Thursday, November 28, 2013

Stolen Art Watch, Da Vinci Madonna Case Proves Beyond Any Doubt, Have Information About Art Crime,You Will End Up With No Money, No Peace & No Liberty, Never, Ever Talk To Dick Ellis, Mark Dalrymple Or Julian Radcliffe


Duke of Buccleuch, Scottish Police, Mark Dalrymple & Dirty Dick Ellis of   
QUINTONS FARM HOUSE
GROVE LANE
ASHFIELD
STOWMARKET
IP146LZ
 

Exposed

Recovery rate for stolen art as low as 1.5%
Art crime is a low priority for police forces, and concerns surround the Art Loss Register
A police officer searches the Rotterdam Kunsthal after a theft last year
The rate of recovery and successful prosecution in cases of art theft is startlingly low, with one expert putting it at only 1.5% globally, The Art Newspaper has learned, underlining the challenges of identifying and returning stolen works.
The global cost of crimes linked to art and antiques was recently estimated at £3.7bn a year by the UK’s Association of Chief Police Officers. Noah Charney, a professor of art history specialising in art crime and the founder of the Association for Research into Crimes Against Art, which organised a symposium on the subject at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum this month, says that statistics are hard to come by because police forces seldom distinguish between stolen art and other stolen goods. “A Rembrandt is classified with a CD,” he says.

Low priority

At the core of the problem is the low importance that most police forces attach to such crimes; the exception is Italy’s Carabinieri, which claims that its force of 350 officers recovers around 30% of lost art. The theft of property in general “has a low priority in Britain and across Europe”, said Dick Ellis, the former head of the Metropolitan Police’s Art and Antiques Unit, at the symposium. In the UK, for example, the Metropolitan Police has just three officers dedicated to art crime (down from 14 around 20 years ago). In the US, the FBI has around 14 agents trained to investigate art crimes, although they do not work on these exclusively. Attempts to pool information on stolen works to create a comprehensive, international database have failed, largely because of a lack of funding.

Without proper public funding, the onus is on private firms, who charge a recovery fee of as much as 30% of a work’s value. Here, there are also areas of contention, particularly surrounding the issue of paying informers for leads on stolen works. This area is a “legal minefield”, said Claire Hutcheon, the head of the Met’s Art and Antiques Unit. “Art cannot be recovered at any cost,” she said.

Loss of trust

At the centre of the debate about art recovery is the London-based Art Loss Register (ALR), which, under the management of Julian Radcliffe, operates the world’s largest private database of stolen art. Radcliffe says his company has 300,000 items on record (by comparison, Interpol’s Stolen Works of Art database had around 40,000 records at the end of 2011). He says that recovery rates within a couple of years of thefts are “bound to be low” but that around 15% of high-value works will have been recovered after 25 years, with the rates for other types of art and antiques “much lower”. Around 20% of works will never be recovered, he says, as they have probably been destroyed.

The ALR has been under fire recently, however; insurance companies and others have expressed concerns about the quality of information on its database and its recovery practices, including paying informants and charging victims for leads. Radcliffe says that he “never withholds information for a fee”, which he says would be “close to extortion”. He says that if he thinks the ALR has a lead on a stolen work, he tells the police. “[Victims] may then go to the police, but unfortunately may then find that they are not interested,” he says, given the police’s limited resources.

When it comes to paying informants, Radcliffe says that there are times when this is the only way to get the necessary evidence. “There is an important difference between paying a ransom to the thieves themselves, which is unacceptable, and paying an informer, who may have a criminal past but may not be involved in the theft or the handling of the stolen property, [and] who may help to get the item returned and the criminal convicted,” he says.

There have been recent staff defections from the ALR, including the firm’s legal counsel, Chris Marinello, and its finance director, Tony Le Fevre. Radcliffe says that although some staff have left, they have been replaced and that there is “no fundamental change in the business”.

Marinello has founded Art Recovery International, a competing company in London, and says he wants to bring “transparency to the rather murky world of art recovery”. “It is our policy not to pay ransoms, nor do we pay criminals… [which], in my view, creates a market for stolen art,” he says. “There is no reason to make such payments. I have recovered stolen and looted art and resolved title disputes involving art worth more than £200m through ethical and strategic negotiation.”

Alternative systems

Others are not so sure that the profit-based system is best. Mark Dalrymple, a specialist fine-art loss adjuster at London’s Tyler and Co, says: “There is a certain need for an international database. There currently is one [the ALR], but all [parties] would prefer a not-for-profit funded system.”

Dalrymple and Dick Ellis both cite Larmtjänst, a non-profit organisation in Sweden, as an example of a model that could work internationally. The organisation benefits the insurance companies that fund it by assisting in the recovery of property (art accounts for only a small proportion), in co-operation with international law enforcement.

Meanwhile, in the UK, the Association of Chief Police Officers last month launched a working group dedicated to national heritage and cultural property crime. The launch was accompanied by a report; its recommendations included establishing a national database for tackling such crime, with one dedicated officer for each constabulary (there are 43 in the UK).

In support of the initiative, Mike Harlow, the legal and governance director of English Heritage, said: “Heritage crime is not just a financial crime where profits and insurance companies suffer the only loss… this is crime that erases history, threatens the viability of churches, defiles the memory of our war heroes and melts away our great art and artefacts.”

Still missing

Johannes Vermeer, The Concert, around 1658-60 : In one of the most notorious unsolved art-museum robberies, two thieves disguised as police officers stole 13 works from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, on 18 March 1990. It has been described as the greatest art theft in American history. Works by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Degas and Manet were stolen, the most valuable being Vermeer’s The Concert. The value of all the missing works has most recently been estimated at around $500m, with the Vermeer accounting for around $200m of the total. The latest opinion is that the works are in either Boston or Ireland.

Henry Moore, Reclining Figure, 1969-70: The Henry Moore Foundation received an insurance payment of £3m for Reclining Figure, which was stolen in December 2005 from its site in Hertfordshire, north of London. The fear is that the two-tonne sculpture has been melted down for its scrap value, which would be just a few thousand pounds. It might be possible to make another cast, but this would raise legal and technical difficulties and is unlikely.

Jean-Baptiste Oudry, The White Duck, 1753 : This oil painting by the French Rococo painter Jean-Baptiste Oudry is still missing after it was stolen from Houghton Hall, Norfolk, in 1992. Considered to be the artist’s masterpiece, the work was the most significant item taken from the home of the Marquess of Cholmondeley (three other paintings, two Louis XVI clocks and a Louis XVI Sèvres vase by Antoine Dulac were also among the hoard). The painting was valued at £5m in 1992.

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Stolen Art Watch, Kunsthal Museum Raiders Jailed As Dublin Monet Vandal Goes On Trial



 

Romania hands 6-1/2 year jail term to Dutch art theft boss

A Romanian court sentenced the ringleader of a gang that stole paintings from a Dutch museum in one of the world's biggest art heists to six years and eight months in prison on Tuesday.

Radu Dogaru and fellow gang member Eugen Darie, both Romanians, received the same sentence for stealing the masterpieces, including two Monets and a Picasso, in October 2012. The paintings have yet to be found.

The trial will continue on Dec 3. for four other defendants including Dogaru's mother, who is also accused of destroying the art and has exercised her right not to comment.

Dogaru and Darie pleaded guilty earlier this year to stealing the artworks, insured for 18 million euros (15 million pounds), from Rotterdam's Kunsthal museum.

Since his July 15 indictment, Dogaru has asked magistrates to move the trial to the Netherlands if authorities wanted him ever disclose the paintings whereabouts.

The decision can be appealed in 10 days. Darie's lawyer Maria Vasii told Reuters by telephone: "We plan to file an appeal. However, it's a correct decision. I expect prosecutors to also appeal today's ruling and ask for harsher punishment."

Security camera footage released at the time of the theft showed a gang entering through a back door and disappearing from the camera's view. Seconds later they reappeared carrying bulky objects and left the building by the same entrance.

The works stolen were Picasso's "Tête d'Arlequin", Matisse's "La Liseuse en Blanc et Jaune", Monet's "Waterloo Bridge, London" and "Charing Cross Bridge, London", Gauguin's "Femme devant une fenêtre ouverte", Meijer De Haan's "Autoportrait" and Lucian Freud's "Woman with Eyes Closed".

Romanian experts believe that three out of seven paintings stolen last year from a Dutch museum, a haul that included works by Picasso and Monet, have been destroyed by fire.

They said nails used to fasten the canvases to their wooden frames, recovered from the ashes in Dogaru's house, had been a crucial piece of evidence.

