France to offer 'asylum' for ISIS threatened artworks to help STOP the flow of Trafficking Antiquities on the Black Market!!

French President Francois Hollande (R) greets General Director of UNESCO, Irina Bokova (L) after delivering a speech for the 70th General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, on November 17, 2015. AFP PHOTO/ YOAN VALAT.

PARIS - President Francois Hollande announced Tuesday that France planned to implement a "right to asylum" for artworks at risk from the Islamic State group which has destroyed heritage sites in Syria and Iraq.

Addressing the UN's cultural body four days after 129 people were killed in jihadist attacks on Paris, Hollande said "the right to asylum applies to people... but asylum also applies to works, world heritage", indicating it would be part of a law to be considered by parliament. He said that Islamic State jihadists were "at this very moment" issuing archaeological permits and slapping taxes on the items that would then feed the global black market, "transiting through free ports which are havens for receiving stolen goods and laundering, including in Europe".

France will also introduce customs checks on the importation of cultural goods and incorporate UN Security Council resolutions into its legislation banning the transport, transit and trade of cultural heritage having illegally left certain countries, Hollande told the UNESCO conference in Paris. IS seized control of Syria's ancient city of Palmyra in May and has realised international fears by destroying some of the most prized sites in the UNESCO World Heritage listed ancient city.

The militants have carried out a sustained campaign of destruction against heritage sites in areas under their control in Syria and Iraq, including the important Iraqi sites of Hatra, Nimrud and Khorsabad, an ancient Assyrian capital. Islamist militants are also accused of being behind attacks on 10 religious and historic monuments in the Unesco World Heritage city of Timbuktu in Mali.

© 1994-2015 Agence France-Presse

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Stolen Andy Warhol prints handed to L.A. police? Or were they?!?

I found this article to my surprise I had not heard about the Andy Warhol switcheroo, so I started to research on the developments in recovering the artworks... The article below states two of the prints have been returned the; Siberian Tiger and Bighorn Ram. However on the LA Police Art Theft unit webpage the two artworks are still listed as missing?!

- http://www.lapdonline.org/paintings_and_prints_w_/content_basic_view/58945

- http://www.lapdonline.org/paintings_and_prints_w_/content_basic_view/58946

Is this a mistake or is their something more to this investigation that is not being revealed ie. did the owners of the artwork do the switcheroo and are hoping to score the insurance money meanwhile selling the real artwork themselves - cashing in twice?! Seems logical who else would have that type of access to make such a grand theft go unnoticed for years?

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- LA - Two of the nine Andy Warhol prints stolen from a Los Angeles movie business in a theft that went unnoticed for years have been turned over to police, an attorney for a man who had the artwork said on Tuesday. Attorney Harland Braun said he arranged to have police come to his office on Monday and pick up Warhol prints titled "Siberian Tiger" and "Bighorn Ram," which he said were among three prints his client bought several years ago from a man involved in commercial construction. Braun represents Bryan Calvero, who he said works at apparel company Crooks & Castles and was named in court documents in the theft case. Braun said Calvero was unaware the two prints - as well as a third one that he sold through an auction house - were reported stolen until a journalist contacted him last week.

Los Angeles police art detail detective Don Hrycyk declined to confirm the prints were returned or comment on the case. The two pieces were among nine original Warhol prints quietly stolen from Los Angeles movie business Moviola and replaced with color copies in a burglary reported in July, police said in documents submitted to a court for a search warrant.

The nine pieces are worth an estimated $350,000. They include three prints from Warhol's 1983 series "Endangered Species" and six from his 1980 "Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century," according to a police report. In the affidavit, police said the theft was so seamless it was only was discovered years later after one piece was taken for reframing and staff noticed it lacked a print number and signature. "The idea that you can have a stolen piece of art and no one knows it's stolen, even the owner, that's a hard concept to wrap your head around," Braun said. "Bald Eagle" was sold through auction house Bonhams in October 2011. Braun confirmed Calvero sold "Bald Eagle" through Bonhams and said Calvero had little experience in art collection and relied on the auction house to ensure the piece was not stolen.

