The Telegraph reports that Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum was robbed last Friday:

Cambridgeshire Police today appealed for anyone with information to help recover the items, which the force described as “very valuable” and of “great cultural significance”.

Among the stolen items were six pieces from the Ming dynasty, including a jade 16th century carved buffalo, a carved horse from the 17th century and a green and brown jade carved elephant.

The police in the UK’s West Midlands think a gang of thieves who spent the better part of an hour making a hole in the wall of a museum to gain entry and head straight for two Chinese works of art worth an estimated £2m were working on specific orders:

The senior investigating officer, Det Supt Adrian Green described the break-in: ”I am sure this job has been planned for quite some time and I would think the artefacts have been stolen to order, for someone who has already identified a potential market.”

Daniel Grant was given a look at some of the documents in the Knoedler case by Nicholas Gravante, Jr, Ann Freedman’s lawyer. These documents are meant to show that Freedman acted in good faith at all times. Here we see the Domenico de Sole Rothko being discussed by none other than Ernst Beyeler:

Gravante released a one-page letter from Beyeler to Freedman, dated April 14, 2005, in which the Swiss dealer asked permission to borrow the De Soles’ Rothko for an exhibition that the museum planned for May 25-July 17, 2005. “I am wondering if the present owner of this sublime unknown masterwork would be inclined to lend it for this prestigious occasion,” Beyeler wrote.

That same purported Rothko was also shown to Laili Nasr, a curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., who had been working for over a decade on a Rothko catalogue raisonne. A letter from Nasr to Freedman, dated Nov. 3, 2003, referred to a recent visit by the curator to Knoedler, where she “especially enjoyed seeing” the Rothko. “It was a real treat.” Nasr noted that “we intend to include a supplementary section to introduce new works on canvas that were discovered since the 1998 publication of the first volume of the catalogue.” She added that if this supplement is published, “we intend to include” the Rosales-sourced Rothko.

Mark Landis, who traveled the country donating forged works of art to museums to please his dead parents, tells how he did it:

Frequently, Landis starts out with art catalogs or books. From these he selects art work that is small enough that it would be easy to transport, and that he thinks would please his parents — honoring his parents, who have both passed away, is an important part of the motivation he describes for donating copied pictures to museums.

“In 2000, I used to go to Office Depot or something like that and use their color copier, then, when I got the printer, I wouldn’t have to go any place,” Landis said. [...] Landis pastes copies of a picture onto boards cut at Home Depot, then goes over a number of them in one sitting while watching TV. Using colored pencils, paint or markers, he fills in the image. To the naked eyes of museum staff, these works appear real when Landis presents them as gifts. But under ultraviolet light or a magnifying glass, the illusion falls apart.

How to Forge Art: Mark Landis Explains His Technique (Live Science)

The Art Loss Register sent out this release today:

Four contemporary paintings stolen in 1988 in a brazen Fourth of July theft from a New York City gallery have been recovered in Cologne, Germany 24 years after the crime.  The theft had been reported to the New York City Police Department, FBI, and Interpol and registered with the International Foundation for Art Research and the Art Loss Register (‘ALR’) who today announced the recovery of artworks by Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Jean Dubuffet and Fernand Leger.  The recovery of these works brings a substantial conclusion to an extraordinary case which spanned over two decades, and involved five law enforcement agencies.

Published accounts at the time of the theft stated that an unidentified intruder had picked the locks of the Solomon Gallery on Madison Avenue and quickly made off with six valuable works on display.

The oil on canvas by Karel Appel, was the first work to resurface and was recovered in 2003 when a German art dealer searched the ALR Database through his lawyer in Stuttgart, Germany.  The dealer claimed to have purchased five of the six stolen works on a buying trip in New York but the lawyer could produce no documentation of the sale and refused to divulge the name of his client to authorities.  A German public prosecutor issued a warrant for aiding and abetting the sale of stolen goods but a police raid of the lawyer’s home and office failed to uncover the other pictures.  According to law enforcement, all references to the dealer had been removed from the firm’s case files and in a bizarre series of events, one law firm partner was charged with threatening a police officer involved in the raid.

The sudden focus on the law firm meant the lawyer could no longer represent the art dealer who quickly retained new counsel. Hiding behind this second lawyer, a criminal specialist from Munich, the German dealer once again refused to cooperate and the case went cold.

Over the course of the next nine years, no attempts were made to contact the ALR or authorities over the stolen pictures.  Finally, in 2012 the daughter of the now deceased dealer contacted the Dedalus Foundation in New York to authenticate the stolen Motherwell.  The daughter, a fine art professional, had also approached a local auction house but was quickly referred back to the ALR.  The ALR Recovery Team immediately flew to Cologne where they met with police authorities and positively identified the works as the paintings stolen in 1988.

Christopher A. Marinello, a lawyer who specialises in recovering stolen and looted artwork for the ALR, negotiated the return of the four paintings with the lawyer for the family. “At the Art Loss Register, we’re going to make life difficult for those who attempt to sell stolen art.  You can hide behind lawyers and look for loopholes in civil law jurisdictions, but eventually you’re going to have to deal with some very uncomfortable issues.  The problem will not simply disappear with the passage of time. Leaving stolen artworks to the next generation is a losing proposition.”

Marinello credits authorities in the US and Germany for their strong support: “International cooperation among law enforcement is alive and well when it comes to recovering stolen art.  The determination and tenacity of Special Agent Meredith A. Savona of the FBI Art Crime Team, NYPD Detective Mark Fishstein and the Cologne Police Department were critical in bringing these pictures home.”

