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Laurier, called Jerry Fielder, director of Karsh’s estate, he thought there was “no chance” that the picture could have been replaced by a copy.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