Bonhams spokeswoman Kristin Guiter said the firm has its catalogues checked against databases of stolen and lost art. She said Bonhams asked about specific provenance "and also obtained from the consignor relevant written representations and warranties, including to the effect that all information provided by him about provenance was true and correct." (Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis; Editing by Daniel Wallis and Bill Trott)

Read more at Reutershttp://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/16/usa-arttheft-california-idUSL1N11L2KR20150916#EYKD30m27ybp7mev.99

Monaco gives go-ahead to million-dollar art fraud trial between Dmitry Rybolovlev and Yves Bouvier

On Thursday, the Monaco appeals court rejected Bouvier's request that the case be dismissed, and ruled he should face fraud and money-laundering charges. Photo: Anouk Antony

MONACO- The fraud case against a Swiss art dealer accused of swindling up to a billion dollars from the owner of Monaco football club should go ahead, a court ruled Thursday. Russian billionaire and club owner Dmitry Rybolovlev bought a total of 37 masterpieces worth two billion euros ($2.1 billion) through art dealer Yves Bouvier over the space of a decade. But their relationship disintegrated last year after he accused Bouvier of inflating prices, rather than finding him the best price, and taking a commission. Rybolovlev's lawyers say Bouvier pocketed "between $500 million and $1 billion" from the inflated prices.

On Thursday, the Monaco appeals court rejected Bouvier's request that the case be dismissed, and ruled he should face fraud and money-laundering charges. The woman who introduced the two, Tania Rappo, Rybolovlev's translator and godmother to his youngest daughter, will also face prosecution for taking a commission on the sales, her lawyer confirmed. "I have been betrayed," Rybolovlev told Le Parisien in September. "(Bouvier) made us believe he was negotiating the price in our interest... while today he claims he was negotiating for himself as a salesman." 'I'm not crazy' Rybolovlev's lawyers say he became aware of the problem over dinner in New York, when an art consultant told him he had overpaid by $15 million for a Modigliani painting.

In another twist, Bouvier was in September charged with handling stolen goods for selling two Picasso watercolours to Rybolovlev. Picasso's daughter-in-law, Catherine Hutin-Blay, claims that "Woman Arranging her Hair" and "Spanish Woman with a Fan" were stolen from her collection and never approved for sale. Rybolovlev handed them over to authorities, saying he was unaware they were stolen. But Bouvier has maintained his innocence, saying he bought the watercolours, along with 58 drawings, from a trust in Liechtenstein that claimed to represent Hutin-Blay. "I am not crazy," he told the New York Times. "I'm not going to sell stolen art to someone who has bought two billion in art from me. He was my biggest client."

Bouvier is not only an art dealer, but also one of the leading organisers of offshore storage facilities for wealthy collectors, shuttling masterpieces between high-tech storage facilities in low-tax countries such as Switzerland, Luxembourg and Singapore. Rybolovlev, who made his fortune in the fertiliser business after the collapse of the Soviet Union, has an art collection to rival major museums, featuring works by artists like Van Gogh, Monet, Rodin, Matisse and da Vinci.

© 1994-2015 Agence France-Presse

Stolen Chokwe masks and a rare statue to be returned to Dundo Museum in Angola

LUANDA.- Fundação Sindika Dokolo has acquired two ancestral female Pwo masks and a rare statue representative of the male figure of the Chokwe people from private European collections .The classical works, which have been identified as looted from Angola during the civil war, will be repatriated to the Dundo Museum in Angola, their original home and where they were last exhibited. These masterpieces, created around the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century, hold historic and cultural significance for the Chokwe people. The Chokwe people inhabit north eastern Angola, the southern part of Congo (Kinshasa) from the Kwango River to the Lualaba and, since 1920, the north western corner of Zambia.

