Hildebrand Gurlitt’s horde of art stolen during World War II is finally beginning to find its way back to the original owners, or their heirs, nearly a century after the conflict ended....
Egan Schiele paintings are at the center of a legal dispute in Manhattan filed by the heirs of holocaust victim Fritz Grunbaum. The Nazis plundered his art and sent him to a concentration camp in 1938. But the two paintings have recently resurfaced and may be worth $5.5 million. Grunbaum’s heirs, Timothy Reif and David Fraenkel, filed the complaint this week in Manhattan Supreme Court to block a pending auction of the paintings....
Andrew Wyeth’s bucolic painting “Ice Storm” is at the center of a legal dispute evolving out of a 20-year-old New York City art scandal perpetrated by disgraced art dealer David Ramus, who swindled clients out of millions of dollars. Among his victims is Reed Galin, a former TV news anchor, who was a life-long friend of Ramus and college roommate....
The Jeff Koons exhibit at the Whitney Museum in Manhattan was hit by a graffiti vandal last night, who was caught on video spray-painting a wall in front of dozens of startled patrons. Christopher Johnson, 33, of Manhattan, was arrested at the museum after he was accosted by security guards and turned over to police, according to reports. Fortunately, the focus of the exhibit, Koons’ “Hanging Heart” sculpture, and other works were not harmed,...
Ludwig and Margret Kainer were avid art collectors in Germany until the rise of the Nazi regime in the 1930s. They were also Jews and fled for their lives after Hitler came to power. The vast art collection, however, stayed behind. Their case highlights the extreme difficultly Holocaust survivors have encountered trying to recover assets seized from Jews by the German government during World War II....
Hildebrand Gurlitt hailed from a family that was well known in artistic circles in pre-World War II Germany. His father was an architect and art historian, one brother was a musicologist and a nephew was an art dealer. But a deep, dark secret set him apart. During World War II, Gurlitt, a specialist in modern art, was hired by Joseph Goebbels, the feared Nazi propaganda minister, to loot priceless artworks from homes and museums across Nazi-occupied Europe....
Pei-Shen Qian, described as a struggling Chinese artist, is the master forger behind one of the biggest scams to sweep the New York City art scene in years, involving more than 80 bogus paintings by modern masters. Alleged works by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell, were actually painted by the 73-year-old immigrant artist in the garage of his Queens home. Few details about the investigation are known. What is known is mostly contained in a new grand jury indictment of alleged scam mastermind Glafira Rosales, 57. She was arraigned today (Aug 19) in federal court in Manhattan....
A lone thief brandishing a handgun walked off with an estimated $53 million in jewelry and other gems that were being readied to go on exhibition at the famed Carlton Hotel in Cannes, playground to the rich and famous....
A Mark Rothko painting defaced at London’s Tate Modern museum over the weekend once again raises questions about how to balance security against the desire to give the public the best experience possible while viewing priceless works of art. A man at the Tate was able to walk up to the Rothko’s untitled 1958 painting best known as “Black on Maroon” and mark a slogan on it in black paint. He was gone in a matter of minutes. The slogan “Vladimir Umanets ’12, a potential piece of yellowism,” doesn't seem to have a direct connection to Rothko or the work....
Financial mogul Jeffrey Gundlach knows there is no honor among thieves. He’s offering a $1.7 million reward for information leading to the return of his art collection as well as other luxury items, including a Porsche sports car, stolen from his Santa Monica, Calif. home. ...
A painting by the French artist Paul Cezanne, worth an estimated $100 million, has been found relatively unscathed four years after it was stolen at gunpoint from a Swiss museum by three masked robbers. The painting, Boy in a Red Waistcoat, was one of four stolen from the E. G. Buehrle Collection in Zurich in 2008 by three robbers who burst in just before closing time and told staff to lie on the floor while hand-picked the paintings to steal....
A painting by Dutch post-Impressionist Vincent Van Gogh, worth an estimated $55 million, was stolen for the second time from a Egyptian museum. Investigators are looking into the possibility the theft was an inside job....
