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: March 20, 2019 by Emily Gould
We reported late last year how busy the New York authorities have been in recent times in seizing and returning looted artefacts. The pattern has continued into the new year, with the widely reported return to the Egyptian Government of a first-century BC gilded coffin, acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art as the centre […]
Posted on: March 1, 2019 by Julia Rodrigues Casella Hommes
As the art world gears up for another round of TEFAF to take place next month in Maastricht, we are faced with the unfortunate outcome involving the sale of two Old Master paintings during last year’s fair. The paintings, sold by the renowned London-based gallery Richard Green, were a river landscape by Jan Brueghel the […]
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: July 28, 2017 by Hélène Deslauriers
The International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR) has recently published a Provenance Guide. As set out in the Introduction to the Guide, provenance had historically concerned the attribution and authenticity of a work. The recent wave of claims by Nazi Holocaust survivors, or their heirs, as well as the threat of illegal exports from foreign source […]
Posted on: July 7, 2017 by Alexander Herman
A warning for museums? There have been two interesting recent developments relating to antiquities: one regarding allegedly looted antiquities, the other regarding artefacts at the centre of a legal storm that has been brewing for some 15 years; both involve the United States of America. The first is the action brought by US District Attorneys […]
Posted on: January 25, 2016 by Nina M. Neuhaus
Switzerland was one of the 44 states that approved the Washington Principles on Nazi-confiscated Art in December 1998. By doing so, the Swiss Confederation obliged itself to identify artworks in its collections that were looted during the Second World War, undertake efforts to locate their pre-War owners or legal successors, and take measures to achieve […]
Posted on: April 17, 2015 by Alexander Herman
Last month, the Dutch Restitutions Committee published its recommendation regarding a claim brought forward by the heirs of the three Stettiner siblings who ran the Stettiner Gallery in Paris until it was closed during the Second World War. The claim involved a portrait by Salomon Koninck (1609-1656) entitled Old Man with Beard, which currently forms part […]
Posted on: February 24, 2015 by Alexander Herman
In a press release last week, the Kunstmuseum Bern explained that, due to the legal challenge to Cornelius Gurlitt’s will by his cousin Uta Werner (discussed by Nina Neuhaus here), there have as yet been no restitutions of artworks from the 2012 Munich art trove, neither by the museum, nor by any other body. Of course, news […]
Posted on: January 13, 2015 by Alexander Herman
On the heels of McBride v Christie’s Australia, came another auction dispute from Australia, this one involving the children of renowned painter John Olsen and Sotheby’s Australia. Sotheby’s had listed for auction an Olsen work entitled Mother, which had been painted in 1964 for the painter’s second wife, marking the birth of their daughter. The children, now executors of their mother’s […]