Stolen Roman-Era Erotic Mosaic Returned to Pompeii After WWII Theft

POMPEII, Italy — A Roman-era mosaic panel depicting an erotic scene was returned to Pompeii on Tuesday, more than 80 years after it was stolen by a Nazi officer during World War II.

The mosaic, set on travertine slabs and dating from the late Roman Republic to the early Imperial period, was repatriated from Germany thanks to efforts by the Italian Consulate in Stuttgart. It had been gifted to a German citizen by a Wehrmacht captain stationed in Italy and was recently returned by the heirs of its last owner.

Experts hail the mosaic as a work of "extraordinary cultural interest," representing a shift in Roman art toward intimate, domestic themes. “It marks a moment when love within the home becomes a subject of art,” said Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of the Pompeii Archaeological Park.

The heirs contacted Italy’s Carabinieri art unit, which confirmed the mosaic’s authenticity and coordinated its return in 2023. Despite limited information on its original excavation site, researchers traced it back to the Pompeii region near Mount Vesuvius.

Now catalogued and preserved, the piece will support education and research at the Pompeii Archaeological Park.

“This return is like healing a wound,” said Zuchtriegel. “It also reflects a change in mindset — where possessing stolen artifacts becomes a burden, not a trophy.”

He also referenced the enduring legend of the "Pompeii curse" — a superstition claiming bad luck befalls those who steal artifacts. Many tourists have returned items over the years, citing misfortunes they believe were linked to the theft.

J.Larson

Stolen Titian, Once Found at a London Bus Stop, Sells for a Record $22 Million

The work had also been looted by Napoleon in the 19th century.

Titian, Rest on the Flight into Egypt (ca. 1510). A religious painting from the Renaissance with the Holy Family traveling in the wilderness, Joseph sitting on the left and the Virgin Mary holding baby Jesus in the center of the painting. A small house is seen in the distance.

A small Titian painting with a storied past has reset the auction record for the famed Renaissance artist. The Rest on the Flight into Egypt (ca. 1508-10) sold for £17.6 million ($22.1 million), including fees, at Christie’s Old Masters sale in London on July 2. The Biblical scene, measuring just 18 by 25 inches, has passed through the hands of emperors, aristocrats, and archdukes, and was stolen—twice.

The work bore a presale estimate of £15 million to £25 million and was backed by a third-party guarantee. It sold to a phone bidder, likely its guarantor. According to the auction house, its “intimate” size is typical of Titian’s earlier works.

The artist’s previous record of $16.9 million was set in the 2011 sale of A Sacra Conversazione: The Madonna and Child with Saints Luke and Catherine of Alexandria at Sotheby’s New York.

“This result is a tribute to the impeccable provenance and quiet beauty of this sublime early masterpiece by Titian, which is one of the most poetic products of the artist’s youth,” said Orlando Rock, the chairman of Christie’s U.K. “This picture has captured the imaginations of audiences for more than half a millennia and will no doubt continue to do so.”

The Rest on the Flight into Egypt was first recorded in the collection of a Venetian merchant in the early 17th century before it was sold to Sir James Hamilton of Holyroodhouse and then on to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria. The Archduke esteemed his collection so highly that, in the mid 1600s, he commissioned a kunstkammer series of paintings to capture all of his trophy artworks. The Rest on the Flight into Egypt appears in one these paintings, which is now in the Prado in Madrid. After a few generations bouncing between Holy Roman Emperors, the work was first stolen when it was looted by French troops in 1809 during Napoleon’s occupation of Vienna. (It was returned in 1815.)

Its second theft was far more recent. In 1995, it was stolen from England’s Longleat, the home of the descendants of John Alexander Thynne, 4th Marquess of Bath, who had acquired the work from the London dealer Colnaghi. The gallery for its part, had bought it in a Christie’s sale in 1878 for 350 guineas (around $46,700 today)—the most of any of the 11 works by Titian in the sale. After it was stolen, Thynne’s heirs called in an art detective, Charles Hill, to help find the painting, then valued at £5 million. It wasn’t until 2002, however, that the painting turned up, frameless and stuffed in a plastic bag, at a bus stop in London in exchange for a £100,000 reward.

