Rare Wine Fraud
Not really art crime but damn interesting…NY Magazine has a great article on fraudulent rare wines and how one collector was indicted last week on four counts of mail and wire fraud, and jail time of up to 100 years. From NY Mag: How would you fake wine, anyway? You could blend two vintages, say a...
Stolen Paintings Going to Auction
Two paintings that resurfaced 31 years after being stolen during a violent home invasion in Massachusetts will be auctioned in New York City next month. “In the Sun” by American impressionist painter Childe Hassam will be sold at Sotheby’s on May 17 as part of its American Art sale for an estimated $1.5 million to...
Sotheby’s Sells “The Scream” For A Record $119 Million
Sotheby’s, Wednesday evening, sold Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” for $119 million, making it the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction. From the NY Times: It took 12 nail-biting minutes and five eager bidders for Edvard Munch’s famed 1895 pastel of “The Scream” to sell for $119.9 million, becoming the world’s most expensive work of...
“Steal This Art” Painting Stolen From Williamsburg Gallery
Artist Adam Simon hoped to elicit a big response from Williamsburg gallery-hoppers with a painting reading “Steal this art” — but he didn’t want his message to be taken quite so literally. The staff at Momenta Art is scrambling to find the crook who grabbed the five-by-seven-inch wood panel, valued at $300, which Simon donated...
John Cusack: Art Thief
Good to know that one of our generations great actors also has art crime on his mind. NY Magazine writer Jada Yuan visits the controversy riddled Getty Villa with John Cusack: Minutes after meeting me at the Getty Villa in Malibu, John Cusack has concocted a plot for us to commit grand larceny. The Greek...
Officials Are Set to Seize Antiquity
Federal agents in New York on Wednesday moved to seize a thousand-year-old Cambodian statue from Sotheby’s, alleging in a civil complaint that Sotheby’s had put the 10th-century figure of a mythological warrior up for auction despite knowing that it had been stolen from a temple. Investigators said the sandstone statue, whose return is being sought...
The Motherwell Is Real, But There’s A Hitch
When a German art conservator recently sought to authenticate an early painting by Robert Motherwell that she had inherited, the director of the artist’s New York foundation told her there was both good news and bad news. The work, “Figuration,” a charming 1947 oil on masonite, was real. But, the art conservator was told, the...
Chelsea Hotel Artists To Landlord: Return Our Art
For decades, visitors to the Chelsea Hotel have been awestruck by the vast collection of artwork filling the walls in the lobby and along the stairways — by those still residing at the iconic hotel on West 23rd Street, by artists who passed away and by artists who’ve passed through and left a bit of...
Gallerist Kristen Dodge Chases Down LES Art Thief
Saturday afternoon, a few days after a bustling opening at her Rivington Street gallery, Kristen Dodge heard an unsettling sound coming from the gallery’s main level. She was in the downstairs office chatting with artist Ellen Harvey, whose exhibition, “The Nudist Museum Gift Shop,” had opened the Thursday before.
In Harvey’s show, dozens of small...
We Don’t Own That Modigliani
The news that the billionaire New York art dealers David Nahmad and his son Helly were being sued for the return of a 1918 work by Modigliani allegedly looted by the Nazis made it to the British and American tabloid press in November. Now, in a legal twist, lawyers acting on behalf of the Nahmad...
Video: Stolen Art
A great video! In New York City in 1978, an unknown Czech artist by the name of Pavel Novak held an exhibit entitled “Stolen Art,” which featured paintings by Rembrandt, Courbet, Van Gogh and other great masters, all reproduced with astonishing accuracy by Novak. Following the claim by a private collector that one painting was...
Ancient Statue Sits In Limbo As Rights Question Looms
Cambodia has asked the United States government for help in recovering a thousand-year-old statue of a mythic warrior that sits in limbo at Sotheby’s in New York and that some experts believe was looted amid the convulsions of the Vietnam War and the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge. The statue, a sandstone masterwork with...