A whole lot of Monet: Damage to famous painting cost €7million to repair


Andrew Shannon is accused of putting his hand through Ireland’s only painting by famous French impressionist Claude Monet


Claude Monet painting
Claude Monet painting
By Jessica Magee
A man caused €7million worth of damage when he knocked a hole through a famous painting, a court has heard.
Andrew Shannon, 48, is accused of putting his hand through Ireland’s only painting by famous French impressionist Claude Monet.
The first day of his trial heard he told two tourists who saw what happened that he felt faint and collapsed on to the oil drawing.
The painting, “Argenteuil Basin with a Single Sailboat”, which hung at the National Gallery of Ireland, dates from 1874 and is valued at about €10 million.
Shannon, from Willans Way in Ongar, Dublin 15, pleaded not guilty to causing criminal damage to the painting on June 29, 2012.
The court heard he worked as a French polisher with Foyle Antiques, which has now closed.
Kerida Naidoo BL, prosecuting, told the jury Shannon was captured on CCTV footage entering and leaving the room in the Millennium Unit of the National Gallery, where the painting was hanging.
He said the two eye-witnesses who had been holidaying in Ireland at the time have travelled from New Zealand to give evidence.
In his opening speech, Mr Naidoo said the incident happened at about 11am, and that Gardaí and an ambulance arrived within 15 minutes.
He said Shannon had told a number of people, including the two tourists, that he had fallen or in some way collapsed against the painting.
He said the jury will hear that Shannon’s pulse was taken, he was given oxygen and was described as having a “sweaty forehead”.
However after a short while the medics on the scene decided his condition was not a cause for concern.
Brendan Grehan SC, defending, said Shannon accepts that the damage to the painting was caused by his hand coming into contact with it.
He said his client has a history of heart problems, and was taken to hospital by ambulance after the incident.
Shannon was then driven to a Garda station where he was seen by three different doctors over the course of 12 hours in custody.
He was brought back to hospital a second time the following morning.
The trial continues tomorrow before Judge Desmond Hogan and a jury of seven women and five men. It is expected to last five days.
Andrew Shannon History of Art Crime:
 http://arthostage.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/stolen-art-watch-shannon-goose-loose-in.html

Friday, November 08, 2013

Stolen Art Watch, Cornelius Gurlitt Nazi Art Haul In Munich Dominate Headlines & Art Crime Gang Jailed As Rhino Horn Irishman Appears In Manhattan Court

Court told how police sting led to millions in antiques

AN undercover police officer helped to recover millions of pounds worth of stolen antiques after infiltrating the Yorkshire gang who were hoarding them.
Three members of the gang were jailed yesterday over the scam in which they stored heritage pieces stolen from stately homes. Some of the items were from Newby Hall, in Ripon, which was designed by Sir Christopher Wren and is home to a prized collection of Chippendale furniture as well as Gobelins tapestries.

Other properties which were targeted included Lotherton Hall, near Leeds, another in North Yorkshire, Sion Hill, one of the last Edwardian country houses to be built in the region prior to the First World War, as well as Firle Place in Sussex, which dates from the late 15th century.
Among the valuables were a George III Pembroke Chippendale drop leaf table worth £500,000 and two Louis XVI vases valued at £950,000.

Darren Webster, 46, of Burnshaw Mews, Middleton, Leeds, was jailed for six-and-a-half years; Carl Rutter, of Silcoates Street, Wakefield, was jailed for six years and Brian Eaton, 70, of Chapel Road, Tankersley, in Barnsley, was jailed for four years. All three men pleaded guilty to conspiracy to handle stolen goods.

Leeds Crown Court heard police became aware of the their involvement by being told by Graham Harkin(actual thief of the said artworks) as part of a deal, then shortly after carrying out a drugs raid at Webster’s home in Middleton in April 2011.

A search recovered a computer memory stick and SIM card which contained photographs of stolen antiques.
An undercover police officer approached Eaton, as is always the case in these matters, pretending that he wanted to store stolen cars. After gaining his trust the officer, known as ‘Jason’, began to talk about buying stolen antiques.

Eaton told him that he knew someone who stored stolen antiques but any pieces bought would have to be shipped abroad because they were so well known.
‘Jason’ told the men that he knew a buyer overseas and was further able to gain their trust. All three gang members were arrested in September 2011.

The burglar responsible for targeting the stately homes, Graham Harkin, is currently serving nine years in prison, albeit with better conditions as a result of him guiding Police towards Eaton Webster and Rutter.

Jailing them, judge James Spencer said: “He could not have carried out those burglaries without some prospect of disposing of them. It is because of that that the real evil of handling exists.”

 Antiques stolen from North Yorkshire stately homes are recovered
ANTIQUES worth millions of pounds stolen from North Yorkshire stately homes were recovered after an undercover police sting operation traced three of the handlers involved.

A police officer posed as a middleman pretending to buy items for the overseas market and in the process tracked down a £500,000 Chippendale table and a £1.3m collection of Sevres and Meissen china.

Leeds Crown Court heard the table had been stolen in a burglary at Newby Hall, near Ripon, in 2006, and the porcelain from Firle Place, Sussex, in 2009.

Other burglaries had been carried out at Burtonfields Hall, Stamford Bridge, and Sion Hall, Kirby Wiske, Thirsk, where a £35,000 Delander clock was among items taken and recovered.

Graham Harkin, the burglar responsible for the break-in at Firle Place and others, was jailed for nine years in 2011 but would not say, publically, where the items had gone, Patrick Palmer, prosecuting, told the court.

However, by chance, after being tipped off, police carried out a drugs raid at the home of Darren Webster in Leeds and found numerous photos of stolen antiques.

Webster, 46, of Leeds, was jailed for six and a half years after admitting conspiracy to handle stolen goods and possession of cocaine and a stun gun. Carl Rutter, 49, of Wakefield, was jailed for six years for the conspiracy and Brian Eaton, 70, of Barnsley, was jailed for four years.

Yorkshire gang jailed for handling £5m of stolen antiques

Gang  
Darren Webster, Brian Eaton and Carl Rutter have all been jailed

Three men have been jailed for handling stolen antiques worth £5m from country houses.
All three had pleaded guilty to conspiracy to handle stolen goods earlier this year at Leeds Crown Court.
Darren Webster, 46, of Burnshaw Mews, Leeds, was jailed for six years and six months.
Carl Rutter 46, of Silcoates Street, Wakefield, was jailed for six years and Brian Eaton, 69, of Chapel Road, Tankersley, was jailed for four years.
According to police the valuables, reported stolen from country halls and estates in North Yorkshire and Sussex, included a pair of Louis XVI vases valued at almost £1m and a Chippendale table worth £500,000.
The antiques were recovered by officers in September 2011 after a year-long investigation.
They had been stolen from Newby Hall and Sion Hill in North Yorkshire and Firle Place in Sussex between 2007 and 2009.

Irishman Pleads Guilty in US Rhino Horns Case

An Irishman linked to a criminal Gypsy clan pleaded guilty Tuesday to charges he used forged documents to sell horns from endangered black rhinos to a New York collector for $50,000.
Michael Slattery wept, rubbed his face and waved his arms before entering the plea in federal court in Manhattan, prompting U.S. District Judge John Gleeson to comment, "You look like a nervous wreck."
Slattery, 23, told the judge he barely knows how to read but understood the trafficking charges.
"I knew I was doing wrong," the defendant said.
Asked later by Gleeson how he was doing in jail, Slattery claimed that one inmate had threated to "spin my head off," and that he'd overheard conversations about how a murder suspect "wanted me to sleep with him."
Prosecutors have identified Slattery as a member of Ireland's Gypsy minority, known there as travelers. They cited a letter from Irish authorities linking him to an Irish Gypsy criminal network based in the County Limerick village of Rathkeale that's suspected in dozens of thefts of rhino horns across Europe.
In Rathkeale, the travelers have purchased "most of the real estate in this town in recent years and shown incredible signs of wealth," the letter said.
According to Europol, thieves known as the Rathkeale Rovers have targeted museums, galleries, zoos, auction houses, antique dealers and private collections in Britain, continental Europe, the United States and South America. It says they were behind a heist this year by masked men who stole stuffed rhinoceros heads containing eight valuable horns from the warehouse of Ireland's National Museum.
U.S. authorities alleged that Slattery traveled from London to Houston in 2010 to try to buy two horns at a taxidermy auction house. Learning that he needed to be a resident of Texas to make the purchase, he recruited a day laborer to be a straw buyer. He and other unidentified suspects gave the straw buyer $18,000 in $100 bills to complete the deal, a complaint said.
Later that year, Slattery met with a Chinese buyer in Queens and sold four horns using endangered-species bills of sale with fake Fish and Wildlife Service logos on them, the complaint said. It's unclear where he got the additional two horns, it said.
Slattery was arrested in September at New Jersey's Newark Liberty Airport while boarding a flight to London. He faces a maximum term of about 2 ½ years at sentencing early next year, followed by deportation.
In 2011, two Irish nationals from Rathkeale were sentenced to six months behind bars on charges they bought black rhino horns in a sting operation in Colorado. Irish authorities say one of the men is Slattery's cousin.

Man pleads guilty to illegally selling four rhino horns in Queens 

Irish national Michael Slattery, Jr., linked to an overseas crew of grifters, pleaded guilty Tuesday to illegally selling four rhinoceros horns to a collector in Queens.

An Irish national linked to an overseas crew of grifters pleaded guilty Tuesday to illegally selling four rhinoceros horns to a collector in Queens.
Federal prosecutors say there's a thriving demand on the black market for the horns in China and Vietnam for medicinal purposes, and they sell for up to $30,000 per pound. Slattery is a reputed member of the Rathkeale Rovers, also known as "Irish Travelers," notorious for pulling scams in Europe and raiding museums for rhino horns.
Michael Slattery, Jr., admitted he traveled from County Limerick to Texas, where he enlisted a straw buyer to purchase a black rhinoceros head with two horns from a taxidermy shop.
RELATED: MOZAMBIQUE RHINOS NOW EXTINCT: EXPERTS
Slattery, 23, returned to New York City and sold four horns for $50,000 to an unidentified collector at a tea house in Flushing. It was unclear where he obtained the other two horns.
"Today's guilty plea highlights our commitment to protect endangered species, like the black rhinoceros, by prosecuting those who would profit from the rhinos' extinction," said Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch.
Slattery wept openly in Brooklyn Federal Court, and told the judge he's had some rough times in federal jail, including deflecting an accused murderer's request to bunk with him.
RELATED: INDIAN FOREST GUARDS RUSH TO RESCUE WOUNDED RHINO
"Some days I wish I wasn't born," he told Federal Judge John Gleeson. "One guy said he'd spin my head off if I came near him again."
"I'd stay away from that guy," Gleeson advised.
Slattery faces up to 33 months in prison when he's sentenced in January.

