Posted on: January 27, 2016 by Judith Bouchardeau and Mathilde Roellinger
The discovery of the art forgery scandal perpetrated by Wolfang Beltracchi has given rise to a number of legal proceedings. The recent decision of the Court of Appeal of Versailles, involving art expert Werner Spies and a painting attributed to Max Ernst, is among them. The facts are as follows. At the 2004 Paris Biennale […]
Posted on: November 6, 2015 by Richard Harwood QC
“Alas poor William… or whoever.” There is a local tradition that a skull in a vault in St Leonard’s Church, Beoley (which is now part of Redditch) is that of William Shakespeare. Two late Nineteenth Century articles said that Dr Frank Chambers, a local doctor, heard at a dinner at Ragley Hall in 1794 that […]
Posted on: October 12, 2015 by Alexander Herman
Goya’s Marquesa de Santa Cruz is back in London. Those with long memories will know that this painting by Spanish artist Francisco Goya had been taken out of Spain in the mid 1980s and brought to auction at Christie’s in London, only to incur the ire of the Spanish government. The work had left Spain in 1983 accompanied by forged […]
Posted on: September 22, 2015 by Alexander Herman
An important legal settlement has been reached between the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the American branch of an Armenian Church. The dispute, which had dragged on for a number of years, involved eight illustrated manuscript pages that had once been part of the Zeyt’un Gospels but which had been separated from the rest of the […]
Posted on: July 21, 2015 by Alexander Herman
There was an interesting development last week in the area of copyright exceptions in the UK. A judge of the High Court quashed (i.e. nullified or rendered inoperable) the exception introduced by the Government last October through the Personal Copies for Private Use Regulations 2014. This is quite something. The courts, through judicial review, are overturning a governmental mechanism which had allowed […]
Posted on: July 1, 2015 by Alexander Herman
An article published on 18 June 2015 in the scientific weekly Nature has given the world a new appreciation of the origins of the human remains known as ‘Kennewick Man’. The remains were discovered in the State of Washington in 1996 and preliminary studies showed that Kennewick Man was roughly 9,000 years old and had no noticeable morphological connection […]
Posted on: March 13, 2015 by Alexander Herman
The British Museum has an upcoming exhibition of art and artefacts from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders entitled Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilization set to open on 23 April 2015. However, as one recent Guardian article makes clear, all is not well in relations between the museum and representatives of certain indigenous groups, namely the Dja Dja Wurrung people of central Victoria. This […]
Posted on: April 14, 2014 by Alexander Herman
It was recently revealed that a final settlement had been reached in the decade-long Beaverbrook art saga. The dispute involved over 200 works that had once belonged to Max Aitken, aka Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadian-born London-based newspaper magnate. Before he died in 1964, Beaverbrook had founded an art gallery in his home province of New […]
Posted on: November 26, 2013 by Ruth Redmond-Cooper
The High Court in London has adjourned until early next year proceedings in the legal battle over where the remains of Richard III should be buried. Members of the Plantagenet Alliance are challenging the decision to reinter the bones in Leicester Cathedral and wish to have him buried in York Minster. The judicial review proceedings […]