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

Drent Museum Theft - Three Arrested In Bold Heist Of Ancient Gold Artifacts

In connection with the robbery, three suspects have been arrested in Heerhugowaard, a city located about 114 miles from Assen. However, despite the arrests, the stolen artifacts have yet to be recovered. Local police are continuing their investigation and have released the names and photographs of two of the suspects, Douglas Chesley Wendersteyt and Bernhard Zeeman, in hopes of gathering further information about their movements and any connections that could lead to the recovery of the stolen items.

Police have identified a third suspect, a woman, but have not disclosed her name and are not ruling out the possibility of additional individuals being involved.

The Gold Helmet of Cotofenesti remains missing after being stolen from the Drents Museum in Assen, Netherlands, during a robbery on Saturday, January 25, 2025. Thieves used explosives to break into the museum and steal four priceless artifacts, including the 2,500-year-old helmet, which is a national treasure in Romania.

The theft is considered a significant loss for Romania, as the helmet is an irreplaceable symbol of their heritage.

“The safe return of the stolen artifacts would be a fantastic next step for all involved," the Drents Museum said in its own statement. “Not only for us, but especially for the Romanian people.”

The thieves stole priceless archaeological artifacts, including this 2,500-year-old gold helmet considered a national treasure in Romania. -J.Larson

The Hunt: $200 Million Worth of Art Is Still Missing From a Paraguay Museum

Thieves dug a tunnel to steal European masterworks back in 2002.

A photograph of a majestic white art museum against blue skies, partially obscured by a palm frond National Museum of Fine Arts (Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes), Asuncion, Paraguay. Photo: MJ Photography / Alamy Stock Photo Vittoria Benzine July 15, 2024

In July 2002, a heist at the National Museum of Fine Arts of Asunción in Paraguay rocked the world, not only due to the lost masterworks, which were valued at around $200 million, but the elaborate ploy the thieves used to pull off their robbery. They favored European paintings, with a haul that included a self-portrait by Tintoretto, Tête de Femme by Adolphe Piolt, a landscape by Gustave Courbet, a Madonna and Child by Bartolomé Estéban Murillo, and an unattributed 16th-century portrait of Saint Jerome.

The museum was founded in 1909, 67 years after Paraguay officially declared its independence from the Spanish Empire. It occupies the same building as the National Archives, and holds 650 artworks ranging from paintings to ceramics, alongside antique coins and more from the collection of the inaugural director-general Juan Silvano Godoi.

The museum’s founding was meant to mark a new chapter for the republic, but centuries of political volatility could partially explain why the institution hadn’t managed to install any security cameras to capture the thieves on film.

Instead, a shocking, subterranean discovery told the story. Authorities found that an 80-feet tunnel had been dug to connect the museum with a health food store across the street.

Further investigation revealed that the men who’d opened that store had used fake identities. They had even carved out another leg of the tunnel that led to the parking lot of a hotel nearby, which the bandits likely used to escape.

A scan of a portion of a portrait painting of a coy young woman lit dramatically against a black background Adolphe Piot, Tete de Femme (date unknown). Photo: The History Collection / Alamy Stock Photo

Legend of the haul lives on and international police forces have scoured the black market ever since. Only one opportunity has presented itself so far. In 2008, the National Centre for Cultural Heritage Protection at the INTERPOL-Argentina Department received a tip that the lost “San Gerónimo” by an anonymous artist and valued at $200,000 was up for illicit sale in Posadas, Argentina.

Soon enough, a police fact-finding mission accompanied by Argentinean Federal forces recovered the painting in mint condition. The work was back home by that July, as part of a larger push by Argentinian authorities to repatriate stolen artwork found on their soil.

Those forces are probably still monitoring the art world’s underbelly for the remaining lost artworks. Meanwhile, the museum has taken matters into their own hands. In February, the institution commissioned five contemporary painters to recreate the lost artworks while 700 fascinated attendees watched on.

The resulting canvases went on view in an exhibition that opened on March 22, and is slated to stay up for awhile. Although the decision doesn’t make it seem like the museum has much hope the works will ever turn up, at least they’re capitalizing on the unexpected notoriety of hosting Paraguay’s one-time robbery of the century.

The Hunt explores art and ancient relics that are—alas!—lost to time. From the Ark of the Covenant to Cleopatra’s tomb, these legendary treasures have long captured the imaginations of historians and archaeologists, even if they remain buried under layers of sand, stone, and history.

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/the-hunt-paraguay-museum-heist-2463477

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-

A German Museum Employee Has Been Caught ‘Shamelessly’ Swapping Original Paintings for Fakes to Fund His Lavish Lifestyle

The man is said to have spent the money on a new apartment, wristwatches, and a Rolls-Royce.

Franz von Stuck, The Fairy Tale of the Frog King (1891). Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images.

A German museum employee has confessed to an audacious scheme, after he was caught swapping out paintings with forgeries and selling the originals to fund a luxury lifestyle. He has received a suspended prison sentence of one year and nine months and must pay back more than €60,000 ($63,500) to the unnamed German museum, the Munich District Court ordered on September 11.

The man, now aged 30, stole three paintings while working at the museum in Munich as a technician between May 2016 and April 2018. He replaced the paintings with fakes while they were in storage, consigning the originals to a Munich auction house.

The defendant allegedly used the money to pay debts and fund a luxury lifestyle, the court heard. “Among other things, he bought a new apartment, expensive wristwatches, and bought a Rolls-Royce,” read the verdict, noting that the man now showed remorse. “He stated that he had acted without thinking. He could no longer explain his behavior today.”

After replacing Franz Stuck’s Das Märchen vom Froschkönig (The Fairy Tale of the Frog King) (1891) with a forgery, the man pretended the original was a family heirloom and it was sold at Ketterer Kunst auction house in May 2017 to a Swiss gallery for €70,000 ($74,000). After auction house fees, he received $49,127.40 ($52,000).

Two more paintings that were switched out for fakes, Franz von Defregger’s Zwei Mädchen beim Holzsammeln im Gebirge (Two Girls Gathering Wood in the Mountains) and Eduard von Grützner’s Die Weinprüfung (Tasting the Wine), brought in an additional €11,490.50 ($12,700). An attempt to sell a fourth painting, Franz von Defregger’s Dirndl, at another Munich auction house was unsuccessful. The man made €60,617 ($64,000) in total.

“We have, of course, fulfilled our duty of care in full and have researched the works mentioned extensively,” a spokesperson for Ketterer Kunst told Artnet News. “We regret that the works were stolen from the museum with such high criminal energy. We cooperated closely with the LKA (Bavarian State Criminal Police Office) at an early stage and handed over all documents to solve this case.”

The unnamed German museum is currently trying to arrange for the return of the pictures, according to Süddeutsche Zeitung. It apparently has many valuable German paintings languishing in storage thanks to a history of receiving bequests from local foundations and families.

“The defendant shamelessly exploited the opportunity to access the storage rooms in the employer’s buildings and sold valuable cultural assets in order to secure an exclusive standard of living for himself and to show off,” the verdict summarized.

The apparent vulnerability of the museum’s collection to theft while in storage recalls the recent scandal of a senior curator at the British Museum accused of stealing some 1,500 objects, several of which were sold for cheap on eBay. Most of these items had never been catalogued, revealing the complex challenges faced by museums tasked with keeping track of vast holdings.


https://news.artnet.com/art-world/german-museum-employee-swapped-paintings-fakes-2367937Jo Lawson-Tancred, September 25, 2023

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