Posted on: November 3, 2017 by Hélène Deslauriers
On 1st November, Judge John Agostini, presiding over the Pittsfield Court remarked that people “don’t often see a large crowd here,” but a large crowd had indeed gathered that day. As previously discussed, the case before him involved two separate hearings for preliminary restraining orders against the Berkshire Museum and its Trustees to stop the sale of a […]
Posted on: October 11, 2017 by Hélène Deslauriers
A storm has been brewing since the summer in the quiet town of Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The town’s Berkshire Museum announced in July that it intended to put up 40 works of art for sale at Sotheby’s over a period ranging from November 2017 to March 2018. The Museum justified its decision by its dire financial […]
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, 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: May 24, 2017 by Alexander Herman
A number of issues arise when we use images of artistic works online. Here, I am referring to copyright and to the specific treatment of images of older works that may – or may not – have fallen into the public domain. Of course, once copyright has expired in a work, that work will enter the public […]
Posted on: April 28, 2017 by Alexander Herman
An excellent show has begun today at the British Library in London called ‘Russian Revolution: Hope, Tragedy, Myths‘. It offers a view into some of the most important – and iconic – texts and visual images of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that marked not only Russia, but also the world. Instead of focusing solely on […]
Posted on: April 25, 2017 by Alexander Herman
A story has been brewing over the past few weeks involving the famed Charging Bull sculpture that sits in the middle of Bowling Green in Lower Manhattan. The sculpture was made by Arturo di Modica and installed without permission near Wall St as a Christmas gift from the artist to New Yorkers in December 1989. […]
Posted on: July 17, 2015 by Alexander Herman
The dispute before the California courts between the Thyssen-Bornemisza Foundation and the descendants of Lily Cassirer Neubauer has now entered its second decade. Neubauer was forced to sell a painting by Pissarro before fleeing Germany in 1939 and her heirs now claim that it should be returned to them from the Spanish Foundation, the painting’s current possessor. The action brought […]
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: April 23, 2015 by Alexander Herman
For those of you who have taken the IAL’s Diploma in Intellectual Property and Collections (DipIPC) course, you will know that an important module of the course deals with the duration of copyright. This can be an especially challenging issue when it comes to the visual arts, where digitisation can make a work instantaneously available throughout the world. But different […]