Germany's shame over looted art haul

Germany today is a peaceful, democratic nation that is in many ways a model to which the rest of the world should aspire. But its authorities’ handling of the hoard of Nazi-looted art found in Cornelius Gurlitt’s flat of reveals that, beneath the surface, severe problems still remain.
The indictment has several counts. The authorities sat on the discovery for eighteen months, during which time owners of the stolen property may well have died. Even now it has been revealed, they have refused to cooperate in any way with the restitution bodies, brushing away with contempt their requests for specific information about the contents. And they have somehow let — ‘been complicit in’ might even be more accurate — Herr Gurlitt simply disappear.
Those who deal with this issue every day say none of this is surprising. While the German government makes the right noises and usually does the right thing, further down the chain attitudes are far more unreconstructed. Many simply do not agree with the idea of restitution and refuse all but the most basic legally necessary engagement.
But the revelation that, far from doing their best to restore stolen property to its rightful owners, the German authorities have – at best – frustrated those efforts may have a positive impact in alerting the world to a Nazi scandal that remains a live issue.

Looted Nazi art: Germany’s ‘conspiracy of silence’

Restitution experts have condemned the German authorities’ handling of the discovery of a hoard of Nazi-looted artwork in a Munich flat.
Investigators faced a furious backlash after they admitted the haul of almost 1,400 paintings had been found two years ago and kept secret until a German magazine reported the case last weekend.
The authorities were also attacked for refusing to publish a full list of the items recovered — hampering attempts to reunite the works with Holocaust survivors and their heirs.
Jewish art specialists raised fears that German investigators could have been involved in a “conspiracy of silence” and accused the German authorities of “deliberately obstructing attempts to reunite the victims of the Nazis with their stolen property”.
Anne Webber, co-chair of the Commission for Looted Art in Europe, said: “The concealment in the past two years is as great a concern as the theft itself.
“The information is a matter of huge public interest and concern. The German government has a clear moral and ethical duty.
“The looting itself was declared a war crime. The authorities must commit to being open, transparent and credible.”
David Glasser, chairman and chief executive of the Ben Uri Collection of art of Jewish origin, said the authorities should have done more to “alert families that it was likely one of their heirlooms had been discovered, and brought some closure to a 75-year-old wound.
“This was a huge opportunity for the Bavarian authorities to demonstrate a moral leadership where the rights of the person should take equal if not greater priority than the state. It appears to be an opportunity lost.”
Valued at around £1 billion, the 121 framed pieces and 1,258 unframed works include paintings by masters including Picasso, Renoir and Matisse.
Reinhard Nemetz, the prosecutor leading the investigation, confirmed on Tuesday that exact details of all the items would not be revealed publicly.
He said authorities would “prefer people with a claim to get in touch with us to say which picture they’re missing, rather than the other way round”.
One observer pointed out that this is “like inviting someone to lunch but refusing to name the restaurant. If people don’t know what the hoard contains, they can’t know if it contains their stolen art ”.
Ms Webber criticised the lack of attention given to reuniting the art with its original owners.
She said: “We are calling on the German authorities to publish a list of the works as quickly as possible. It’s a matter of great concern that the prosecutors said they would not publish details.”
Mr Glasser said a list could have been checked against records stored by art experts based in Munich, with pieces ultimately returned to families within two months of the initial discovery.
Mr Nemetz defended the way the case had been handled and said his “primary attention” was on whether a crime had been committed and the “exceedingly complex legal position”. He said the public attention was proving “counter-productive”.
Much of the public focus has been on the emergence of previously unknown works, but Ms Webber and other specialists criticised the lack of attention given to reuniting the paintings with their original owners.
She said: “We are calling on the German authorities to publish a list of the works as quickly as possible. It’s a matter of great concern that the prosecutors said they would not publish details.”
Mr Glasser added: “Art museums could have prepared an initial full inventory including high resolution images and public provenance from gallery and exhibition labels in around six weeks.”
He said a list could have been checked against records stored by art experts based in Munich, with pieces ultimately returned to families within two months of the initial discovery.
Ms Webber said the size of the haul would encourage survivors’ families who had previously given up hope of finding looted art.
She was “inundated” with requests from around the world for information about the recovered works.
“The emails have been very moving. There’s a real sense of hope because people had clearly previously given up,” Ms Webber said.
“It shows the potential for how much art is still missing and how much stolen work is still in galleries. In a way it just encapsulates the fact that there are so many looted artworks.”
She said that while the size of the discovery in Munich was substantial, around 90 per cent of looted works still remain unrecovered.
The Claims Conference, which works to distribute restitution payments to Shoah survivors, also expressed its concerns over the handling of the case.
Chairman Julius Berman said: “Had this discovery been made public at the time it was found, families looking for their lost art would have been able to potentially identify works within this collection.
“Publicising the existence of Nazi-looted art is essential to the process of finding heirs. With the time that has been lost, every possible effort must now be made to determine the original owners of these artworks and locate them or their heirs.”
The artwork was found during a routine investigation by customs officials at the Munich flat of Cornelius Gurlitt.
He is the reclusive son of art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt, who was recruited by the Nazis to collect artwork regarded as “degenerate” by Hitler and the leaders of the Third Reich.
Mr Gurlitt’s current whereabouts are unknown.
Customs officials said the paintings had been “professionally stored” in one room of the flat and that it had taken three days to remove them. It is not known where the artwork is now being held.

Giving back the art stolen by Nazis

Among the many sins of the Nazi leaders who afflicted Europe for 12 years, until they were bludgeoned into surrender in 1945, is that they were unsurpassed as thieves and robbers.
Shocking and belated evidence of their greed exploded recently with the disclosure that a trove of over 1,400 works of art - likely looted, stolen or coerced from their owners - had been found in a shabby Munich apartment belonging to the elderly son of an art dealer in league with the Nazis.
The works, preliminarily valued at $1.35 billion, are described by The Wall Street Journal as comprising "one of the most significant collections of pre-war European art in the world." It includes art by Picasso, Matisse, Chagall, Klee, Kandinsky and Toulouse-Lautrec, even a 16th-century engraving by Albrecht Durer.
The art was amassed by Hildebrand Gurlitt, purged from his job as museum curator for showing modern works - and for being part Jewish. Nonetheless, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels charged Gurlitt with cleansing museums in Germany and occupied countries of "degenerate art." Hitler fancied himself an art connoisseur, but his tastes ran heavily to corny representational painting. Anything modern or abstract was deemed a corrupting influence.
Much of what Gurlitt confiscated found its way into his private collection instead of being destroyed or sold abroad. The treasures came to light two years ago in connection with a tax investigation of his son, Cornelius. The elder Gurlitt died in 1956.
The art has been removed to a secure warehouse for safekeeping. In the meantime, many questions remain unanswered. Why, for example, did it take two years for the existence of the cache to come to light?
German authorities cite the legal secrecy of tax investigations, but the collection's importance and value would seem to outweigh considerations of tax evasion by an 80-year-old man.
The Daily Beast reports that for the last 40 years, Cornelius Gurlitt owned a house in Salzburg, Austria, which has yet to be searched. It adds that an official from the prosecutor's office in Augsburg, Germany, would not say whether Gurlitt was alive or dead. The Nazis squirreled away a lot of looted property later recovered from Austrian salt mines, making the house a logical place to look.
One possible explanation for the delay is that authorities wanted to document the collection and, wherever possible, its provenance before the inevitable avalanche of claimants: descendants of the original Jewish owners who were expelled or exterminated, museums stripped by the Nazis, collectors forced to sell for a pittance.
The task of finding rightful owners is formidable. But simple justice demands that the German government at least try.