The ‘found’ pieces belonged to the Dundo Museum which held one of the most distinguished collections of ethnographic art from wooden traditional masks and wooden sculptures of the local heterogeneous Chokwe people to recordings of local folk music and a photographic collection dating to the 1880s. Located in a mining town in north-eastern Angola about 15 miles (24 km) south of the Democratic Republic of the Congo border, the museum saw many of its art works ‘disappear’ during the Angolan civil war from 1975–2002 and due to lack of archival documentation, the number of missing works and their whereabouts remain a mystery. The recovered works have been slightly altered from their original state: on both of the Pwo masks, the cord hair has been removed and the surface of the wood has been retouched and altered to hide original carved motifs visible on the surface of the wood; this is thought to be have been done to render the pieces unrecognisable and untraceable. They were sold on to private dealers and acquired by various collectors in the intervening years.

The return of the Pwo masks and sculpture is the result of diligent research by Brussels-based gallerist Didier Claes and Parisian dealer, Tao Kerefoff, both specialists in classical African art. The works were traced thanks to several publications by noted Belgian art historian Marie-Louise Bastin (1918-2000). Her publications remain a principal and definitive source in identifying the different cultures and styles of Chokwe art and its people.

The provenance of both Pwo masks were established through photographs in her book, Art Décoratif Tshokwe: Museu do Dundo (1961). Both masks are illustrated in the book: a photograph taken of an exhibition of “Sala da Crença Animista" or “Animist Belief Room” at the Dundo Museum at the end of the 1950s depicts one of the looted masks in a line-up of 30 Pwo masks belonging to the museum collection. The Chokwe statue is documented in an essay Les Entités Spirituelles des Chokwe (The Spiritual Existence of the Chokwe) written by Bastin and published in the academic paper Quaderni Poro in 1988.

This pioneering project to recover classical works of African art enables Fundação Sindika Dokolo to advance a local and a global dialogue of the epic story of African civilizations. Inspired by his father Augustin Dokolo Sanu, a great collector of classical African art, Sindika Dokolo created his foundation to document the journey of arts and culture from Africa with the aim of empowering future generations of Africans with the knowledge of their own cultural history. “We are honoured to be returning these symbolic works,” Mr Sindika Dokolo said. “Locating the works and negotiating their return to their homeland are the result of the strong collaboration between Fundação Sindika Dokolo and dealers Didier Claes and Tao Kerefoff.”

Before their return to the Dundo Museum, these important works will travel to Luanda where they will be exhibited at the new Currency museum as part of La Triennale di Luanda at the end of November. The occasion will also celebrate forty years of Angolan Independence.

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Three Syrian's tied to columns in Syria's Palmyra were blown up for execution by ISIS

Syria's UNESCO world heritage site of Palmyra is under threat from Islamic State fighters. The city was founded in the second millenium BC, and was an important stop for caravans crossing the Syrian desert. It became prosperous under the Roman empire, and reached its pinnacle of importance in the second century AD.While the Isil advance is not aimed at the ancient city itself, it has raised fears for its future

BEIRUT (AFP).- The Islamic State jihadist group executed three people in Syria's ancient city of Palmyra by binding them to three historic columns and blowing them up, a monitoring group said Monday. Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said IS on Sunday "tied three individuals it had arrested from Palmyra and its outskirts to the columns... and executed them by blowing up" three columns. Khaled al-Homsi, an activist from Palmyra, said IS had yet to inform local residents who the executed individuals were or why they had been killed. "There was no one there to see (the execution). The columns were destroyed and IS has prevented anyone from heading to the site," Homsi, who works with the local Palmyra Coordination Committee activist group, told AFP.

Mohammad al-Ayed, also an activist from Palmyra, said the columns were "archeological, and there are many like them still present in Palmyra." "IS is doing this for the media attention, so that IS can say that it is the most villainous, and so it can get people's attention," al-Ayed told AFP. The Islamic State group has captured swathes of territory across Iraq and Syria to create a self-styled "caliphate" where it enforces an extreme form of Islamic rule. IS considers pre-Islamic artefacts to be idolatrous and therefore worthy of destruction.

Since the jihadists seized Palmyra from regime forces in May, they have destroyed multiple sites and historic artefacts, including its celebrated temples of Bel and Baal Shamin as well as several funerary towers. IS has used Palmyra's grand amphitheatre for a massacre in which child members of the group killed 25 Syrian soldiers, execution-style, in front of residents. It also beheaded Palmyra's 82-year-old former antiquities director in August.

