Posted on: October 22, 2015 by Janet Ulph
A dispute over a highly attractive marble statue sparked headlines in the national press in early September 2015. It had been seized by Customs officers and kept in the British Museum for safekeeping during the legal proceedings. The District Judge, John Zani, had examined the statue there before coming to a decision that it had been […]
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: October 9, 2015 by Alexander Herman
Following on from my last post about two recent reports from the UK’s Spoliation Advisory Panel (SAP) regarding Nazi-looted art in British public collections, it was reported this summer that Glasgow City Council has followed an earlier SAP recommendation in relation to a 16th century tapestry fragment held at the city’s Burrell Collection. The November 2014 report recommended that an ex gratia payment (literally meaning […]
Posted on: October 2, 2015 by Alexander Herman
An art exhibition in Norway is built around a work by Henri Matisse, Blue Dress in a Yellow Armchair, and yet the work isn’t even there. The Henie Onstad Museum returned the work in March 2014 to the heirs of Paul Rosenberg, the famous Parisian art dealer whose collection of masterpieces had been looted by the Nazis […]
Posted on: September 25, 2015 by Ruth Redmond-Cooper
A change to the law in Scotland could have an impact on objects left at museums, where the owner has disappeared or has become untraceable. The draft bill before the Scottish Parliament would first seek to introduce a 20 year positive prescription period, whereby a possessor of corporeal movable property (i.e. an object like a painting) would […]
Posted on: August 21, 2015 by Ruth Redmond-Cooper
We have reached the end of the Diploma in Law and Collections Management course in Melbourne, graciously hosted by the Melbourne Museum. Thanks to the Australian Registrars Committee. Well done to all the students!
Posted on: August 14, 2015 by Alexander Herman
Having finished the IAL refresher course in Melbourne this week (with the full Diploma in Law and Collections Management course starting next Monday), it has become clear yet again the difficulties which museums face when dealing with certain objects in their collections. The difficulties stem from an uncertainty as to whether an object has been given (‘gifted’ or donated) to […]
Posted on: August 4, 2015 by Ruth Redmond-Cooper
For those in Australia, don’t forget about the Institute of Art and Law courses coming up in Melbourne, to be hosted at the Melbourne Museum. Next week, on Tuesday and Wednesday (11th and 12th August) there will be a ‘refresher’ course for those who have already taken the Institute’s Diploma course. The following week we […]
Posted on: May 8, 2015 by Alexander Herman
An interesting recent article in the New York Times recounts the struggle between two Spanish Museums over the right to display four paintings, including two masterpieces of European art (Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights and Rogier van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross). The works have been held at the Prado Museum in Madrid since being sent […]
Posted on: April 10, 2015 by Ruth Redmond-Cooper
Back by popular demand, radehe IAL’s Diploma in Intellectual Property & Collections (DipIPC) Course will be run again this year over three full days in London, from the 10th to the 12th of June 2015. The course will cover all areas of IP that affect the art world and is designed for museum professionals and others in […]