A Pissarro Settlement Seven Heirs Never Signed

Impressionist painting of Dieppe harbor on a bright afternoon, seen from above. A long sandy quay curves across the foreground, lined with a dense crowd of small figures watching sailboats with white and rust-colored sails in a pale green basin. People stroll and a horse-drawn cart passes in the lower right. Beyond a low jetty, red-roofed houses and factory chimneys rise against green hills under a blue sky full of pinkish clouds. Signed and dated lower left, "C. Pissarro 1902." — Camille Pissarro, *Darse de pêche et bassin Duquesne, Dieppe, après-midi ensoleillée* (1902), oil on canvas, 65.3 × 81.2 cm. Listed in France’s 1947 *Répertoire des biens spoliés*, the painting sold at Sotheby’s London in June 2024 for £1.2 million under a settlement signed by two of Salomon Flavian’s heirs. Seven others are now asking a Paris court to undo it. Image: Sotheby’s.

A Pissarro Settlement Seven Heirs Never Signed

In June 2024 Sotheby’s London sold Camille Pissarro’s Darse de pêche et bassin Duquesne, Dieppe, après-midi ensoleillée (1902) for £1.2 million. That was a bit below its £1.5–2.5 million estimate. The catalogue carried the now-familiar line: the work was “offered for sale pursuant to a settlement between the current owner and heirs of Salomon Flavian.” Settlements like this have become the ordinary way Nazi-era spoliation claims to privately held works get resolved at auction. The consignor gets clean title and the claimants get a share of the proceeds. The auction house gets to sell the picture.

Except that not everyone was at the table. As Vincent Noce reports in The Art Newspaper, seven of Flavian’s heirs appeared before a Paris court on September 18 and asked it to retrospectively cancel the sale and annul the contract behind it. Only two heirs, Gilles and Nicolas Flavian, signed the agreement with the seller. They were represented by Mondex, the Toronto restitution firm, and they waived all their rights. The other heirs say they were never consulted. They apparently found out in a Mondex letter dated October 17, 2024, nearly four months after the hammer fell, which offered them an 8% share of the net sale price. The same letter mentioned a 16% commission owed by the two signatories. Mondex’s founder James Palmer says the firm received no payment for the transaction. A decision is expected November 5.

Was it looted at all?

The provenance fight is the more interesting half of the case. Salomon Flavian was a Jewish banker whose Paris collection was seized in 1941. The painting appears in the Répertoire des biens spoliés, France’s 1947 register of property looted during the war. Sotheby’s own catalogue lists the Répertoire under literature, so nobody disputes that the entry exists.

The seller commissioned research from Mary Kate Cleary, who has since become curator of provenance at Princeton University Art Museum. She concluded the painting was not among the 45 works seized from Flavian in 1941. She found it on no Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) confiscation list. She also found that Paul Rosenberg’s archives, together with the 1939 Pissarro catalogue raisonné, point to a sale around 1938 to the British painter and collector Edward Le Bas. Mondex accepted that finding, which is a somewhat unusual position for a firm in the business of making claims. Palmer says it did so “in the interests of rigour and intellectual honesty.”

Corinne Hershkovitch, for the heirs, has several answers. Works were regularly scrubbed from ERR lists with the help of unscrupulous dealers. Rosenberg’s postwar notes are allegedly imprecise. The catalogue entry does not mention that Flavian had owned the painting since 1935. Rosenberg may simply have confused this Dieppe with another picture Le Bas bought. And its seems Cleary may have worked from Rosenberg’s archives without checking them against the Flavian family’s own papers.

They can’t both be right. Sotheby’s published provenance has the painting going from a 1935 Drouot sale to Flavian and then to Rosenberg “by 1937,” with no date for when it left Flavian. That undated step is the whole case. The Répertoire is an important document, but it was compiled largely from owners’ own postwar declarations, made in chaos and grief, and it has errors in it. A 1939 catalogue predates the seizures, and that counts for something. But dealers’ stock books are not neutral records either.

