A masterpiece by Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) that was recently restituted to the heirs of a Jewish collecting couple could fetch up to $45 million (£37.4 million) at Sotheby’s. It is one of the most important works by the artist ever to appear at auction as a rare example of his early style.
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Police in Brazil have arrested a gang of con artists on suspicion of scamming a member’s mother out of more than 709 million reais (£140 million) in art, cash, and jewellery. A phony clairvoyant was allegedly even employed to convince the alleged victim that her art collection was cursed.
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In February 1972, a fire raged at the Veterans Foreign Wars building in New Paltz, New York. With emergency services distracted, a robbery occurred at the town’s historic district of Huguenot Street. Dozens of objects were stolen, including a pair of portraits by the prominent itinerant folk artist Ammi Phillips (1788-1865) depicting local residents Dirck D. Wynkoop (1738-1827) and his wife Annatje Erlinge (1748-1827). Exactly fifty years later, the portraits were rediscovered, and were put back on display at the Historic Huguenot Street.
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Two leather-bound notebooks written by the naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-1882) have mysteriously reappeared at the University of Cambridge, twenty-two years after they went missing. The notebooks are now worth many millions of pounds.
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In 1979, five paintings were stolen from Schloss Friedenstein in Gotha, Germany. The works did not re-emerge for 40 years, and the event became communist East Germany’s biggest ever art heist. In 2019, however, the paintings were returned to Friedenstein, and new scientific analysis and research indicates that one of the portraits, previously attributed to seventeenth-century artist Ferdinand Bol, might be a lost masterpiece by Rembrandt.
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Following a report from the Dutch Council of Culture, several major museums have pledged to repatriate looted artworks in an attempt to rectify historical wrongs. An estimated 100,000 artefacts stolen by colonialists could be subject to restitution.
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A solid gold toilet on display at Bleinheim Palace was stolen in the early hours of Saturday morning (14 September 2019).
The heirs to a stolen Joshua Reynolds oil painting are seeking its return after it turned up 35 years later in a Tokyo museum.
The descendants of a Nazi soldier are to return a €2 million (£1.8 million) painting to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Germany announced the result of the secret deal this week, which will see the painting handed back almost 75 years since it was looted. Continue reading
Missing for nearly 20 years, a stolen Pablo Picasso painting worth £21 million has been recently recovered by Arthur Brand, a Dutch art detective. Continue reading
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