It was returned to Longleat and has been there ever since, except for its appearance in the 2012 exhibition “Titian’s First Masterpiece: The Flight into Egypt” at the National Gallery, London.

After the sale, Lord Bath, who succeeded his father as the Marquess of Bath in 2020 and inherited the Longleat estate, said it was “fabulous” to see the interest in the painting. “As the next chapter in the Rest on the Flight into Egypt’s story is written, I am pleased with the outcome [of the sale]; which will support our considerable long-term investment strategy at Longleat to build on the vision and legacy of my ancestors for the benefit of future generations,” he said.

Margaret Carrigan, July 4, 2024 https://news.artnet.com/market/titian-sells-for-a-record-22-million-2507972

Investigators say Chicago's Art Institute is holding onto 'Looted Art'

The Art Institute of Chicago. Ando Gallery. Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.
by Tom Mashberg and Graham Bowley

NEW YORK, NY.- New York investigators trying to seize a drawing from the Art Institute of Chicago filed an exacting 160-page motion Friday accusing the museum of blatantly ignoring evidence of an elaborate fraud undertaken to conceal that the artwork had been looted by the Nazis on the eve of World War II.

While the court papers, filed by the Manhattan district attorney’s office, did not accuse the museum of being party to the fraud, they said it had applied “willful blindness” to what the investigators said were clear indications that it was acquiring stolen property.

The drawing, “Russian War Prisoner,” by Egon Schiele, was purchased by the Art Institute in 1966. It is one of a number of works by Schiele that ended up in the hands of museums and collectors and have been sought by the heirs of Fritz Grünbaum, a Jewish cabaret entertainer from Vienna who was murdered in a Nazi concentration camp. The institute paid about $5,500 for the drawing, which has been valued by investigators today at $1.25 million.

In a statement, the Art Institute said it had good title to the work by Schiele, an Austrian expressionist, and would fight the district attorney’s attempt to seize it.

“We have done extensive research on the provenance history of this work and are confident in our lawful ownership of the piece,” the museum said, adding: “If we had this work unlawfully, we would return it, but that is not the case here.”

But the investigators said in their court filing that the institute’s “failure” to vet the work properly “undercuts any arguments that AIC were truly good-faith purchasers.”

Much of what was presented in the investigators’ voluminous filing had been cited in civil court cases pursued in recent years by the Grünbaum heirs. The current detailed presentation — which included more than 100 exhibits designed to trace the path of the artwork from the hands of Grünbaum to the Nazis to the museum — was aimed at pressuring the institute to follow the lead of seven other museums and collectors who have recently turned over Schiele works once owned by Grünbaum to the district attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit.

The Art Institute has argued that the federal courts have already ruled in the matter, deciding that the heirs had come forward too late to lay claim to the work and that there was reason to believe the works were all inherited by Grünbaum’s sister-in-law, who passed them on to a Swiss dealer in the 1950s.

The New York investigators took aim at that account in their motion, devoting page after page to evidence that they said showed the provenance documents brought forward by the dealer, Eberhard Kornfeld, to prove his account, contained forged signatures or were altered long after he came into possession of the Schieles in the mid-1950s.

“There is one person in this case who doctored” documents, “and always did so in pencil — Eberhard Kornfeld,” Matthew Bogdanos, chief of the Antiquities Trafficking Unit, said in the court filing.

The investigators contend that, while it is not possible to absolutely determine how Kornfeld secured the Grünbaum art, it was most likely provided to him by other art dealers known to have relations with the Nazis. The court filing includes inventory records that prosecutors said establish that the works were in the possession of a Nazi-controlled storehouse in Austria in 1938 after Grünbaum was sent to the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, where he was killed in 1941.

