair of notebooks filled with Charles Darwin’s early musings went missing from the Cambridge University Library, they were anonymously returned in good condition last month along with a note to the elated librarian: “Happy Easter.”

“Happy” scarcely begins to describe the reaction of Jessica Gardner, the university librarian who spearheaded an international publicity blitz in 2020 to recover the notebooks. Filled with Darwin’s scrawled handwriting and sketches from 1837, including the famous “tree of life” drawing, the notebooks recorded his thought process as he began sketching out ideas that would later develop into world-famous theories still revered and studied today, including the theory of natural selection.

On March 9, outside her office in an area of the library with no cameras, someone placed a bright pink gift bag. Gardner and her colleagues first recognized the original blue box that had been taken from the archives. Then, inside a brown envelope, they found the notebooks they had long sought inside tightly wrapped cling wrap, along with the typed note wishing her a Happy Easter.

“I still feel shaky,” she said in an interview Tuesday, when the university announced that the notebooks had been recovered. “It’s really hard to express how overjoyed I am.”

After waiting a few days — the police, who are continuing an investigation, instructed the university to wait before removing the notebooks from the plastic wrap — the university’s conservation experts delicately unsheathed them. Along with a team of experts, they looked through every page of both books, searching for damage or missing pages.

Jim Secord, the director of the university’s Darwin Correspondence Project, which has assembled the scientist’s writings, was among those who handled the notebooks, having also handled them in the 1990s before they went missing. He said it was immediately apparent that they were genuine, and that they had been kept in good condition with no missing pages.

Forgery was not a concern, he said — it would have been far too difficult to forge the several types of ink, the aged paper or the clasps on the leather binding, let alone the box it came in from the archives. “There’s no question, I think, they are the real notebooks,” he said.

The notebooks had been held in the library’s Special Collections Strong Rooms, where the rarest and most valuable items in its collection are stored. They were taken out to be photographed in September 2000. During a routine check a month later, the small box that contained the two notebooks was found to be missing, the library said. Years of fruitless searching led the library and national experts in cultural heritage theft to conclude that they had most likely been stolen.

The return of the notebooks brings relative closure to the academics eager to bring them home to the university’s treasured collection of Darwin’s correspondence. But it has done little to settle the many mysteries that remain: how the notebooks went missing, who took them, what happened in those 22 years, and why they were returned now.

The police in Cambridgeshire said in a statement that the investigation remained open, adding that “we share the university’s delight that these priceless notebooks are now back where they belong.” There’s no way to know what prompted someone to hand back the notebooks. But Gardner said she believed the public appeal for information in 2020, which prompted worldwide media coverage, including an article in The New York Times, could have been a factor. Perhaps someone’s conscience was pricked.

Getting the notebooks back at any point would have been a joy, but Gardner was particularly pleased that they can now be included in an exhibition starting in July. The exhibition, “Darwin in Conversation,” will come to the New York Public Library in spring 2023. “Charles Darwin means so much to people around the world,” Gardner said. The university’s archive includes thousands of his letters, but “these two are so important,” she said.

The contents of the notebooks had long been digitized, so scholars could still study his words and images even when the books themselves were missing. But Secord said that they contained “unparalleled insight into how an individual comes up with a discovery,” and that there was incalculable value to seeing the physical objects. Imagining Darwin scribbling in a grubby book, one that would have been readily available at stationery stores across London at the time, reflects how ordinary settings can give rise to enormous thought, he said.

“I do think they help to make the discoveries real and concrete,” he said, “and I think for us that’s really important to see.”

https://artdaily.cc/news/145239/Stolen-Darwin-notebooks--missing-for-decades--are-returned#.Yk3GUOjMKUk This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

UNESCO says 53 cultural sites in Ukraine have been damaged since the Russian invasion

April 2, 20226:08 PM ET - DEEPA SHIVARAM

The Menorah memorial is seen outside of Kharkiv at the Drobitsky Yar Holocaust memorial, a location that saw a mass killing of Jewish people by Nazis during WWII. UNESCO included the memorial in its list of sites that have sustained damaged since Russia invaded Ukraine. Sergey Bobok/AFP via Getty Images

Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, UNESCO says it's verified damage to at least 53 cultural sites in the country. The organization says it assesses damage reported in the media or by Ukrainian officials and has a system to monitor main Ukrainian sites and monuments via satellite imagery.

"Our experts continue to verify each report and it is feared that other sites will be added to this list," a UNESCO spokesperson told NPR.

As of March 30, UNESCO said, the confirmed damaged sites, located in several regions across Ukraine, include 29 religious sites, 16 historic buildings, four museums and four monuments.

How some people are trying to make art, not war, in Ukraine right now

When the war began, UNESCO implemented some emergency measures in order to best protect these cultural sites. It held regular online meetings with World Heritage site managers, museum directors, national monument officials and local heritage protection associations in Ukraine to provide expertise and practical advice. UNESCO says it has experts available 24/7 to respond to emergencies.

"We assist them in identifying safe havens in which to store items which can be moved; and in assessing and strengthening fire fighting procedures," the spokesperson said.

The agency says it's also communicated with Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov to reiterate that heritage sites are obligated to be protected and sent him location data of the heritage sites in Ukraine.

Both Russian and Ukraine have signed on to an act by the Hague Convention in 1954 that protects cultural property during armed conflict. It prohibits and condemns all attacks and damage to cultural heritage.

If cultural sites are marked with a blue shield — the convention's emblem — it means they are under the protection of the convention. If attacks are committed against these sites, UNESCO says, the perpetrators will be held responsible for acts constituting war crimes.

https://www.npr.org/2022/04/02/1090475172/unesco-ukraine-cultural-sites-damage?t=1648940453841&t=1649066550966

Art World Art Industry News: Celebrity Art Scammer Anna Delvey Is Free—And Is Now Being Shipped Back to Germany

Fake German heiress Anna Sorokin is led away after being sentenced in Manhattan Supreme Court May 9, 2019. Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY / AFP.