A couple of tangents

The first is that the archive doing the most work for the seller belongs to Paul Rosenberg. He was one of the most celebrated dealers in Paris and was himself among the ERR’s biggest victims after he fled to New York in 1940. The 1939 catalogue raisonné by Ludovic-Rodo Pissarro and Lionello Venturi was published by Rosenberg’s own gallery. So the records of one looting victim dealer are now being used to show that a looted victim banker’s painting was never looted. Nobody has suggested Rosenberg did anything improper here. Still, it shows how much of our knowledge of this period rests on a handful of dealers’ paperwork.

The second is that the provenance runs through David Rockefeller, by way of Sam Salz, before ending up in the Dreitzer estate and a 1985 Sotheby’s New York sale. The painting was exhibited at the Tate in 1952 and the Met in 1966. It is a reminder that “hiding in plain sight” is the normal condition for works like this, and that no one apparently raised the Répertoire entry for decades.

The fee question, again

Readers with long memories may recall the Bermann-Fischer Pissarro I wrote about years ago. Gisela Bermann-Fischer found her family’s painting in a Zurich vault, and the fight over what the experts who helped find it should be paid ended with Jonathan Petropoulos resigning from Claremont McKenna amid extortion allegations. The Art Loss Register had proposed a sliding scale of 20% of the first million and less above that. I said then that money is a key focus of restitution, and the Flavian case is that point in a new form. Here the money question isn’t how much the intermediary takes. It is whether an intermediary acting for two heirs can bind a family it never spoke to, and then offer the others a fixed percentage after the sale. If French law treats the claim as belonging to all the heirs jointly, it is hard to see how two of them could settle it alone. If the painting was never looted, there was no claim to settle, and the settlement was simply insurance the seller bought to make the picture marketable.

Can Paris undo a London sale?

Sotheby’s also argues that a French court has no business ruling on a sale made in London between two clients with “no relationship with France.” Since Brexit, the EU’s Brussels I bis rules no longer sort out jurisdiction between France and the UK, so the Paris court will I think apply its own rules. And even a French annulment would still have to be enforced against a buyer whose identity hasn’t been reported and a painting that may be anywhere. The French courts have not been shy about Nazi-era claims. In the Bauer case, another Pissarro, La Cueillette des pois, was seized while on loan to the Musée Marmottan. Its American owners, who bought in good faith, lost it under the 1945 ordinance voiding acts of spoliation, and the Cour de cassation upheld that in 2020. But Bauer involved a painting physically in Paris. This one sold in London to an unnamed buyer.

That leaves a lot to watch on November 5. Will the court even reache the merits? Are the heirs proceeding under the 1945 ordinance or on ordinary contract and succession principles? How will a judge weigh a 1947 government register against a dealer’s catalogue from 1939?

Pissarro must be among the most litigated artists in restitution law. Cassirer, Bauer, Bermann-Fischer, and the University of Oklahoma’s Shepherdess all turned on a Pissarro. I can only speculate about why, but a few reasons might be: First, he was prolific. There are simply more of them out there to be lost and later found. Second, his collectors; many were the assimilated Jewish families of Paris, Berlin and Vienna whose collections were seized or sold under duress after 1933. Third, the money; a Pissarro is valuable enough to justify years of litigation, but not so famous that it couldn’t pass quietly through the postwar market. And finally, he liked to paint in series. He returned to the same harboror bridge again and again, in different weather and light. A wartime claim form or a dealer’s stock book that says “Pissarro, port of Dieppe, 1902” could describe several canvases, and the heirs here argue that is exactly what happened with Rosenberg’s records.

Why so many fights now? Part of it is that the evidence is easier to get at. The ERR card files, the Répertoire and dealers’ archives like Rosenberg’s are all searchable now in ways they weren’t a generation ago, so a listing that sat unread for decades can surface with a few keystrokes. Part of it is the auction houses themselves, which now want a settlement in hand before a flagged work goes on the block. And part of it is simple arithmetic. Eighty-five years on, a claim belongs to grandchildren and great-grandchildren scattered across several countries, which is exactly the situation that produced two signatories and seven plaintiffs here.