Documents Reveal How Looted Nazi Art Was Restored to Dealer

 Throughout the waning years of World War II, a band of Allied soldiers, art historians, curators and scholars labored to safeguard Europe’s cultural heritage and recover the millions of artworks and other treasures plundered by the Nazis and their collaborators. Nicknamed the Monuments Men, this group set up a string of temporary collection points for the valuables.
Among the art in their care was a cache of 115 paintings, 19 drawings and a half-dozen crates of objects that the British had found in Hamburg in 1945. The works were registered under the name of Hildebrand Gurlitt, according to documents unearthed this week in the National Archives in College Park, Md., by Marc Masurovsky, the founder of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project.
Now, six decades later, restitution experts said it is possible that this collection, once entrusted to the Monuments Men, is part of the astonishing stash of more than 1,400 works seized in 2012 by German investigators from the apartment of Gurlitt’s son Cornelius and brought to light this week. It is considered to be the largest trove of missing European art to have been discovered since the end of World War II.
For five years, the elder Gurlitt, one of a handful of German dealers whom the Nazis had anointed to sell art confiscated from Jews and museums and sold abroad for foreign currency, had insisted these works were rightfully his. With the European recovery effort finally winding down, officials at a collection center in Wiesbaden agreed to return the cache to Gurlitt.
On Dec. 15, 1950, the leader of the Allied unit, Theodore Heinrich, an American, signed the papers releasing the art to Gurlitt. The names and descriptions of a handful of paintings in the cache returned to Hildebrand Gurlitt — including gems by Otto Dix, Max Beckmann and Marc Chagall — appear to match those once hidden in the cluttered apartment of his son.
The State Department in Washington says it is pushing the German authorities to make public a list of the seized works. Without the list, it is impossible to confirm with certainty that any of the pieces returned in 1950 to Hildebrand Gurlitt are the same as those seized last year. Mr. Masurovsky, however, said he believes that at least some of the works returned by the Allies in 1950 are the same.
What can be confirmed is that at least eight of the paintings that were returned in 1950, and that the elder Gurlitt maintained he had legitimately acquired were, in fact, stolen by the Nazis. These eight are currently listed in a database of looted art that the Nazis had stored at the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris after they occupied France. Those works are all by the French painter Michel Georges-Michel, whose apartment and studio were ransacked by Nazi agents in 1941.
Mr. Masurovsky and other restitution experts said the 1950 list might help with the identification of works that the Germans recently took from Cornelius Gurlitt’s apartment.
Among the other items returned to Hildebrand Gurlitt 63 years ago were dozens of works by German Expressionists including Dix, Georg Grosz (“Two Women and a Man Walking”); Erich Heckel; Max Beckmann (“Lion Tamer” and “Woodcutters”); Christian Rohlfs (“Yellow Flowers” and “White Flowers”); and Franz Lenk. Italian, French and Dutch masters were on the Allied list, as well, including Guardi’s “Entrance to a Monastery,” Fragonard’s “Anna and the Holy Family,” Caspar Netscher’s “Boys Blowing Bubbles,” and landscapes attributed to Ruysdael and Rombouts. The collection included Gustave Courbet’s “The Father” and “Landscape With Rocks”; and Max Liebermann’s “Wagon in the Dunes” and “Two Riders on a Beach.”
Mr. Masurovsky pointed to the return as an instance when the Monuments Men let looted art slip through their hands.
Historians have pointed out, however, that finding the legal owner in the confusion of postwar Europe, without the aid of computerized databases and, often, documentation, was extremely difficult. France, for example, still has nearly 2,000 works in its museums that it knows were looted, but cannot properly identify owners. 
 Hildebrand Gurlitt was an art historian who had twice been stripped of posts because he had a Jewish grandparent; nonetheless, he had the expertise and international connections the Germans needed to move plundered works to market. He also crisscrossed Nazi-occupied territory during the war looking for treasures to fill Hitler’s grand plans for a museum in Linz, Austria. German and American investigators had questioned Gurlitt about his dealings after the war, archival documents show, but he insisted that all of the art that remained was his own. Other works that he had gathered for the Nazis, he said, as well as his records were destroyed in the firebombing of Dresden in 1945.
As for the Modern works, which the Nazis labeled degenerate, many had been discarded or sold off from museums by the Third Reich and could have been legally acquired by Gurlitt and other collectors — even for a pittance.
So far only one among the more than 1,400 works that were taken from Cornelius Gurlitt’s squalid Munich apartment has been positively identified. Marianne Rosenberg, the granddaughter of the renowned French dealer Paul Rosenberg, confirmed that a photograph of a Matisse portrait of a woman wearing pearls that was released by German officials this week matches one owned by her family. (German authorities had previously said that at least one painting used to belong to Rosenberg, who imprinted his gallery’s stamp on the back of all his works.) 
“The Rosenberg family is, of course, delighted to see a color reproduction of the beautiful Matisse which until now had only existed for them as a black and white photograph in their archives of looted art,” Ms. Rosenberg said in an email, adding that the family “is proceeding diligently and carefully with a claim for restitution. The Rosenberg family still insists, however, that the German authorities must promptly do the right thing and provide photographs and lists of all the other items.”

British doctor launches legal fight for art in looted Nazi trove which includes previously unknown works by Chagall and Matisse

  • Dr Michael Hulton, 67, is the great-nephew of famous Jewish art collector Alfred Fleichtheim
  • His galleries were ransacked after he fled from Berlin to London in 1933
  • Dr Hulton says some of the 1,400 paintings found in Cornelius Gurlitt's Munich apartment belonged to his great-uncle
  • This includes The Lion Tamer by Max Beckmann

Dr Michael Houlton is launching a legal bid to recover paintings he claims were looted from his family by the Nazis

Dr Michael Houlton is launching a legal bid to recover paintings he claims were looted from his family by the Nazis


A British doctor has launched a legal battle to recover masterpieces looted from his family by the Nazis that he believes form part of a $1 billion treasure trove of paintings discovered in Germany.
Dr. Michael Hulton, 67, is the great-nephew of Alfred Fleichtheim, a famous Jewish art collector whose galleries were ransacked after he fled from Berlin to London in 1933.
Now working as an anaesthetist in San Francisco, Dr Hulton told the Mail that his lawyers reached an agreement two years ago with Cornelius Gurlitt - the son of Hildebrand Gurlitt, an art dealer who traded plundered works for the Nazis – after he tried to sell a painting once owned by Mr Fleichtheim for £720,000.
The painting – The Lion Tamer by Max Beckmann – had been given to the collector by the artist himself in return for 'living expenses.'
'I asked him at the time, "Are there any others?" We had no idea.’
It wasn’t until Sunday when Dr. Hulton’s relatives sent him a BBC report saying German customs officials had found 1,400 paintings in Guritt’s cluttered Munich apartment that he realised he may have discovered what happened to many more of his great uncle’s stolen collection.
Dr Hulton said he had not been contacted by the German authorities since the find last year.
He believes the hiudden cache of artworks it may contain other works by Beckmann.
Mr Flechteim also owned works by the likes of Picasso, Klee, Monet, Renoir and Matisse.
Sold: The Lion Tamer by painter Max Beckmann was one of the paintings in the collection Gurlitt has already sold
Sold: Dr Michael Hulton claims the painting The Lion Tamer by Max Beckmann, which Gurlitt tried to sell for £750,000 before the collection was discovered, belonged to his great-uncle Alfred Fleichtheim
Holding place: The £600-a-month apartment in Munich where officials discovered the hidden paintings
Holding place: Cornelius Gurlitt, lived off the collection and as a consequence he has managed to survive his entire life without any official bank account, pension or insurance. Pictured: The Munich apartment where officials discovered the hidden paintings
‘My German lawyer is certainly very well known to the German authorities. At the very least it would have been courteous for him to have been notified.
'They say they don’t want any Tom, Dick or Harry to turn up but with all due rerspect we are no Tom, Dick or Harry.
'It is a matter of justice and family honour. It really hit a nerve. We will be making a formal application in Germany to remind Munich that we don’t consider the mater closed.
'I just wish my father was alive to see this, although he would be over 100 now.'
Remarkable: A painting from Henry Matisse 'Sitzende Frau' ('Sitting Woman') - one of the previously unknown works found at Gurlitter's flat - is projected on a screen during a news conference in Augsburg
Remarkable: A painting from Henry Matisse called Sitzende Frau (Sitting Woman) - one of the previously unknown works found at Gurlitt's flat - is projected on a screen during a news conference in Augsburg. It is worth an estimated £50-£60million
Never-before-seen: A painting of Otto Dix
Never-before-seen: A painting of Otto Dix called Selbstportrait Rauchend (Selfportrait Smoking)


Control: Hitler only liked classical art and held exhibitions of modern 'dissident' pieces to show German people what not to like
Control: Hitler only liked classical art and held exhibitions of modern 'dissident' pieces to show German people what not to like. Many of those paintings that appeared in those shows have been found in Gurlitt's collection



Looters: American soldiers are pictured discovering one of the Nazi's enormous art stash during the war
Loot: American soldiers are pictured discovering one of the Nazi's enormous art stash during the war

Friday, November 01, 2013

Stolen Art Watch, Strad, Serbia & Snapshot of Art Crime


Stolen Delacroix painting found in Belgrade

A painting worth more than 600,000 euros ($825,000) by French master Eugene Delacroix, which was stolen last November from a central Parisian art gallery, has been found in Belgrade and repatriated, a source close to the case said Thursday.
A 50-year-old Serbian has been arrested in Paris on suspicion of having snatched the 1833 work entitled "The Arabs of Oran" from a gallery on the chic rue Saint-Honore, which runs parallel to the Louvre museum.
The man is also suspected of having stolen a crystal statue worth 40,000 euros from a Paris boutique of designer glassware Lalique a day before the Delacroix theft.
Delacroix, who lived from 1798 to 1863, was the most important member of the French Romantic movement.
Art Hostage Comments:
The truth of this matter is back in June 2013 the Delacroix painting was recovered in Belgrade by Special Elite French Police (The Brigade for the repression of Banditry (BRB)) liaising with Serbian Police. The Serbian Man was arrested in Paris September 2013 and remains in custody. Only now has the painting returned to France.

The Pink Panthers – radio review

Documentary-maker Havana Marking gains a remarkable insight into the high-octane workings of a gang of jewellery thieves
• The Pink Panthers
 
CCTV footage of jewel heist
The Pink Panthers in action … the gang carried out more than 340 armed robberies across the world. Photograph: Observer
A magnificent example of investigative journalism aired this week with The Pink Panthers, a throwback to when reporters were able to rely on more than spit'n'grit for a good story. The World Service documentary gained extraordinary access to members of the world's most prolific network of jewellery thieves, responsible for more than 340 armed robberies across the world worth more than $330m in loot.
Havana Marking meets safe cracker Mike in a beach bar on the coast of Montenegro; he's wearing a pink polo shirt. "I don't have a badge that says 'Pink Panther'," he laughs. But his stories are Marking's key to unlocking the secrets of a gang that rose from the chaos of wartime Yugoslavia to conducting headline-grabbing heists in Dubai, London, Tokyo, Paris and beyond. Through him, she meets Lela, now retired but once employed to scout out targeted shops, while playing at "being Madonna" with her own driver, designer wardrobe and hair stylist to seem credible. "I was extremely good-looking at the time, I had to look very powerful," she says, as the two explain how they lured a Spanish shop owner to fall in love with her, so the gang could bash through his wall into the jeweller's next door. "I didn't go to seduce him, but my very appearance contributed to his joy." Said shop owner gave Lela a job, despite the fact that she spoke no Spanish. Weeks of planning later, the gang made off with a safe filled with jewellery, money "and a fake penis … a dildo? I bet they didn't declare that to the police."
With all the high-octane thrills this documentary delivers, it's easy to forget that Marking is dealing with serious, hardened criminals – such as Green, the murderous Bosnian Serb paramilitary turned diamond dealer – and only touching on the work of detectives such as Jan Glassey, in Geneva. The Swiss intelligence officer had made it his life's mission to catch the thieves and Marking notes the stuffed pink panther toy hanging in a noose in the corner of his office. It was, he says, a joke present from his colleagues. One that probably serves as a reminder of how close he has come to completing the job: since 2007, 189 panthers have been arrested and jailed. Meanwhile, Mike admits the glamour and the protection once afforded to the criminals in the Balkans is slipping. He'll always be paranoid, he says, looking over his shoulder and taking tranquillisers to sleep: "It is a consequence of the job."

