Posted on: July 23, 2019 by Julia Rodrigues Casella Hommes
Landing just in time to absorb you during the Summer holidays, the July 2019 issue of Art Antiquity & Law (Vol. XXIV, Issue 2) has been released in print and online. Subscriptions are available either as hardcopy only, digital only as well as digital + hardcopy packages and can be purchased directly through our website. […]
Posted on: July 12, 2019 by Stephanie Drawdy
The great-grand niece of a Jewish couple from Cologne, the Leffmanns, has again received an adverse ruling in a New York federal case in which she seeks possession of a painting sold by the Leffmanns after Nazi-rule necessitated their departure from Germany. In its June 26, 2019 decision, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld […]
Posted on: May 21, 2019 by Julia Rodrigues Casella Hommes
The brand new issue of IAL’s Art Antiquity & Law quarterly journal is hot off the press and is now available in print and online via the Hein portal. This year’s first issue brings an array of articles, conference reports and a book review. Maja Dehouck discusses the regulation of illicit trafficking of cultural property […]
Posted on: May 14, 2019 by Stephanie Drawdy
It’s a rainy winter day in Paris, 1897. A distinguished gentleman is standing at his easel with the curtains drawn, his eyes surveying the street below. As a painter myself, I like to imagine the excitement the Impressionist Master Camille Pissarro felt as he envisioned the composition of the scene that would become Rue Saint-Honoré, Après-midi, […]
Posted on: December 14, 2018 by Alexander Herman
American prosecutors have been busy of late. Not only has New York Assistant District Attorney Matthew Bogdanos been active over the past 18 months in seeking seizure and forfeiture orders for stolen or looted property, but the US Attorney’s office has been busy as well. Added to this is the favourable stance the US courts […]
Posted on: December 5, 2018 by Emily Gould
The adoption of the Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art by 44 nations in 1998 marked a deeply significant moment in the development of cultural policy in the 20th and 21st centuries. Whilst the extent of looting perpetrated by the Nazis during the 1933-45 period was fairly well understood at that stage, few would have […]
Posted on: November 12, 2018 by Alexander Herman
Tonight, Sotheby’s auction house in New York will hold a major sale of early 20th century European masterworks, including pieces by Kandinsky, Monet, Magritte and Miró. But perhaps most exceptional will be three restituted works that had been spoliated during the Nazi period. Two of these were returned to the heirs of Alfred Flechtheim, a […]
Posted on: September 14, 2017 by Alexander Herman
Along with the Centre for Commercial Law Studies at Queen Mary, University of London, we were happy to host US attorney Nicholas O’Donnell last night for a talk on Nazi-looted art and the ongoing attempts at reclaiming lost works from museums and private collections in the US. Nicholas was in London promoting his new book, […]
Posted on: July 7, 2016 by Alexander Herman
A little-discussed restitution of a still life by Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625) led to an important sale at Sotheby’s London last night. The work, Still Life of Flowers in a Stoneware Vase, had once belonged to Baron Alphonse von Rothschild and had been kept at his castle in Schillersdorff, Silesia (now Silherovice, Poland). A forced transfer […]
Posted on: June 1, 2016 by Alexander Herman
Thanks to the release of the Panama Papers last month, more has been leaked in relation to the dispute involving Modigliani’s Seated Man with a Cane (the painting shown below, reputed to be worth £15 million), which places the current owner, a company named the International Art Center, against a descendant of Oscar Stettiner, the Parisian dealer from whom the painting […]