The Daily Mail reports on efforts to find the lost works from the Hatvany Collection seized from Baron Hatvany, once the Hungarian Minister of Finance, in 1944 by Adolph Eichmann:

Viennese historian Burkhart List, 62, says he has acquired documents from old Wehrmacht archives that report a mass shipment of the Hatvany collection to two subterranean galleries, measuring 6,000 by 4,500 feet, in the Erzgebirge Mountains.

With the permission of the mayor of nearby Deutschkatherinenberg, Hans-Peter Haustein, he deployed a neutron generator inside the mountain to probe for the secret chambers.

The device revealed that, 180 feet down, there are workings detailed on no maps and they appear to be man-made, not natural.

Mr List said: ‘In the winter of 1944 – 1945 the records indicate that a mysterious transport arrived here from Budapest that was coded top secret.

‘One of the photos yielded up by the archives was of the Sonnenhaus, a large building directly in front of the Fortuna mine where I believe the art is stored.

‘It shows a large contingent of SS. There was no military or logical state purpose for them to be here on a secret mission, unless it was to deliver the artwork into chambers which, climactically, are ideal for the storage of art.’

So far the explorations have yielded only a Schmeisser machine gun, a Nazi gas mask, plastic explosive detonators and a safe deposit key.

Expedition seeks to unearth £500m worth of masterpieces buried by Nazi looters in mine (Daily Mail)

The National Archives announced the discovery and donation of two additional volumes of the “Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, or ERR, document the unprecedented and systematic looting of Europe by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. The ERR was the main Nazi agency engaged in the theft of cultural treasures in Nazi-occupied countries. As the ERR staff looted, photographed and catalogued the French collections, they created leather bound albums, including the two being donated today. Each page of the album contained a photograph of one stolen item.”

ERR Albums 7 and 15 are significant discoveries. Album 7 includes images of sixty-nine paintings which represented very early thefts, some as early as 1940 and early inventory numbers such as EW4 (the fourth item stolen from Elizabeth Wildenstein). Images of two important paintings by Jean-Honoré Fragonard are featured in Album 7. Girl with Two Doves, or Mädchen mit zwei Tauben (inventory code: R38) sold at auction in 2000 for over $5 million after having been properly repatriated by the Monuments Men in 1946. Album 7 also includes The Dance Outdoors, or Tanz im Freien, (inventory code: R67) attributed to the painter Jean-Antoine Watteau, which was intended for Hitler’s Führermuseum.

Although the majority of the paintings featured in Album 7 appear to have been properly restituted after the war, four paintings are listed on the ERR Database as not having been restituted. Album 15 contains photos of forty-one pieces of furniture, primarily from the Rothschild family. Three of those pieces, inventory codes R917, R943, and R944, were prominently featured in one of the exhibits staged at the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris for Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring to select items for his own collection.

In May 1945, thirty-nine original ERR albums were discovered at Neuschwanstein by the Monuments Men. They had been stored there by the Germans along with records that documented their confiscations and thousands of looted items. These albums were subsequently taken to the Munich Central Collecting Point where they were used by the Monuments Men to assist in the restitution process. In late 1945 these albums were used as evidence at the Nuremberg trials to document the massive Nazi art looting operations.

Today the National Archives has custody of the original 39 albums, as well as two additional albums, 6 and 8, discovered by the Monuments Men Foundation and donated to the National Archives in 2007. Like Album 7, Albums 6 and 8 were picked up by a member of the 989th Field Artillery Battalion who was stationed in the Berchtesgaden area in the closing days of the war. Mr. Edsel stated about this occurrence: “I hope discoveries such as these will encourage other members of the 989th Battalion and their families, as well as all veterans, to look in their attics and basements for any lost wartime items as they may hold the clues to unravel this unsolved mystery.”

National Archives Announces Discovery of “Hitler Albums” Documenting Looted Art (National Archives)

The Art Newspaper has provoked more interest in the market for Greek art today than has been seen in a decade of the Greek art boom and bust with their story on the court case alleging a market filled with fakes. Collector Diamantis Diamantides is suing Sotheby’s over the sale of two works but the story suggests a wider and deeper problem:

“It’s a huge deal that one of these cases has finally come to court,” says one collector, who bought a fake painting purportedly by Parthenis in 1997, and has been offered more since. “We are not like the UK and the US, people don’t talk about the issue here—there’s a general lack of trust in justice and new buyers don’t want to highlight their naiveté and mistakes,” he says, before adding that he wishes to remain anonymous.

A further problem that has emerged as part of the Diamantides case is the lack of institutions studying Greek artists, developing catalogues raisonnés and discussing the authentication and provenance of art made in Greece. While works have to be assessed for national significance by the National Gallery in Athens before export licences are issued, the process does not involve authentication. Dealers are concerned that the National Gallery’s stamp on works is being used as provenance.

It’s hard to read the story without coming to two separate conclusions. The first is that this case shows once again that the art market’s greatest vulnerability lies in its lack of a bedrock in scholarship. The second is that the liquidity provided by forgeries might have been behind the rise in the Greek market in the first place.

Fears grow that Greek art market is riddled with forgeries (The Art Newspaper)

Like a scene from a bad thriller, Germany’s Spiegel says that Wolfgang Beltracchi is dropping coy hints about the extent of his activities as an art forger:

 But in a SPIEGEL interview the 61-year-old has now admitted to creating phoney works by “about 50″ different artists. Speaking to the media for the first time since he was sentenced, Beltracchi refused to name the exact number of paintings he forged throughout his career, which he began in the 1970s by creating “unpainted works by old masters, and later Jugendstil and Expressionists” and selling them at flea markets. But during the interview with SPIEGEL, Beltracchi said that due to high demand, he could have easily put “1,000 or 2,000″ forgeries on the art market.

Ringleader Reveals He Faked Many More Works (Spiegel)