Whatever the court decides, it has a lesson for the settlement model the market depends on: a deal that gives clean title is only as good as the list of heirs who signed it.

Vincent Noce, Was this Pissarro painting—sold at Sotheby’s in 2024—looted by Nazis? A Paris court deliberates, The Art Newspaper (Sept. 24, 2026), https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2026/09/24/was-this-pissarro-paintingsold-at-sothebys-in-2024looted-by-nazis-a-paris-court-deliberates.

Camille Pissarro, Darse de pêche et bassin Duquesne, Dieppe, après-midi ensoleillée, Lot 49, Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction, Sotheby’s London (June 25, 2024), https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2024/modern-contemporary-evening-auction-including-the-ralph-i-goldenberg-collection/darse-de-peche-et-bassin-duquesne-dieppe-apres (last visited Oct. 1, 2026).

Heirs of a Jewish Collector Contest Sotheby’s Sale of a Pissarro Painting Possibly Looted by Nazis, ARTnews, https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/heirs-jewish-collector-sothebys-sale-pissarro-nazi-looted-1234799464/ (last visited Oct. 1, 2026).

Bureau central des restitutions, Répertoire des biens spoliés en France durant la guerre 1939-1945 (1947), digitised by the French Ministry of Culture, Accès au Répertoire, https://www.culture.gouv.fr/rechercher-une-publication-du-ministere-de-la-culture/bases-de-donnees/mnr-historique-de-la-publication/acces-au-repertoire (last visited Oct. 1, 2026);

Répertoire des biens spoliés en France pendant la Guerre 1939-1945, Lootedart.com, https://www.lootedart.com/MFEU4B37276 (last visited Oct. 1, 2026).

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Cemeteries, Crown Jewels, Fakes, and War

Recent cultural heritage events remind me that protection is often weakest before anyone thinks to call it protection. A cemetery becomes “vacant” land. A museum becomes a little too open. A forged provenance becomes plausible enough. A customs rule turns movement into uncertainty. A damaged monument returns to Italy. The dramatic theft still has its place. Crown jewels stolen from the Louvre will always draw attention. But the quieter stories may tell us more about how heritage is actually lost: slowly, administratively, through development pressure, through market incentives that reward thin provenance and quick sales, and sometimes violently, in the gap between what the law promises and what institutions are prepared to do.

Heritage can also disappear through neglect, development, poor records, wishful thinking, legal uncertainty, military force, or a stamp on the back of a painting that looks just plausible enough.

In Northeast Houston, residents are raising concerns that development may threaten an abandoned Black cemetery. The legally recognized cemetery parcel is small, but longtime resident Roscoe Bluitt remembers headstones extending more widely into the wooded land nearby. A 2014 survey reportedly identified possible graves at least partly outside the known cemetery boundaries, and Houston officials have placed a stop-work order on the site while the next steps are considered. Advocates are now calling for a more thorough investigation, potentially including ground-penetrating radar.

Roscoe Bluitt, a lifelong resident of northeast Houston, describes his memories of a now abandoned Black cemetery where developers are clearing a nearby property. Jason Fochtman/Houston Chronicle

The story is painfully familiar. Burial grounds, especially Black cemeteries, are often “forgotten” only after systems of ownership, recordkeeping, maintenance, and development have made them easy to ignore. By the time a neighbor notices bulldozers, the law is already playing catch-up. The question is not simply whether a parcel is listed as a cemetery. It is whether the community, the city, the developer, and the state are willing to ask what may have been missed.

A very different kind of vulnerability is on display in the continuing discussion of museum security after the Louvre crown jewels theft. The New York Times recently used that heist to examine a broader design problem for museums: how to protect collections without turning institutions into fortresses. The article notes not only the Louvre robbery, but also thefts from an off-site storage facility of the Oakland Museum of California, damage at Chihuly Garden and Glass in Seattle, and the recent theft of works by Renoir, Cézanne, and Matisse from the Magnani-Rocca Foundation near Parma.