Stradivarius offered by thieves for £100 could fetch £2m at auction

Violin made in 1696 was stolen at train station cafe in London in 2010 and recovered in west Midlands this year

Stradivarius played by owner Min-Jin Kym - video Link to video: Stradivarius played by owner Min-Jin Kym A Stradivarius that thieves once tried to sell for £100 may fetch more than £2m when it goes for auction in December, ending its long association with an internationally acclaimed violinist.
The violin, then valued at a mere £1.2m, was snatched at a Pret a Manger cafe at Euston station, London, in November 2010. It had been played by the Korean-born, London-based musician Min-Jin Kym since she was a teenager. Its discovery this year after a long police investigation left her "on cloud nine" and "with an incredible feeling of elation", she said.
Kym spoke at the time of her "difficult journey" and sense of responsibility for the loss. After the theft she acquired another Stradivarius.
"The violin was a faithful friend for many years and I was devastated by the loss," she said on Monday. "Its recovery is an absolute relief and I am eager to hear the violin once more and I wish its next owner all the best of luck and success."
The instrument, found at an unnamed property in the West Midlands, was returned to insurers in the summer. Jason Price, director of the Tarisio auction house, said he was not at liberty to say who was the present owner. "Min-Jin has replaced it with something else, she had no other option. It is a 1705 Stradivarius, nine years later than this one but it is similar and also a great instrument."
Made in Cremona, Italy, Kym's former violin is one of about 600 surviving instruments made by Antonio Stradivari. Price said that although the instrument was not from Stradivari's golden period of around 1710-20, it was very similarly striking. "Pre-1700, Stradivari was quite experimental and innovative," he said. "He made some instruments of slightly longer body length and varied proportions of his violins, violas and cellos.

Stradivarius  
The 1696 Stradivarius violin. 
"This 1696 violin is, however, of normal proportions and is more or less the model Stradivari settled upon to use for the rest of his career. Interestingly, instruments from this pre-1700 period probably have more of Stradivari himself in them. In the later periods Stradivari was in his 70s and, although he was active and working, it is clear he had a very productive workshop, with his sons and others assisting in the output."
Price added: "The beauty of this violin is the wood used for the back. It is sensational maple. It is really glamorous, gorgeous stuff. The bridge was removed but that's of no consequence. The bridge is held in place by the tension of the strings and it is frequently changed over the lifetime of an instrument.
"This is an instrument very much designed to be a player's instrument. It deserves to be played on. It will probably go someone like Min-Jin, an emerging soloist or professional orchestra player or a chamber musician. It's rather amazing that these instruments survive for 300 years – when you think that a professional violinist has one under their chin for four hours a day and carries it with them by all means of transportation.
"It shows the care that musicians give their instruments that more of them don't go missing or get irreparably damaged. It is an extremely attractive violin and the sound is first-class."
Online bidding will start at £1m but the instrument could fetch more than £2m. "The reason I can imagine it going for much more than the more conservative price we have is that it is an extremely usable violin," said Price.
Min-Jin bought it in around 2000. Its history before that is unknown, but it has a certificate from the English expert Charles Beare and bears its original label.
Price put the top three Stradivarius violins as the £9.8m Lady Blunt once owned by Lord Byron's granddaughter, sold by the Nippon Music Foundation to an anonymous owner via a Tarisio auction in 2011; the 1716 Messiah (or Messie) at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; and the 1716 Medici, exhibited in the Accademia galleries, Florence.
In 2011 John Maughan was jailed for four and a half years at Blackfriars crown court in London for the theft of Kym's violin. He and accomplices had tried to sell it in an internet cafe not far from Euston. Two teenagers were sentenced for their involvement.
British Transport police chased leads across Europe – one false trail involved an instrument in Bulgaria that turned out to be a replica made no more than a century ago – but are still investigating how it ended up where it did. They always believed the violin was so rare and distinctive that established dealers would recognise it as stolen property.
"The police used to call Min-Jin every Friday afternoon, which just shows the amount of care they showed. Their efforts to recover the violin went well beyond the call of duty," said Price, explaining why a portion of the proceeds and sales commission would go to authorities who helped recover it.
On the subject of the desirability of Kym's old violin, Price added: "Is it worth more as a result of being stolen? Probably not, but is sure adds colour and intrigue to the history of the instrument."

 Bidding starts at £1 million. A portion of the proceeds and sales commission will benefit the authorities ;-) who were instrumental in recovering the violin.

Romania Picasso Thief Claims Stolen Artworks May Be Fakes

The accused ringleader of Romanian thieves who stole seven works by artists including Picasso and Matisse claims they may have been fakes and he fell victim to a set-up aimed at pocketing the insurance money, his lawyer said.
Radu Dogaru, who admitted to stealing the artworks, had an as-yet-unidentified accomplice working inside the Kunsthal museum in Rotterdam who helped him enter the premises and avoid police patrols, attorney Catalin Dancu told reporters in Bucharest today. The museum won’t comment on “allegations of lawyers from suspects,” spokeswoman Sabine Parmentier said in an e-mailed response to a Bloomberg question.

'Tete d’Arlequin'  
"Tete d’Arlequin" by Picasso. 
A court in the Romanian capital is hearing statements from the perpetrators of the October 2012 theft of the artworks, insured for a combined 18 million euros ($24.6 million). Dancu’s account differs from statements in the prosecutors’ file, which outlines how thieves stole the paintings in less than three minutes from the Kunsthal after they forced an emergency door open with a set of pliers.
“What serious person would have original paintings with a market value of 100 million euros exhibited in such a way?” Dancu said. “The answer is that they’re either irresponsible, in which case they have to pay, or the paintings were perfect copies and someone duped the insurance company.”
Insurer Aon Plc (AON) paid 17 million euros to Triton Foundation, which owned the artworks at the time of the theft, Dancu said in September. Judge Adrian Chitoiu said the admissions to the crime may reduce the defendants’’ sentences by a third.
Burned Paintings?
The theft of works by Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, Lucian Freud, Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin and Meyer de Haan ranks among the most spectacular art heists of the last decades. The case has turned on whether any of the artworks still survive after Dogaru’s mother, Olga Dogaru, first confessed to burning all of them in her stove, only to withdraw her statement on July 22. She now claims that none were incinerated.
If Kunsthal and other Dutch authorities refuse to cooperate, Dogaru will hire lawyers to press charges against the museum and Rotterdam city council for neglectful management of the art works, Dancu said. Dogaru wouldn’t reveal the name of the museum employee who allegedly helped him and his accomplices enter the museum and on the night of the heist, Dancu said.
A scientific analysis of the ashes in Olga Dogaru’s stove showed they contained fragments of oil paintings, according to Ernest Oberlander-Tarnoveanu, the director of the Romanian museum that carried out the tests.
The stolen paintings belong to a private collection managed by the Triton Foundation, started by Rotterdam port entrepreneur Willem Cordia. The collection consists of about 250 paintings, drawings and sculptures from the period 1860 to 1970.

The Billionaire, the Secretary, and the (Possibly) Stolen Monet

British hedge fund manager Alan Howard made waves in the art world in 2010 when he reportedly bought an original oil painting from Claude Monet’s “Water Lilies” series from a London art dealer for $43 million.
Turns out, the painting may have been stolen.
Not only that, but this particular Monet – full name: “Japanese Footbridge Over the Water-Lily Pond at Giverny” – comes with a uniquely scandalous backstory. Imelda Marcos, the one-time First Lady of the Philippines, whose profligate spending on the country’s dime ended when her husband, Ferdinand Marcos, was forced into exile in 1986, once owned it. And her former secretary has been accused of stealing it from her.
Now the 1899 painting is a key piece of evidence in the criminal trial of that ex-aide, Vilma Bautisa, which began in New York City in mid-October. The 74-year-old Bautista has been charged with conspiracy after she and two nephews tried to sell the painting (and several others from Marcos’ New York City townhouse) in 2010 after the former first lady’s properties were seized by the new Philippine government in the 1980s. Bautista faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted of the charges.
“It’s a simple story of greed, opportunism and fraud,” Garrett Lynch, an assistant district attorney, said to the jury at Bautista's trial, according to The New York Times.
Speaking of greed, Marcos – whose spending habits while First Lady are the stuff of legend: a closet with 3,000 pairs of designer shoes, $3-millon-in-a-day shopping sprees in New York, artwork by a range of old masters, and even several Manhattan skyscrapers including the Woolworth Building – remains active in Philippine politics and is now serving as a member of the country’s House of Representatives.
Howard, for his part, was a good faith purchaser of the painting and has no part in Bautista's trail.

Valuable work of art to be ‘stolen’ in front of TV audience

British illusionist and all-round trickster Derren Brown is to stage an art robbery next month – in front of potentially millions of TV viewers.
Brown (42) will employ a crew of pensioners to target an artwork owned by millionaire businessman and art collector Ivan Massow. The one-off special, Derren Brown: The Great Art Robbery, will air in December on Channel 4. Digital Spy reports: “Brown will train his team the basics of pulling off a gallery theft, as well as how to move in perfect synchronicity and deceive security guards.” A twist to the “crime” is that Brown will tell Massow in advance which painting will be stolen, and what time the theft will happen. “He will also provide Massow a photograph of the robber,” says Digital Spy, adding a quote from Brown: “This has been nerve-racking for me and my team, leaving such an extraordinary task entirely in the hands of a group of contributors to pull off. The idea was to use the fact that the elderly tend to be treated as invisible as a strength. Infamous “There’s only so much training you can give, so many worst-case scenarios you can try to cover. I’m used to feeling in control with these shows – but not with this one. It’s a big caper – fun, edge-of-seat, hopefully taking you to unexpected places.”

Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/361320#ixzz2jPPfBQri

U.S.A.

