[CPProt.net] City officials say missing works of art, artifacts will be hard to find; Bronze statues returned to Redding; Vandals permanently shut down library; Confidential documents reveal museum's secret past; Brancusi sculpture, lost for more than 75 years, is in

[Museum Security Network / Cultural Property Protection Net (Ton Cremers)]

- City officials say missing works of art, artifacts will be hard to find

- Bronze statues returned to Redding

- Vandals permanently shut down library

- Who Pocketed 3 Hunks of Bronze?

- Project Y: A Museum's Secret History 
Confidential documents reveal museum's secret past 

- Brancusi sculpture, lost for more than 75 years, is in the hands of the
Christie's auction house

______________________________________________



Art resurfaces after decades

A Brancusi sculpture, lost for more than 75 years, is in the hands of the
Christie's auction house.

By Edward J. Sozanski

Inquirer Art Critic


Many people dream of finding a lost art masterpiece. Occasionally, such
dreams come true.

Christie's, the international auction house, has just experienced such a
windfall. On May 4 in New York, it will offer for sale a sculpture by
Constantin Brancusi that had been invisible to the art world and the public
for more than 75 years.

Brancusi (1875-1957) is widely regarded as the most important sculptor of
the 20th century. The blue-gray marble work consigned by an unidentified
European seller is an early Bird in Space - an elongated cigar shape rising
from a two-step pedestal.

According to Christie's, the 331/2-inch-tall sculpture, acquired from the
artist in the 1920s by his Parisian patron Léonie Ricou, has been locked
away since about 1928, first in a Brussels bank vault and subsequently in a
private house "in Northern Europe."

It was consigned to Christie's recently by heirs of the most recent owner.
The piece carries a presale estimate of $8 million to $12 million, but given
the artist's reputation and the significance of the work within his oeuvre,
it might easily bring more from private and institutional bidders.

The record auction price for a sculpture was established several years ago
when a Brancusi Danaïde sold at Christie's New York for $18.1 million.

Brancusi is believed have made between 100 and 200 sculptures, including
pieces in multiple edition. While the discovery of this heretofore unknown
Brancusi is exciting, such events are not rare. Major works of art
periodically drop out of public view and later resurface.

In 1982, a Brancusi sculpture called Sleeping Muse III was found in a
Philadelphia storeroom. More recently, a portrait by Vincent van Gogh of Dr.
Paul-Ferdinand Gachet, who treated the artist in the last weeks of his life,
dropped out of sight after its owner, a Japanese industrialist, died.

The portrait still hasn't surfaced, but it's believed to have been sold to a
private collector by the industrialist's heirs.

The recently discovered Bird in Space is significant not only because it
isn't known to scholars, but because it represents a transitional phase in
the evolution of the "bird-in-space" form, of which Brancusi executed a
number of versions in different materials.

The Brancusi collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, one of the
largest outside of Paris, includes two Birds in Space, one in bronze and one
in yellow marble. The museum also owns a sculpture from the artist's
Maïastra series, which some experts consider to be the starting point for
the later abstracted bird forms.

In all, the Art Museum owns 18 sculptures, three drawings, two architectural
elements, and 23 photographs by the artist. In 1995, the museum organized a
major Brancusi exhibition with the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. A
spokesman said the museum was not planning to bid on the sculpture at the
May 4 sale.

Museum director Anne d'Harnoncourt yesterday agreed that the newest Bird in
Space represents a key transitional stage in Brancusi's evolution of the
concept.

"It's closely related to a piece of ours, and it's also quite close to a
Bird in the Metropolitan Museum of Art," she said. "The Birds get taller and
slimmer over the years."

When one compares a photograph of the sculpture with later versions of Bird
in Space, it's evident that the artist had yet to achieve the full delicacy,
grace and especially the sense of "lift" inherent in the later works.

The sculpture apparently has never been in the public domain. In an essay
for Christie's, Friedrich Teja Bach of Vienna, a preeminent Brancusi
scholar, writes that Ricou, whose Paris salon attracted many famous artists
and writers, owned four Brancusi sculptures. Until now, only three of these
had been known.