The challenge is that the museum ideal of openness sits uneasily with the needs of security. Glass, light, gardens, open galleries, and accessible storage can all help museums feel less forbidding. They can also create blind spots, entry points, or tempting routes of escape. The best security seems to be less about a single dramatic barrier and more about layers: thoughtful site design, sightlines, lighting, staffing, cameras, object-level alarms, and best of all the good old-fashioned human response. A camera, as one consultant put it, cannot get out of its chair.

Then there are the fakes. A father and daughter have pleaded guilty in connection with a multimillion-dollar forgery scheme involving works presented as Banksy, Andy Warhol, Andrew Wyeth, Richard Mayhew, Raimonds Staprans, Fritz Scholder, and others. Prosecutors described a scheme using forged works made in Poland, antique paper, and fabricated gallery stamps from defunct galleries to make the objects appear more credible. Forgery stories are often treated as colorful art-world scandals, and they are that. But they also show how fragile the market’s trust mechanisms can be in a market that continues to value privacy and discretion. Provenance is not just a nice story attached to an object.

This photo provided by Tulane University classical archeologist Susann Lusnia in October 2025 shows the 1,900-year-old grave marker of a Roman sailor named Sextus Congenius Verus, discovered in a New Orleans backyard. (Susann Lusnia via AP)

There was also a quieter and more hopeful story this week. A nearly 2,000-year-old Roman grave marker discovered in a New Orleans backyard has been returned to Italy. The marble epitaph, dedicated to Sextus Congenius Verus, was eventually matched to an object missing from a museum in Civitavecchia, near Rome. The likely path to New Orleans seems to have involved a U.S. soldier who served in Italy and later kept the stone at his home. The FBI coordinated the return, and the object is now headed back.

The movement of objects is also being shaped by a less romantic force: tariffs. The Art Newspaper reports that after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s unilateral tariffs as unconstitutional, the administration imposed a new tariff regime of up to 15 percent under a different emergency powers law, prompting further litigation and continued uncertainty for the art and antiques trade. Dealers described confusion over whether exemptions for antiques over 100 years old will remain secure, and whether shipping, tariffs, and fuel surcharges will make some transactions commercially impossible. Tariffs may seem far removed from grave markers, forged art, or museum alarms. But they matter because cultural objects move through ordinary commercial channels. Dealers, collectors, museums, conservators, shippers, and customs brokers all operate inside systems of cost and uncertainty. When the rules shift suddenly, especially around imports, the market adjusts. One suspects, uncertainty makes the already opaque parts of the trade even harder to see.

Finally, a much darker reminder that cultural heritage protection cannot be separated from the conduct of war. More than 200 scholars and cultural professionals (including me) signed a statement criticizing damage to Iranian cultural heritage during U.S.-Israeli strikes and the international response to that damage. The statement invokes the 1954 Hague Convention and argues that more than 130 registered UNESCO and national monuments and museums have reportedly been damaged since the start of the conflict. It also criticizes international institutions for what the signatories view as an inadequate response when powerful states are involved.

The Art Newspaper’s coverage notes reported damage to sites including Golestan Palace in Tehran, the Chehel Sotoun building of the Persian Garden in Isfahan, the Jame Mosque of Isfahan, and sites near the Prehistoric Sites of the Khorramabad Valley. UNESCO has acknowledged damage and expressed concern, while the statement’s organizers argue that concern is not enough when legal protections lack enforcement.

This is the hard edge of cultural heritage law. The 1954 Hague Convention rests on the premise that damage to cultural property belonging to any people is a loss to all humanity. But that principle is only as strong as the willingness of states and institutions to apply it consistently. The problem is not that we lack legal language. What is often missing is consequence.