Museum-quality antiques stolen during home burglary in south Houston

Antiques stolen 
Detectives say these are some of the antiques that were stolen during a home burglary in south Houston in late August. Detectives are investigating a home burglary in south Houston during which several antiques were stolen. It happened between August 21 and August 22 at a home in the 3500 block of MacGregor Way.
According to Crime Stoppers, at least one suspect broke the glass back door, entered the house and stole several museum-quality antiques. Authorities did not provide an estimated value of the items taken.
Now detectives are hoping to get a tip that could lead them to the suspect(s) and recover the stolen antiques.

SAUGERTIES — A Wawarsing man accused of peddling stolen antiques to local pawnshops has been arrested, Saugerties police say.
Aaron Eaton, 24, of the Colonial Motel in Wawarsing, is charged with possession of stolen property, a felony.
He was picked up at his residence Wednesday afternoon by Ulster County sheriff’s deputies on an arrest warrant. The antiques were taken during a burglary in May from a John Street residence, police say, and later recovered at several pawnshops. The pawnshops led police to Eaton, police say. Eaton was being held at Ulster County Jail in lieu of $1,500 cash bail.

No charges for school board member in Buffalo Thunder art theft

Pojoaque Valley school board member Jon Paul Romero won’t face prosecution for reportedly stealing a sculpture of an iguana from the Buffalo Thunder Resort & Casino.
Brett Chomer’s 4-foot-long, 100- to 150-pound bronze lizard with a turquoise patina, valued at between $3,500 and $5,000, was reported missing from its display just outside the resort’s Red Sage bar and restaurant Sept. 27.

An affidavit for a search warrant filed by the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office says a surveillance video caught a man identified as Romero taking the piece as he left the bar Sept. 26.
Deputies who went to Romero’s house, 28 Wymas Drive in Cuyamungue, the next day found no one at home, but saw the iguana sculpture on the living room floor through the open blinds of a window.
The incident report says that when deputies called Romero on his cellphone, he gave them permission to enter his residence and take the artwork, but they waited until they had a search warrant to enter the house.
Romero “couldn’t recall how that happened,” District Attorney Angela “Spence” Pacheco said Thursday. “I’ll leave it at that.”
Pacheco said because the sculpture was quickly recovered, Romero was neither arrested nor charged, and her office decided not to prosecute him for what could have been a third-degree felony.
Instead, Pacheco said, Romero was referred to a pre-prosecution diversion program, through which he will get counseling for whatever personal issues might have caused him to steal the sculpture. State law allows pre-prosecution diversions for third- and fourth-degree felonies if the perpetrator has no felony convictions and no record of any violent felonies. If the person fails to complete the program, charges can be filed later.
Romero, 45, has been charged six times for driving while intoxicated and was convicted twice of misdemeanor DWI over the past 22 years. The other four cases were dismissed. His driver’s license has been revoked four times by the state Motor Vehicles Division, and he has filed numerous petitions to have it restored.
Those records became an issue in 2010, when Romero ran unsuccessfully in the Democratic primary for the District 1 Santa Fe County Commission seat. In his initial interviews with The New Mexican, Romero said he had only been arrested twice for DWI and convicted once.
“I haven’t been a saint,” Romero said after admitting the six charges. “I’ve made mistakes. I’ve learned from them. That’s why I’m on the DWI planning council.”
Romero, who did not return calls for comment on the alleged theft, has a civil engineering degree from The University of New Mexico and has owned his own planning, land development and construction management company, Southwest Design LLC, for 15 years. He was elected to the Pojoaque Valley School Board in 2009 and was re-elected earlier this year.
Pacheco said Thursday that she did not give special treatment to Romero and would refer any eligible person to the pre-prosecution diversion program.
“Let’s say [you] got really drunk one night and went to La Fonda and walked out with a priceless lamp,” she said. “You were drunk and didn’t know what you were doing. The next day, you’re like, ‘Oh, my God,’ and then the police show up and you’re like, ‘Here, take it. It was stupid. I never should have done that.’ But they do a report and they forward it to us, so, theoretically, you have committed a larceny. …
“It annoys me that people think that I would treat him differently,” the district attorney said. “I’m not. Like I say, I would treat you the same way.”
Lt. William Pacheco of the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office said he remains puzzled by the case.
“Why in the heck would you take a 4-foot iguana when they know who you are?” he asked. “He frequents the restaurant. … He’s a common patron.”
Lt. Pacheco said deputies who investigated the case watched the surveillance video, but he never got a copy. Because the incident took place on Pojoaque Pueblo land, the video can only be released by the tribal judge or pueblo governor. He said Gov. George Rivera has said he would only release the video to the District Attorney’s Office.
Rivera said late Thursday that he preferred to let the sheriff and district attorney — rather than tribal or federal authorities — handle the case. “We got the piece back, so we’re not going to spend any more time and money on it,” he said. “We just left it up to the sheriff and the DA.”

Vienna museum director quits in Nazi looted art row

The director of Vienna's Leopold Museum, home to extensive collections of work by Austrian artists such as Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt, has quit in a row over Nazi-looted art.
Tobias Natter said he could no longer stay at the museum after some of its most senior staff joined a controversial new foundation associated with Klimt's illegitimate son, film director Gustav Ucicky, whose works included Nazi propaganda.
The so-called Klimt Foundation has 14 Klimt works - four oil paintings and 10 drawings. The ownership of at least one, a portrait of Gertrude Loew, has been disputed for years by her heirs, who say it was stolen by the Nazis and want it back.

The Leopold Museum has recently tried to open a new chapter in its history after fighting numerous claims and in some cases settling financially with heirs of the previous Jewish owners of art works stolen after Hitler's 1938 annexation of Austria.
Many were sold at auction in Vienna after 1945 and then bought from their new owners by Rudolf Leopold, who began amassing his collection in the 1950s and resisted restitution claims until his death in 2010.
The museum last year settled a claim over Schiele's "Houses by the Sea" with the heirs of Jenny Steiner, a silk factory owner whose valuable art collection was seized by the Nazi regime in 1938.
"It's a sad truth that for years the museum was known worldwide as being synonymous with looted art. Why should we besmirch ourselves with this theme again?" asked Natter in a telephone interview with Reuters.
Natter was director of the museum for just two years. His shows included "Naked Men", an exhibition which invited nudists to its opening night and became so popular that it later moved to Paris.
Art historian Sophie Lillie, who documented the fates of 148 collections seized by the Nazis from Viennese Jews in her 2003 book "Was einmal war" (What once was), said Natter was to be commended for his decision to resign.
"I think the Leopold Museum has tried to some extent to resolve its problems because there was such media pressure on them. The spotlight is really on them now," she told Reuters.
Two researchers are working through the museum's 6,000-strong collection to establish the provenance of as many pieces as possible, a museum spokesman said.
The Austrian state transferred the Leopold collection, which it had bought, into a private foundation in 1994 and helped build the museum to house it.
MISSING MASTERPIECE
The Nazi regime systematically plundered hundreds of thousands of art works from museums and individuals. An unknown number of works is still missing, and museums worldwide have held investigations into the provenance of their exhibits.
A Dutch commission investigating the looting of property in the Netherlands during the Nazi era said on Tuesday said it had identified 139 works of art with problematic origins in Amsterdam's famed Rijksmuseum.
Austrian laws on looted art restitution are now being put to the test by the case of Klimt's monumental 1902 Beethoven Frieze, which pays homage to the German composer and is on permanent display in Vienna's Secession museum.
The heirs of its former owner Erich Lederer, whose Jewish family fled when Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938, may get the frieze back if a review supports their claim that he was forced to sell it to the Austrian state at a knock-down price.
The Klimt foundation has commissioned independent research into the provenance of its works, and says the investigation of the Gertrude Loew portrait will finish by the end of the year.

139 Artworks Stolen From Jews During WWII Found in Dutch Museums

A woman looks at the pictures called 'The Apocalypse' by German Renaissance painter Albrecht Duerer during a preview of the 'Duerer' exhibition at the Staedel museum in Frankfurt October 22, 2013. The exhibition opens tomorrow and runs until February 2, 2014.  REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach (GERMANY - Tags: ENTERTAINMENT)
A woman looks at the pictures called 'The Apocalypse' by German Renaissance painter Albrecht Duerer during a preview of the 'Duerer' exhibition at the Staedel museum in Frankfurt October 22, 2013. The exhibition opens tomorrow and runs until February 2, 2014. REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach (GERMANY - Tags: ENTERTAINMENT)
At least 139 of the artworks seen in various Dutch museums were determined to have been stolen from the Jews during the 1933 to 1945 World War II invasion by the Nazis.

A probe into the country's art acquisitions conducted by the Netherlands Museums Association yielded some 69 paintings, two sculptures, 31 decorative art objects, 13 Jewish ritual objects and 24 drawings have "potentially problematic history."
"These objects are either thought or known to have been looted, confiscated or sold under duress," Siebe Weide, director of the Netherlands Museums Association, said. Among the paintings the Nazi included in their loot were from painting masters Matisse, Klee and Kandinsky.
Coinciding with the launch of the Web site http://www.musealeverwervingen.nl that details the artwork pieces and their histories, the aim is eventually to contact family members or heirs of the original owners.
The Web site is initially available in Dutch. An English translation will be launched by end 2013.
Returning the precious artworks to their rightful owners is "both a moral obligation and one that we have taken upon ourselves," Mr Weide said.
The investigation probed a total of 162 Dutch museums. The 139 questionable objects came from 41 different museums. Out of the total, only 61 so far have been linked to their original owners.
Among the potentially questionable artworks are:
  • Kandinsky's "View of Murnau with Church"
  • Kandinsky's "Painting with Houses"
  • Matisse's 1921 "Odalisque"
As to museums, the Gemeentemuseum, Hague's main modern art venue, has the most number of questionable artworks at 19 pieces. It was followed by the Stedelijk, Amsterdam's main modern art museum, with 16 pieces, and Amsterdam's celebrated Rijksmuseum with nine pieces. The latter has the 17th-century silver salt cellar by Johannes Lutma.
"It was no easy task, but our museums always realised the importance of the research. The fact that much time has passed since the end of the Second World War should not be a reason not to do the research."
"The Museum Acquisitions research from 1933 gets to the heart of what museums do: studying their collections and telling the story to the public," Mr Weide said.