She acquired Bird in Space with her second husband, Alexandre Stoppelaere, a
Belgian. In preparing to move from Paris to Brussels in 1928, she had the
sculpture shipped to the Banque de Bruxelles. The crate made for that
purpose has survived.

Ricou died several years later. In September 1937, Stoppelaere sold Bird in
Space to a European collector, in whose family it has descended, according
to Bach.


http://www.philly.com/ 










City officials say missing works of art, artifacts will be hard to find


Associated Press

WICHITA, Kan. - More than 270 works of art and artifacts that have vanished
from the Mid-America All-Indian Center might never be recovered because of
shoddy record keeping at the museum, city officials said.

Wichita's art director, John D'Angelo, said most of the items that turned up
missing earlier this week were identified only by vague descriptions in
acquisition records. He said those descriptions might not hold up if
ownership is disputed.

The center has been run by the city since December, when it was revealed
that the museum was $135,000 in debt. The city-supported center had been run
by a private board.

City officials found out about the missing items when they conducted an
inventory of the museum's collection.

D'Angelo said the most serious problem with tracking down the missing art is
a lack of documented photographs of the items. He said museums run by the
city routinely take pictures of their exhibits so they can be identified if
they are lost or stolen.

"It's going to be extremely hard to try to recover much of this without the
visual images," he said. "We'll do our best, but there are a lot of
obstacles."

Lynne Richardson, chief of the FBI's art theft unit in Washington, said
under a 1994 law, any theft from a museum is considered a federal crime -
regardless of whether the goods ever cross state lines.

While the FBI hasn't been asked to join the investigation, Richardson said
the agency can become involved whenever a case involves artwork 100 years or
older that exceeds $5,000 in value, or when contemporary items add up to
$100,000.

Criminals who steal from a museum can face up to 10 years in prison, and can
be prosecuted as much as 20 years after the crime. The statute of
limitations for most federal crimes is five years.

Newman Washington, acting chairman of the center's board, said he was not
comfortable with the condition of the collection, even before the city took
over.

"I know there hasn't been any real proper documentation," he said. "I really
don't know too much about the practices of a curator - that's kind of out of
my league.

"(But) more or less, you had a feeling something just wasn't matching up."

http://www.kansascity.com/


_____________________________________________


Bronze statues returned to Redding
The Associated Press
REDDING, Calif. — Two stolen bronze statues discovered last month in Sams
Valley were returned Friday to their home in Caldwell Park.

The life-size statues of two boys were stolen Feb. 5 from the park. They
were recovered two weeks later by a Central Point man who found them outside
a Sams Valley storage shed. 

According to the (Redding) Record Searchlight, the statues were greeted by
cheers and shouts by passers-by who witnessed the bronze boys being secured
back in place on Friday.

After being located in Sams Valley, each of the statues had a leg repaired,
according to the newspaper. 

The February theft was not the first time vandals have targeted the
"Balancing Act" sculpture that includes the statues. One of the boys was
stolen in September 2003, only to be found a few days later in the park, the
newspaper reported. 

To prevent future thefts, Redding city officials have welded stainless steel
rods inside the legs of the statues. A surveillance camera is now keeping
watch over the sculpture, according to the newspaper. 

The sculpture is valued at about $17,500.

The February theft prompted a multi-agency search that included a California
Highway Patrol helicopter. 


http://www.mailtribune.com/


____________________________________________


Vandals permanently shut down library
By Steve Castle
Mar 26, 2005, 08:32


An under-siege Walsall library hit by a year-long onslaught of vandalism and
arson attacks has been forced to permanently close down. 

Even the presence of security guards has not been enough to save Shelfield
Library in Birch Lane which shut on a temporary basis at the start of this
month, putting the site's long term future into the balance. 

Now council chiefs have made the decision to end a tradition of book lending
in the area stretching back decades. 

Arrangements are being made to introduce a mobile library service into the
area while regular customers are being urged to use neighbouring libraries,
one of which is to open for an extra day each week. 

The library has been plagued by a series of vandal attacks including a brick
wall being knocked down, while staff there have been constantly intimidated
by gangs of yobs running riot inside the building and throwing books around.