Anna Delvey Has Been Released From Custody...The scammer Anna Sorokin, who called herself Anna Delvey, was sent back to Frankfurt, Germany, yesterday after being released from an upstate New York detention center. She had been in ICE custody for nearly a year.

The former socialite, who sought to open her own art foundation in Manhattan before her downfall, is the subject of the hit Netflix show Inventing Anna.


Full Article NY Post: https://nypost.com/2022/03/14/anna-delvey-released-from-ice-custody-to-be-deported-to-germany/

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/art-industry-news-march-15-stories-2085152?utm_content=from_&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=US%20News%20Morning%203/15/22&utm_term=US%20Daily%20Newsletter%20%5BMORNING%5D

@Artcrime2 https://twitter.com/artcrime2

Stolen Roman statue returned to France after 50 years

By Paul Kirby, BBC News

Statue of Bacchus - Museum director Catherine Monnet was visibly moved when Arthur Brand handed back the statue Almost half a century after it was stolen, a Roman statue of the god Bacchus has been handed back to the French museum where it was displayed.

The 1st Century bronze of Bacchus as a child was taken by thieves in December 1973, along with 5,000 Roman coins. Art detective Arthur Brand traced the statue to the museum when a client was offered it by an Austrian collector. "Fifty years after a theft it's unheard of that something comes back - normally it's been destroyed," he told the BBC.

The 40cm-high (15.7in) statue was dug up on the site of the Gallo-Roman village of Vertillum in eastern France in 1894 and years later featured in a Paris exhibition of France's finest art pieces.

Bacchus - The statue was stolen in December 1973

When Mr Brand handed the statue back to the Musée du Pays Châtillonnais this week, director Catherine Monnet said she realised how much more beautiful it was than the copy that had been put on display.

The Dutch art sleuth, who has built a reputation for tracking down stolen masterpieces around the world, said the museum was "flabbergasted" when he told them he had traced their missing statue.

He described how he had been contacted by a client who wanted to know more about the statue after he was offered it by an Austrian collector, who had bought it legally and in good faith.

There were no databases in 1973 but Mr Brand eventually found a reference to it in an archaeology magazine dating back to 1927, and French police then found their report from the time of the theft.

"I contacted the collector. He didn't want to have a stolen piece in his collection so he wanted to give it back, but French law dictates that a small amount has to be paid for safekeeping."

That small amount in relation to the statue's value is still a considerable sum of money.

While half was paid by the local authority in Chatillon, the rest was provided by an auction house specialising in ancient art in the English port town of Harwich. "The piece belongs in the museum so it's only right people can get together and make that happen," said Aaron Hammond of Timeline Auctions.

According to Mr Brand, the museum director cried tears of joy when she saw the statue: "I thought she was going to drop it she was so nervous."

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60226454

Experts Have Been Searching for This Marsden Hartley Painting for Decades. It Just Turned Up in a Bank Vault

An art historian tracked the painting down while working on an online catalogue of the modernist artist’s work.

Marsden Hartley, Friend Against the Wind (1936). Courtesy of the Bates College Museum of Art.

For decades, the whereabouts of a rarely seen painting by Marsden Hartley remained unknown, leading many experts to wonder if it still existed at all. But then, last summer, a Hartley scholar finally found it in an unexpected place: a bank safety vault.

Gail Scott, an art historian who, with support from the Bates College Museum of Art, is leading a multi-year effort to catalogue all of Hartley’s works, was the person responsible for the discovery, according to the Portland Press Herald. Last year, Scott tracked down the last-known owner of the artwork, an unidentified collector who had purchased the piece more than 40 years ago, but never heard back.

The reason for that, it turned out, was because the collector had recently passed away. Scott learned this fact months later, in the early summer of 2021, when she was contacted by an attorney for the estate of the buyer. Fearing that the prized artwork could be stolen from his Windham, Maine, home, the collector had, years ago, stored the artwork in the vault of a Key Bank branch in the adjacent city of Portland, the lawyer told Scott.

In August, she finally had a chance to see it. “It took a couple of months, but sure enough, I walked down to the Key Bank in downtown Portland and into the big vault and there was this painting that I had never seen in color and had never seen in person,” Scott told the Herald.

The scholar quickly went to work photographing and otherwise documenting the painting, a 14-by-17-inch oil-on-board picture of a gold chalice that Hartley had created in 1936 as a remembrance to friends who had drowned in a hurricane. Various titles had been scrawled in different handwriting on the back—Ciboire avec Ostie (or Chalice with Host), Friend in the Storm, Roses for Fishermen Lost at Sea—but Scott chose to stick with the one that Hartley himself seemed to have written: Friend Against the Wind.

That’s the name of the painting as it will appear in “The Marsden Hartley Legacy Project,” an exhaustive online catalogue of all the Maine-born artist’s paintings and works on paper. The project will be rolled out in the coming years by the Bates Museum of Art, which owns the Marsden Hartley memorial collection of 400 artworks and objects.

Hardly one of the modernist artist’s greatest hits, Friend Against the Wind has only been shown publicly twice, once at New York’s American Place Gallery in 1936, shortly after its creation, and again at Barridoff Galleries in Portland in 1980, where it was sold to the collector who eventually stored it in the bank. The only evidence the artwork existed at all was a black-and-white photo of it reproduced in a catalogue for an exhibition in 1987.

Taylor Dafoe, January 12, 2022
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/marsden-hartley-painting-found-2059416?utm_content=from_&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=US%20PM%201/13&utm_term=US%20Daily%20Newsletter%20%5BAFTERNOON%5D