Palmyra's ruins are on the UNESCO World Heritage list, and before the war around 150,000 tourists a year visited the town. Experts say the militants have used the destruction to raise their profile to attract new recruits, and are also funding their "caliphate" by selling treasures on the black market. Syria's archaeology association, the APSA, says that more than 900 monuments and archeological sites have been looted, damaged or destroyed during the four-year civil war.

© 1994-2015 Agence France-Presse

Anish Kapoor sculpture "Dirty Corner" on exhibit in Versailles is Vandalized for the Second Time!

"Dirty Corner", a 2011 Cor-Ten steel, earth and mixed media monumental artwork by British contemporary artist of Indian origin Anish Kapoor. AFP PHOTO / PATRICK KOVARIK.

PARIS (AFP).- British-Indian artist Anish Kapoor has covered anti-Semitic graffiti on a controversial sculpture that was vandalised in France with gold leaf -- but only just. Dabs of white paint could still be seen Wednesday at the edges of the gold leaf placed on the massive, funnel-like sculpture at the Palace of Versailles, which has been dubbed the "queen's vagina" for its sexual overtones.

In an interview with the artnet website, Kapoor said the choice to leave bits of the graffiti visible was deliberate. "I have to transform it. Unravelling, finding an answer to a crime of hate and turn it into something else." The 60-metre (200-foot) long, 10-metre high structure, officially called "Dirty Corner", was first vandalised in June and then cleaned. Then two weeks ago it was covered in white paint with phrases such as "SS blood sacrifice" and "the second rape of the nation by deviant Jewish activism". Kapoor, 61, wanted the graffiti to remain to bear witness to hatred, and France's culture ministry said it was his choice. However a local government official, who saw the phrases as a "grave violation of fundamental rights", objected and a judge ruled on Saturday that the graffiti must be removed.

The scrawlings were covered with black cloth and a team from Kapoor's art studio has laid gold leaf on the rocks around the sculpture, which were also defaced. They said the operation would be completed Wednesday. Kapoor told artnews, in an interview in Moscow, that he was appealing the court's decision. "Culture is a victim of vandalism and hate," said Kapoor. "If vandalism and hate stops public experimentation, we all lose. If we stop that, we might as well live in a fascist state." Kapoor's work is not the first to be defaced recently in France. In October 2014, vandals in Paris's chic Place Vendome deflated a massive sculpture by American artist Paul McCarthy that was shaped like a sex toy.

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Spain banker Jaime Botin accused of trying to smuggle Pablo Picasso painting

Scoundrel Spain banker Jaime Botin

MADRID (AFP).- Courts are prosecuting a prominent Spanish banker accused of trying to smuggle a 26 million-euro Picasso painting out of Spain on a yacht, sources said Friday. Jaime Botin, former head of Spanish lender Bankinter and a member of the family that founded giant lender Santander, has been trying to get the painting out of the country for months. French customs seized the work "Head of a Young Girl", worth the equivalent of about $30 million, on July 31 on board the yacht in Corsica. The Spanish state has taken possession of the painting and handed it to the Reina Sofia modern art museum in Madrid.

Picasso painted it during his pre-Cubist phase in Gosol, Catalonia, in 1906. It was bought in London in 1977. A court in the affluent suburb of Pozuelo de Alarcon is investigating Botin, who has an appeal pending against the judicial procedures, sources close to the investigation said. He had been trying since 2012 to get permission to export the work but Spanish authorities refused on the grounds that it was a unique example in Spain of that period of Picasso's work. It was seized on board the "Adix", a British-flagged yacht.

Botin's lawyers have argued that the artwork counts as property under British law. But the Spanish courts in May ruled he could not export it on board the yacht which was moored in the Spanish port of Valencia. Auction house Christie's had already tried to export the painting to Britain on Botin's behalf in 2012 but the Spanish culture ministry blocked that move. Botin later claimed that the picture was not in Spain after all and that he owned it indirectly through a Panamanian company.

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