But the final straw was an arson attack on the building a few weeks ago when
vandals set fire to a wheelie bin, pushed it against the building and caused
thousands of pounds worth of damage as well as disturbing asbestos. 

Today Councillor Garry Perry, Walsall's cabinet member for leisure, said it
would have proved too costly to repair the building in the face of the
continued threat of problems at the library. 

"These vandals have continuously caused problems and have now caused the
library to close," he said. 

"We are working hard to minimise the impact of the loss of the library to
local people in the Shelfield area." 

Measures being introduced include extending the town's mobile library
service to include Shelfield where it will make its first visit between
10.30am and 12.30pm on March 30. 

Book lovers in Shelfield are being urged to use nearby Rushall Library and
also the one in Pelsall which is opening for an extra day on Tuesdays with
immediate effect. 

A book return bin is also being set up outside the closed down Shelfield
library. 

http://www.expressandstar.com/

__________________________________________


Who Pocketed 3 Hunks of Bronze?
By BEN SISARIO 

Published: March 26, 2005


Here's what we know: It's really big, it's bronze and most of it is not
where it should be. 

Here's what we don't know: Who took it, when or how. Especially how.

On Wednesday night, Philip Pavia, a 94-year-old sculptor who was a friend of
Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Henry Miller, received a troubling
phone call about one of his favorite works, "The Ides of March." The
early-1960's piece is a four-part bronze of enigmatic pyramidal shapes that
once adorned the entrance to the New York Hilton on Avenue of the Americas
at 53rd Street and was called "a sort of contemporary Stonehenge."

 
 
The call came from Andrew Gottesman, an owner of the Hippodrome, the office
building at Avenue of the Americas and 43rd Street where the sculpture had
been displayed since 1988. Mr. Gottesman told Mr. Pavia and his wife,
Natalie Edgar, that "The Ides of March" was missing, Ms. Edgar said. Three
of the four pieces were gone, and on Thursday the building management called
the police and reported the sculpture stolen. 

In preparation for yet another move, to what the artist hoped would be a
permanent home - Hofstra University, where it would become the 88th work on
its 240-acre campus in Hempstead, on Long Island - the work was being held
in storage in an area easily accessible from the street while the Hippodrome
undergoes an extensive renovation. It was set to be transferred to Hofstra,
and administrators from the university's museum had inspected the work as
recently as two weeks ago. When they came back this week for another
inspection, they found that three of the work's four pieces were gone, a
building spokesman said.

Officials at the Hippodrome and Hofstra were left puzzled about the
disappearance. Who could have taken such a thing undetected? Could it have
been simply misplaced?

"It's not the easiest thing to pick up and take away," said Doug Sarini, the
spokesman for the Hippodrome and its owners. 

The four pieces range from 6 to 10 feet in height and together weigh about
3,000 pounds; the three missing pieces were about 600 pounds apiece, the
artist said. They were in a storage room just off the building's 43rd Street
loading docks, protected by a pull-down gate and an alarm system. The alarm
had been disabled while the power at the building was cut during
renovations, Mr. Sarini said.

David Christman, the director of the Hofstra Museum, said he had last seen
the work two weeks ago when he went to the Hippodrome for an inspection.
"March 8 was the last time I had seen it," he said in an interview Thursday.
"So sometime between March 8 and last night somebody walked off with most of
it."

Ms. Edgar said "The Ides of March" had been moved into storage last summer.
At the same time, a search team looking for a permanent home for the
sculpture found it at Hofstra. The university agreed to accept the piece,
Mr. Christman said, but no formal paperwork was signed, so it was still in
the Hippodrome's possession. The sculpture is insured for $65,000, Mr.
Sarini said. The police are investigating and would not comment. 

No one is more aggrieved by the disappearance than Mr. Pavia. 

"It's like a death in the family," he said. "I considered it my masterpiece.
Everybody liked it."