The filing also cites documents to show that the sister-in-law, Mathilde Lukacs, had already fled the country when the “Prisoner” drawing, and others later obtained by Kornfeld, were in the Vienna storage facility. As a result, the investigators said, the works could not have been sold by her to Kornfeld.

In arguing it holds good title to the work, the Art Institute has relied on two federal court rulings. In one, rendered in 2011 involving another Schiele work once owned by Grünbaum, the judge described Kornfeld’s account as credible, and added that, regardless, the heirs were not timely in bringing a claim.

In a second case brought by the heirs and decided in November, a federal court in New York, citing the earlier federal case, awarded the Art Institute ownership of “Prisoner” because it, too, ruled that the Grünbaum heirs had waited too long to make a claim for the drawing.

A lawyer for the heirs, Raymond Dowd, said he had filed to ask the judge to reconsider the decision in this case and to allow him to file an amended complaint.

“The Art Institute of Chicago recently prevailed in civil litigation in federal court regarding Egon Schiele’s ‘Russian War Prisoner,’ successfully demonstrating that the claimants’ suit lacked merit,” the institute said in its statement.

“Federal court,” the statement said, “has explicitly ruled that the Grünbaums’ Schiele art collection was ‘not looted’ and ‘remained in the Grünbaum family’s possession’ and was sold by Fritz Grünbaum’s sister-in-law Mathilde Lukacs in 1956.”

The institute’s decision to continue to fight the efforts by Manhattan prosecutors to retrieve its Schiele work makes it a lone holdout among the museums and collectors who received warrants from investigators telling them they possessed stolen property.

Among those returning Grünbaum works in September were the Museum of Modern Art and the Morgan Library & Museum, both in New York; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California; Ronald S. Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress and a longtime advocate of Holocaust restitution; and the estate of Serge Sabarsky, a well-known art collector.

Since then, two other institutions — the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh and the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College — agreed to surrender artworks once owned by Grünbaum.

One of the confusing aspects of the dispute is that a state court in New York has ruled in a completely opposite way and found that the Grünbaum Schieles were indeed looted.

While decisions in federal court have held that the Grünbaum heirs waited too long to start reclaiming the works, the 2018 New York state Supreme Court ruling found that Grünbaum had never sold or surrendered any of his works before his death, and that they were looted by the Nazis, making his heirs their true owners.

The ruling relied on the terms of the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act of 2016, a U.S. law that seeks to ensure that “claims to artwork and other property stolen or misappropriated by the Nazis are not unfairly barred by statutes of limitations.”

Investigators for the Manhattan district attorney’s office became involved after the New York state court ruling. Prosecutors have said they have jurisdiction because some of the Grünbaum works passed from Kornfeld to a Manhattan dealer, Otto Kallir.

The Schiele works, including the “Prisoner” drawing, were sold by Kallir to a variety of buyers, and the drawing ultimately ended up at the Art Institute.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.https://artdaily.cc/news/166994/Investigators-say-Chicago-s-Art-Institute-is-holding-onto--Looted-Art-

Hartwig Fischer, British Museum Director resigns after worker fired for theft

Hartwig Fischer, the director of the British Museum, in London on Aug. 27, 2020. Just days after the museum announced that it had fired an employee who was suspected of looting its storerooms and selling items on eBay, Fischer announced Friday, Aug. 25, 2023, that he was resigning, effective immediately. (Tom Jamieson/The New York Times) by Alex Marshall

LONDON.- Just days after the British Museum announced that it had fired an employee who was suspected of looting its storerooms and selling items on eBay, the museum’s director announced Friday that he was resigning, effective immediately.

Hartwig Fischer, a German art historian who had led the world-renowned institution since 2016, said in a news release that he was leaving the post at a time “of the utmost seriousness.”