Heirs Win Back Nazi-Looted Art, Lose Others in Auction

The heirs of Max Stern, a Jewish art dealer who fled Nazi Germany after he was forced to close his gallery, today announced the recovery of a painting he lost 76 years ago.
That is only half the story. They may have lost track of two more pictures that Stern was forced to sell for good.
Andreas Achenbach’s 1837 landscape was offered at Van Ham Fine Art Auctions in Cologne in May. Encouraged by Van Ham, the consignor agreed to negotiate with Stern’s estate. The painting was presented in a ceremony at the Canadian Embassy in Berlin.
Two other pictures in the Van Ham catalog of the May event also belonged to Stern, yet the consignor of these refused to negotiate with the dealer’s heirs.
He said his grandfather bought the works legally at the 1937 Nazi-forced auction of Stern’s gallery, according to a person familiar with his letter to Van Ham.
“This kind of situation happens frequently,” said Anne Webber, co-chair of the Commission for Looted Art in Europe. “Heirs are often dependent on the goodwill of private owners. Some consignors may not want to deal with what their grandparents did.”
Van Ham returned the two paintings to the consignor and declined to reveal his name to Stern’s heirs, leaving them with little hope of recovering the artworks.

‘Reluctant’ Trade

The Stern estate’s experience spotlights the difficulties heirs face in tracing and reclaiming the countless Nazi-looted artworks that have vanished into German private collections, even when they are offered for sale by auction houses.
“Members of the art trade have been reluctant to work with claimants on the return of Holocaust-era works,” Clarence Epstein, director of the Max Stern Art Restitution Project at Concordia University in Montreal, wrote in an e-mail.
While museums are morally accountable under international principles endorsed by the German government on returning Nazi-looted art, German art dealers and auction houses often pursue strictly legal arguments. Under German law, the statute of limitations for theft expires after 30 years, and claimants have little hope of winning title in court.
Max Stern took over his father’s Dusseldorf art gallery in 1934, a year after the Nazis seized power. Stern was informed in 1935 that as a Jew, he could no longer practice his profession.
After the forced sale of his gallery’s contents at the Lempertz auction house in Cologne -- for which Stern never got the revenue -- he fled to London in 1938, later making his way to Canada. He settled in Montreal and became one of the most important art dealers in Canada.

Tracing Works

He died in 1987 without children, leaving the bulk of his estate to three universities: Concordia and McGill in Montreal and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 2002, the colleges began a campaign to recover the lost art, creating the Max Stern Art Restitution Project, administered by Concordia.
The two pictures returned to Van Ham’s consignor -- “Canal in Dordrecht” by Hans Herrmann and Jakob Becker’s “Children’s Festival in the Country” -- are among about 400 Stern’s heirs are trying to trace.
They have recovered 11 so far. Epstein says most of the rest are probably in German private collections.
“There are still thousands and thousands of works of looted art that have not been returned and the art trade continues to sell disputed works,” Webber said.

‘Powerless Claimants’

“The claimants are powerless in the process. The balance of power is in favor of the possessor of the art.”
While Sotheby’s (BID) and Christie’s International have teams of researchers checking provenance, the smaller German houses often rely uniquely on the services of the Art Loss Register, a London-based company with a database of stolen art.
Yet all three Stern paintings in the Van Ham catalog for the May sale have been listed since July 2005 with photographs on lostart.de, the German government’s database of art missing after World War II, according to Michael Franz, who administrates the website.
Van Ham submits all catalogs to the Art Loss Register, Anne Srikiow, a spokeswoman for Van Ham, said by telephone from Cologne. If there is any reason to be skeptical about a work’s provenance, the company conducts some basic checks, she said.
“We can’t do it with every piece,” Srikiow said. It is not company policy to routinely check lostart.de, she said.
In contrast, Sotheby’s has four provenance researchers, said Richard Aronowitz, who heads the London research team. They check the painting itself, the company’s own database built up over 15 years, the artist’s catalogue raisonne and the main lists of lost works published by national governments.

Loss Register

The findings are sent to the Art Loss Register, which runs a second check.
“Of say 5,000 lots that we examine a year, 50 to 60 may raise concerns serious enough that we have to send someone to investigate in archives abroad,” Aronowitz said. “Out of those maybe 10 to 15 will be unrestituted Nazi-looted artworks.”
When disputed works come up at auction in Germany, claimants may not be able to prevent a sale even if they succeed in tracking down the work.
In 2010, heirs of the painter Max Liebermann failed to prevent the sale of a sketch by the artist at the Hamburg auction house Hauswedell & Nolte.
The heirs’ lawyer wrote requesting more research before the sale of the sketch, which he said was probably seized by the Nazis or sold under duress. The auction house argued that the consignor had proven legal title and said the claim was unfounded.

Return to Consignor

Where Sotheby’s keeps hold of disputed pieces to encourage consignors to negotiate, Van Ham returns them to the consignor. Srikiow said German data protection laws prevent the company from passing the names of consignors of Nazi-looted art to claimants.
For foreign buyers, purchasing prewar art at auction in Germany is a case of “caveat emptor,” said Christian Bauschke, a lawyer at Bauschke Braeuer in Berlin.
Bauschke represents the New York dealer Richard Feigen, who in 2009 agreed to return a picture to the Max Stern estate that he had purchased from the Kunsthaus Lempertz nine years earlier. The work was seized by U.S. customs. He is now seeking compensation from the auction house in a lawsuit scheduled to be heard by a court in Cologne in December.

Art Crime

The German police also can take action, Rene Allonge, the officer who leads the art crime department of the Berlin force said by telephone.
“In cases of theft and confiscation dating back to World War II, the criminal act is too far in the past, the perpetrator is probably dead, and the statutes of limitations have expired,” Allonge said. “But even in such cases, it is possible to open an investigation on suspicion of handling stolen goods.”
Proving that the suspect was aware the object in question was stolen can be very difficult, Allonge said.
“But police can search an auction house’s premises and expose the identity of the consignor,” he said. That can help heirs pursue title in civil courts, he said.

Modernist art haul, 'looted by Nazis', recovered by German police

About 1500 works, includining pieces by Chagall, Klee, Matisse and Picasso, had been considered lost until raid in Schwabing

Hitler Shows Off
German art – purged of modernism, impressionism and cubism – is shown off by Adolf Hitler and propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels (far left) in Berlin in 1939. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis
About 1,500 modernist masterpieces – thought to have been looted by the Nazis – have been confiscated from the flat of an 80-year-old man from Munich, in what is being described as the biggest artistic find of the postwar era.
The artworks, which could be worth as much as €1bn (£860m), are said to include pieces by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, Paul Klee, Max Beckmann and Emil Nolde. They had been considered lost until now, according to a report in the German news weekly Focus.
The works, which would originally have been confiscated as "degenerate art" by the Nazis or taken from Jewish collectors in the 1930s and 1940s, had made their way into the hands of a German art collector, Hildebrand Gurlitt. When Gurlitt died, the artworks were passed down to his son, Cornelius – all without the knowledge of the authorities.
Gurlitt, who had not previously been on the radar of the police, attracted the attention of the customs authorities only after a random cash check during a train journey from Switzerland to Munich in 2010, according to Focus. Further police investigations led to a raid on Gurlitt's flat in Schwabing in spring 2011. Police discovered a vast collection of masterpieces by some of the world's greatest artists.
The artworks are thought to have been stored amid juice cartons and tins of food on homemade shelves in a darkened room. Since their seizure, they have been stored in a safe customs building outside Munich, where the art historian Meike Hoffmann, from Berlin university, has been assessing their precise origin and value. When contacted by the Guardian, Hoffmann said she was under an obligation to maintain secrecy and would not be able to comment on the Focus report until Monday.
According to Focus, Cornelius Gurlitt, described as a loner, may have kept himself in pocket over the years by occasionally selling the odd artwork. Several of the frames in the flat were empty. He is thought to have sold at least one picture – a painting called Lion Tamer by Beckmann – since his flat was first raided by the police. On 2 December 2011, the painting was sold for €864,000 at an auction house in Cologne.
At least 300 paintings in the collection are thought to belong to a body of about 16,000 works once declared "degenerate art". Others are suspected to have been owned by fleeing Jewish collectors who had to leave belongings behind.
One Matisse painting used to belong to a French art dealer, Paul Rosenberg, whose granddaughter is Anne Sinclair, the TV journalist who is also the ex-wife of the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Rosenberg was renowned for representing Picasso, Georges Braque and Matisse.
Sinclair and her family have been campaigning for the return of looted Nazi treasures for years. "We are not willing to forget, or let it go," Marianne Rosenberg, another granddaughter, told the New York Times in April. "I think of it as a crusade."
Gwendolen Webster, an art historian who has spent time studying works from the Nazis' "degenerate art" collection, told the Guardian the significance of the find was "absolutely staggering for historians" but opened a legal can of worms.
One of the reasons why German customs may have been sitting on their find for such a long time is that they can expect a huge number of claims for restitution from around the world, with all the diplomatic difficulties that entails.
Descendants of Jewish collectors who were blackmailed or simply robbed of their works by the Nazis may now be able to legally claim ownership of some of the works in Munich.
The looted art trove may help to shed light on one of the more obscure chapters in Nazi Germany's history. Modernist art was banned soon after the Nazis came to power, on the ground that it was "un-German" or Jewish Bolshevist in nature.
From spring 1933 right up to the start of the war, exhibitions of the art toured the country, showcasing works that are now considered classics of expressionism, surrealism, cubism and Dada. Records of which artworks the authorities had looted from where are incomplete. "It was complete anarchy," says Webster.
Hildebrand Gurlitt, who had been a museum director in Zwickau until Hitler came to power, lost his post because he was half Jewish, but was later commissioned by the Nazis to sell works abroad. The discovered loot may show that Gurlitt in fact collected many of the artworks himself and managed to keep them throughout the war.
After the war, allied troops designated Gurlitt a victim of Nazi crimes. He reportedly said he had helped many Jewish Germans to fund their flight into exile, and that his entire art collection had been destroyed in the bombing of Dresden.