Bent, hard of hearing and with a faint rasp of a voice, Mr. Pavia is
nevertheless still a vigorously productive sculptor; his Greenwich Village
studio is cluttered with work, some abstract, some figurative. He received a
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation grant last year, and his current
gallery show, at OK Harris on West Broadway in SoHo, with 12 newly created
terra-cotta heads - representing the inside of the skull, not the outside,
he said - just received a rapturous review in The New York Observer.

In the early 1960's, the Hilton commissioned him to make "The Ides of March"
for its porte-cochere entrance. (The title refers to his birthday, March 15,
though he declines to explain further.) The work stayed there from 1963 to
1988, when it was sold to the Hippodrome. The office building displayed only
two of the work's four pieces, and Mr. Pavia won a lawsuit demanding that
the work be shown in full. A piece by Mr. Pavia that stood outside the
Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park in the 1970's also caused a headache: a big
marble pile, it was knocked over by a truck and languished on its side for
years, he said.

The Hippodrome case took a surprising turn on Thursday night when a man
showed up at the building after hours to collect the remaining piece of the
sculpture. He was stopped by a building superintendent, Mr. Sarini said, but
said he had permission to take the items and had taken the three pieces the
day before. The police were called, and the man, whom a police
representative called a "scrap collector," is to be interviewed on Monday.

Mr. Pavia insisted that he had shed only "metaphysical tears" for the work.

"Naturally I am saddened and shocked that a piece of beauty and a piece of
New York has disappeared," he said. "But I am an active artist and I am
going back to work."


Joel Topcik contributed reporting for this article.


http://www.nytimes.com/

___________________________________________








Town family recovers art lost to Nazis
 
By Martin B. Cassidy
Staff Writer

March 26, 2005

Sixty-five years after relatives abandoned it as they fled the Netherlands,
a Greenwich family has recovered an Edgar Degas sketch, one of an estimated
1,300 works taken from their Amsterdam estate after the Nazi invasion.

Marei von Saher, 60, of Greenwich, and her daughter, Charlene von Saher, 30,
of Manhattan, N.Y., said the sketch, "Four Nude Female Dancers Resting," is
in New York City, and they plan to view it soon.

Marei von Saher is the widow of Eduard G. von Saher, the son of Jacques
Goudstikker, a leading collector and dealer of Dutch and Flemish Old Master
paintings during the 1930s. Goudstikker displayed his collection at Castle
Nijenrode, the family estate in Ouderkirk, outside Amsterdam.

The family believes the Degas sketch was confiscated by the Nazis and
acquired by Field Marshall Hermann Goering, commander of the Luftwaffe, the
Nazi air force, who took it back to Berlin, Marei von Saher said.

An American couple eventually acquired the sketch and, through the
America-Israel Cultural Foundation, donated it to the Israel Museum in
Jerusalem in 1970. The museum returned the work voluntarily after a joint
investigation with the family's art research team, Marei von Saher said.

The family, which has located 50 of the stolen works and had 10 returned,
has been on a mission to find and recover as many of the paintings as
possible. "That's one more, but there are many more paintings to find,"
Marei von Saher said yesterday. "I'm dying to see it."

As the Nazis moved into France, the Netherlands and other European nations
be-tween 1933 and 1945, they looted priceless art collections from galleries
as the rightful owners fled. After Germany lost the World War II, some of
the stockpile was returned to various nations' governments, rather than the
dispossessed owners. Other works were sold off, vanishing into mostly
private collections.

Goudstikker fled the Neth-erlands in 1940 with his wife and son, Charlene
von Saher said. He died in a fall aboard a boat traveling to England, and
his wife and son came to the United States through Canada.

In the 1970s, her grandmother, Desiree von Saher, who had remarried,
returned to Holland to live, Charlene von Saher said. In the late 1990s,
Char-lene von Saher and her mother began trying to recover the lost artwork.

The family recovered its first work in 2001, regaining a 1520 oil canvas by
Dutch pre-Renaissance painter J. W. de Cock, titled "The Temptation of St.
Anthony." In the painting, St. Anthony stands in a forest, holding a Bible
as evil creatures peer at him from behind trees and bushes. Marei von Saher
considers the work particularly precious because it was the first one
returned.

"I would never sell it," she said.