Fischer, 60, said that it was “evident” that under his leadership, the museum did not adequately respond to warnings that a curator may be stealing items. “The responsibility for that failure must ultimately rest with the director,” Fischer said.

A few hours after Fischer’s resignation, the museum announced that its deputy director, Jonathan Williams, had also “agreed to voluntarily step back from his normal duties” until an investigation into the thefts was complete.

Trouble has been brewing at the British Museum since it announced last week that items had been stolen from its collection. The museum did not say how many objects were taken or how valuable they were. But it said that the missing, stolen or damaged pieces included “gold jewelry and “gems of semiprecious stones and glass” dating from as far back as the 15th century B.C.

Ever since, a stream of revelations around the museum’s handling of the thefts undermined Fischer’s position. On Tuesday, The New York Times and the BBC published emails showing that he had downplayed concerns raised by Ittai Gradel, a Denmark-based antiquities dealer, about potential thefts.

In an email to a trustee in October 2022, Fischer said that “the case has been thoroughly investigated,” adding that “there is no evidence to substantiate the allegations.”

Fischer initially defended his response, saying in a statement Wednesday that his handling of the allegations had been robust and that the museum had taken the warnings “incredibly seriously.” The extent of the problem only became clear later, he said, after the museum undertook “a full audit” of its collections.

His defense did little to quell criticism in Britain. On Wednesday, The Times of London wrote that the thefts were “a national disgrace, calling into question the museum’s own claims for its stewardship of cultural treasures, and for which it needs to give a full accounting.”

The unfolding drama was also watched closely in countries that are seeking the return of pieces in the British Museum’s vast collection, which includes more than 8 million items, many from Britain’s former colonies. Lawmakers in Greece and Nigeria used the thefts as an opportunity to call for the return of contested artifacts.

Lina Mendoni, Greece’s culture minister, said in an interview Monday with To Vima, a Greek newspaper, that the case reinforces her country’s demands for the return of the Parthenon Marbles, a series of sculptures and frieze panels, sometimes known as the Elgin marbles, that once decorated the Parthenon in Athens, Greece. The thefts raised questions about the “safety and integrity of all of the museum’s exhibits,” Mendoni said.

And Thursday, Nigerian officials reiterated their long-standing call for the British Museum to return a collection of artifacts known as the Benin Bronzes, which British troops looted in 1897.

Fischer’s time at the museum coincided with a sea change in attitudes over what rightfully belongs in the West’s museums, and an increase in the volume and intensity of restitution demands. He took over at the British Museum in 2016, having formerly run the State Art Collections of Dresden, a prestigious collection of museums in Germany.

In late July, shortly before the news broke that the museum had fired a worker suspected of theft, Fischer announced that he would step down from his role next year. But as the crisis at the museum deepened this week, his position looked increasingly untenable.

The turmoil has come at “a very bad moment,” said Charles Saumarez Smith, a former director of the Royal Academy of Arts, in London. The British Museum is expected to announce a major renovation project that The Financial Times has reported will cost 1 billion pounds, or about $1.26 billion, and the current uncertainty could make fundraising much more difficult, he said.

The resignation was “an act of symbolic bloodletting,” Saumarez Smith said, but it may not end the British Museum’s woes. There are clearly “bigger issues that need to be resolved” at the institution, he added, including the questions about whether it has a handle on its inventory.

Fischer said in his statement that he expected the museum to “come through this moment and emerge stronger” but that he had “come to the conclusion that my presence is proving a distraction.”

“That is the last thing I would want,” he said.

George Osborne, the museum chair, said in the release that the board had accepted Fischer’s decision. “I am clear about this: We are going to fix what has gone wrong,” Osborne said. “The museum has a mission that lasts across generations. We will learn, restore confidence and deserve to be admired once again.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
https://artdaily.cc/news/161675/British-Museum-Director-resigns-after-worker-fired-for-theft

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.