Does the Munich hoard turn the story of art and the Nazis on its head?

The discovery in a Munich flat of 1,500 'lost' works raises fresh questions about the Nazi's attitude to the modern art they loved to hate.

Degenerate Art exhibition
Hitler, Goebbels and other Nazi officials get a tour of the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich in 1937.
It is one of the most shuddered-at chapters in the story of art. In July 1937, Nazi officials turned up in full uniform alongside evening-suited cultural eminences of the Third Reich at an art gallery in Munich for the opening of the Exhibition of Degenerate Art. They came not to praise modern art, but to laugh at it.
Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, Otto Dix, Georg Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner – the masters of modernism, including giants of Germany's own avant garde, were shown in this exhibition as deviant, decadent practitioners of so-called Degenerate Art – "Entartete Kunst". Sections of the show had titles such as "Total Madness", "The Prostitute Raised to a Moral Ideal", "The Negroisation of Art". Modern art was interpreted in the catalogue as a conspiracy by Russian Bolsheviks and Jewish dealers to destroy European culture. The admiration for African carvings that had so fired Picasso and other artists was taken as proof of modern art's racial degeneracy.
Vile stuff – but the Nazi attitude to modern art may have been radically misunderstood. An amazing discovery in 21st-century Munich turns the story of art and the Nazis on its head.
Cornelius Gurlitt's flat looks meagre in photographs. It is located in an apartment block in Munich that, from the outside, appears to have seen better days. Yet in that flat lay secrets of the Third Reich only now accidentally uncovered. Intrigued by Gurlitt's lack of German identity documents and odd behaviour while crossing the border on a trip to Switzerland, police raided his home and found a hoard of more than 1,500 works of art including pieces by Picasso, Matisse, Renoir, Paul Klee, Emil Nolde, Franz Marc, Otto Dix and Oskar Kokoschka. The understandably reclusive Gurlitt turned out to be the son of Hildebrand Gurlitt, an art dealer who played a key role in the Nazi roundup of "degenerate art". Although half-Jewish, and the cousin of the "degenerate" composer Manfred Gurlitt, the Nazis considered him a useful expert. This is not just any haul of stolen goods: it may turn out to be one the most important recoveries of lost art ever. For it takes us to the heart of the cultural policies and crimes of the Third Reich.
It raises massive questions about the fate of art in and after the second world war. As the allies entered Germany in the last phase of the war they took with them experts, nicknamed the "monuments men", whose job was to find out where the Nazis had stashed looted works of art. For it was not just modern art the Nazis abused. All over Europe, they seized the best masterpieces from the finest museums. Many of these, including such treasures as Titian's Danae and Van Eyck's Ghent altarpiece, were found stashed in mountain tunnels and mines. Others, including many of the works of art shown in the Degenerate Art exhibit, are believed lost for ever. Paintings such as Van Gogh's The Painter on his Way to Work and 14 masterpieces by Gustav Klimt are written off as destroyed. But is it possible a Nazi network preserved a secret world of stolen art after 1945? Is it even possible such art was used to fund neo-Nazi activities or maintain war criminals in quiet comfort?
To put it another way: were Hildebrand Gurlitt and his son unique, or is the find in Munich a clue to some larger network of Nazi art hoarders sitting on secret treasures all this time in postwar Europe, living off occasional covert sales of the Picassos that they keep among the canned foods in their anonymous flats?
One thing is certain: this story comes from the dark heart of Nazi Europe. Munich was Hitler's art capital. As a young man, famously, he wanted to be an artist. He wasted an inheritance trying to get an art education in Vienna. While Klimt was creating modern art there, Hitler was going to the opera to hear Wagner (conducted by the modernist Gustav Mahler), and soon eking a living painting drab topographic scenes. Eventually he left for Munich, where he survived as a hack painter of typical German scenery until the first world war gave him a new life as a soldier. Hitler loved Munich, and when he came to power lavished money on its art scene. The city's expressionist painters were in trouble. But while Degenerate Art pilloried them, in 1938 Hitler opened a huge exhibition of "proper" German art at the newly built House of German Art, a grand neo-classical temple to the art of a new, fascist Europe. Where the year before thousands had flocked to see the art they were told to hate, far fewer went to see Nazi-favoured art.
This is where the cliches start. It is conventional to contrast the avant-garde art the Nazis maligned with the traditionalism and conservatism of the art they admired. But the National Socialist nightmare was not "conservative". It was, in its own way, horribly modern – it imagined a different, perverted vision of modernity. The House of German Art still survives in Munich. Today it is used as an alternative arts centre. Video and installation look subversively great in its grand icy halls. You wouldn't call these rooms old-fashioned. Rather they have a chilly neo-classical hauteur that speaks of sublime ambition. This is the neo-classical modern art of Nazism that can still be seen in Leni Riefenstahl's terrifying films – some of the most disturbingly beautiful ever made – and the designs of Hitler's architects Paul Troost and Albert Speer.
Hitler did not hate art – he loved it. Other leading Nazis just saw it as money. Goering, greedy and corrupt, amassed art because it symbolised wealth and power. Munich was at the centre of the regime's cultural pretensions. The Gurlitt hoard is a survival of the Nazis' strange and ambivalent attitude to art, from Hitler's aesthetic New Order to the simple philistine greed that probably motivated most of their art theft.
Gurlitt's cache reveals that many assumptions about the Nazis and art are simply untrue. The Degenerate Art exhibition was real enough – but did it really mean the Nazis hated modern art? It is because we take this for granted that no one has been searching for lost "degenerate" works such as those in the flat in Munich. Some works from the Entartete Kunst exhibition, many seized from once-progressive German museums, were sold abroad afterwards. Others have vanished. As the war began and Nazi racial policies became ever more explicit, more modern and pre-modern works were seized or bought for a pittance from Jewish owners. Much was destroyed. Or was it?

Goering's art collection  
An American soldier examines part of Herman Goering's personal collection of looted art, recovered as the allies invaded Germany in 1945. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis One of the most suspicious cases is that of Klimt's lost works. Fourteen paintings by this Austrian visionary of dreams and desire were stored in an Austrian castle during the war. In 1945, an SS battalion reportedly held an orgy there before setting the castle alight. The Klimts are presumed lost, but there were rumours that some might have been spirited away. Now, surely, such stories need to be re-examined. The 1,500 works hidden by the Gurlitts, father and son, were also presumed lost.
The allies tend to blame themselves for art lost in Germany in the 1940s. Almost every major German city was bombed by Britain and the US during the second world war. Firestorms ravaged museums and art stores as well as killing thousands of civilians. "Bomber" Harris, Britain's Bomber Command mastermind who insisted this was the way to win the war, was apparently responsible for burning paintings such as Van Gogh's Painter on the Way to Work and Caravaggio's first version of St Matthew, as well as his portrait of a courtesan.
Perhaps the single most significant fact that has so far come out about Hildebrand Gurlitt is that he claimed his collection of looted art was destroyed in the bombing of Dresden. So it was the allies who burned it. If he lied so easily about that, what about other Nazi-owned art that supposedly vanished in wartime air raids?
The massive destruction the Nazis brought down on Germany created chaos in 1945. As the "monuments men" were seeking out stolen art treasures in Alpine mines, it seems Gurlitt was carefully and quietly preserving his personal hoard.
The reason he got away with it is that he had grabbed so many modernist works. Ever since 1937, it has been assumed that "degenerate art" was either sold abroad or destroyed. The "monuments men" went searching for Titians, not Picassos. But the Munich hoard proves the naivety of this assumption. Even in the mind of Hitler, modern art was bizarrely fascinating. You do not put on an exhibition of something you do not want to look at. In some strange way the Nazis needed modern art, as a demonic image of their nightmares. The Degenerate Art exhibition is, after all, the biggest backhanded compliment ever paid to the avant garde. Many people think art has no influence on the world. Hitler knew it did. The old saw that he hated modernism is just too simple. He loved to hate it. What you love to hate, you want to keep, somewhere, if only as a freakshow curiosity.
Other Nazis simply went along with Hitler's taste in public but did not really know what the would-be artist in him was talking about. In Mussolini's Italy, the Futurist movement was cosy with fascism. There was no reason – Italy proved – that fascists needed to spurn modernism. Some German modern artists, notably Nolde, were themselves sympathetic to the far right.
Then there was greed. In the end, the National Socialists were thugs, criminals and murderers. The idea that most of them believed deeply in ideological discriminations about art is not that plausible. For men like Gurlitt, modern art made a good stash. He and his son sat on the hoard while his claim that it was lost in a firestorm was taken at face value.
Now the books on Nazi loot need to be reopened. It seems only too possible that other Gurlitts hid away other art treasures in the chaos of defeat.
In one of the last photographs ever taken of Adolf Hitler he is in the bunker in Berlin contemplating Albert Speer's design for a new art capital to be built at Linz. Much as he loved Munich, this city was closer to his childhood home. Its massive new museum was to have contained all the art treasures of conquered Europe.
While Hitler doted on his cultural fantasies, paintings were vanishing into fruit cellars and attics. It was so easy to write them off in the Führer's Götterdämmerung.

Read Jonathan Jones on the masterpieces that are missing in action