About 50 Goudstikker paintings have been located through investigative
efforts, said Lawrence Kaye, an attorney for Herrick Feinstein LLC, a law
firm specializing in recovering stolen artworks.

About 350 of Goudstikker's paintings are thought to be in the official state
collection of the Netherlands, which has set up a committee to consider the
family's claims, Kaye said.

The balance of the artworks is outside the Netherlands, with paintings
located or recovered in the United States, Austria, England, Germany and
Switz-erland, Kaye said.

The lost art has begun to resurface in recent years as a growing number of
museums, galleries and private collectors respond to pressure from
de-scendants and critics to return stolen art or compensate surviving
relatives. Recovery has been aided by museums and collectors who have set up
Web sites showing paintings for which there are gaps in the provenance, or
chain of ownership.

"I think because of the time that has passed, all these museums and auction
houses want to make sure they have art that they acquired legally," Charlene
von Saher said. "Everybody wants to clear the record." 

http://www.greenwichtime.com/

___________________________________________


Project Y: A Museum's Secret History 
Confidential documents reveal museum's secret past 
 
LYNCHBURG, Va.—Fifty years ago, in the midst of the Korean conflict and
escalating Cold War tensions, board members and executives of the National
Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C. took part in a series of confidential,
closed-door discussions to plan emergency measures designed to ensure the
safety of the gallery’s collections “in view of the present national
emergency.” Among the measures deemed necessary was Project Y, a plan for
the removal and evacuation of the collections to a storage facility of
heavily reinforced concrete to be built at an undisclosed location somewhere
in Virginia. Today, that facility – now known as the Maier Museum of Art on
the campus of Randolph-Macon Woman's College – shelters one of the finest
college collections of American art in the country. 

The contract between the College and the Gallery was signed March 16, 1951,
and called upon the parties to provide a shelter and curator’s cottage which
the trustees of the National Gallery could employ for the emergency storage
of the “irreplaceable and invaluable works of art entrusted to them.”
Construction began in April 1951, with the help of the A. W. Mellon
Educational and Charitable Trust, and the building was officially dedicated
in December 1952. 

Memoranda and letters reveal that periodic inspection visits were made to
Lynchburg from the mid 1950s until at least 1967 to ensure that the
facilities, and the attendant cottage, were in good repair and that
machinery—especially the all-important air conditioning—was functional. In
November 1962, in the midst of the Cuban missile crisis, Gallery officials
held an apparent evacuation drill to test the truck drivers’ skills and to
make sure the trucks fit into the storage facility’s loading dock. Even in
1964, Gallery administrators continued to want the storage facility’s true
purpose kept confidential, writing to Professor Mary Frances Williams about
her forthcoming history of the College art collection that they would prefer
“as little publicity as practicable.”  

The National Gallery of Art’s active interest in the Lynchburg facility
waned in the 1970s, though the museum remained on the Gallery’s “go-to” list
in the event of catastrophe. The College’s unique arrangement with the
National Gallery of Art finally expired without fanfare March 16, 2001.

This year, the Maier Museum of Art is celebrating its secret history. A
recent exhibition at the museum showcased blueprints, photos, and news
clippings outlining the planning and construction of the facility and museum
director Karol Lawson has collected hundreds of documents from the National
Gallery and other sources that tell the tale of Project Y, the Maier Museum
of Art’s secret history.

For more information on Project Y or the Maier Museum of Art, visit the
museum’s web site at www.maiermuseum.rmwc.edu anytime. The museum’s offices
are closed for the holidays between December 20, 2002 and January 1, 2003.
If you need assistance during that time, please contact Michael Kiser at
434-851-5439. After January 2, you can contact museum director Karol Lawson
directly at 434-947-8136. 
 
Contact Information:  Between December 20 and January 2, contact Michael
Kiser at 434-851-5439. After January 2, contact museum director Karol Lawson
at 434-947-8136.
mkiser at rmwc.edu 
Sending Institution:  Randolph-Macon Woman's College 
Story Date:  December 20, 2002 
Keywords:  museum, art, war, cold war, emergency 


_________________________________________________