Taken together, these stories point to the same larger lesson. Cultural heritage protection is not a single switch that the law turns on after something has gone wrong. The law matters. But the law often arrives late. The harder work is to build protection into ordinary practice, before the bulldozer, before the ancient stone becomes patio décor, and before a historic site is reduced to a damage assessment. Heritage is most vulnerable where attention is weakest.

Sam González Kelly, Houston Residents Worry Development Threatens a Black Cemetery. They’re Fighting to Protect It., Houston Chronicle (May 1, 2026), https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/article/black-cemetery-history-construction-22218009.php , archived at https://perma.cc/WJ6H-3J27.

Sam Lubell, After the Heists: Securing Museums Without Closing Them Off, The New York Times (Apr. 18, 2026), https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/arts/design/museums-security.html.

Jake Offenhartz, Father and Daughter Admit to $2M Banksy and Warhol Art Forgery Scam, Independent, https://uk.news.yahoo.com/father-daughter-admit-2m-banksy-082920547.html, archived at https://perma.cc/HCQ6-5HZX (last visited May 2, 2026).

More than 200 Cultural Figures Sign Statement Criticising International Response to Destruction of Iran’s Heritage, The Art Newspaper – International art news and events, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2026/04/15/more-than-200-cultural-figures-sign-statement-criticising-international-response-to-destruction-of-iran-heritage (last visited May 2, 2026).

Ancient Roman Gravestone Found in New Orleans Back Yard Returned to Italy, the Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/may/01/roman-gravestone-new-orleans-returned-italy, archived at https://perma.cc/75LC-7R43 (last visited May 2, 2026).

Art Trade Adjusting after US Supreme Court Struck down Trump’s Extreme Tariffs, The Art Newspaper – International art news and events, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2026/05/01/trump-tariffs-struck-down-supreme-court-art-trade-adjusts (last visited May 2, 2026).

Security, Spectacle, and Return

It has been an oddly revealing week for cultural heritage.

On one end, Dutch officials unveiled the recovered Coțofenești helmet and two gold bracelets at a press conference in Assen, flanked by heavily armed officers in balaclavas. The helmet, stolen from the Drents Museum in January 2025 while on loan from Romania, was recovered with minor damage; though one bracelet remains missing. The recovery appears to have come as part of an agreement with suspects ahead of trial.

A Geto-Dacian helmet dating from the first half of the 4th century BC, uncovered by chance. View from the front. — By © Radu Oltean / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14615152

On the other end, just days earlier, thieves entered the Magnani-Rocca Foundation near Parma and, in about three minutes, made off with works by Renoir, Cézanne, and Matisse. Reports describe a fast, organized raid by four men who forced entry and targeted highly recognizable names.

“Odalisque on the Terrace” by Henri Matisse.

And then, in Zurich, Switzerland quietly transferred ownership of 28 Benin Bronzes from three museums, with 18 expected to travel physically to Nigeria in June. That return followed provenance research and was framed, quite rightly, as another step toward reuniting Nigeria with material taken in the 1897 British plunder of Benin.

Three stories, one week, and each says something slightly different about how the cultural heritage world performs security, legitimacy, and justice.

The Dutch press conference was the most visually obvious example. The object had been recovered. Great! That part matters most. But the staging mattered too. Armed guards. Masks. Cloth lift. The careful unveiling of a rescued national treasure. It was a display of regained control. One could almost hear the subtext: yes, it was stolen, but look how seriously we take it now.

That is what struck Donna Yates so clearly in her reaction to the event: the oddity of the whole performance. The recovery of a cultural object becomes not just an announcement, but a kind of theatrical rebuttal to the earlier embarrassment. The state is not merely returning the object; it is staging authority. And perhaps staging reassurance too.

The Italian theft, by contrast, stripped away the theatre. There is no ceremonial dignity in a three-minute smash-and-grab. Only a broken entry point, a short timeline, and the uncomfortable reminder that museums remain vulnerable to ordinary criminals with planning, nerve, and a few minutes to spare. Anthony Amore’s point is useful here: three minutes is not some cinematic anomaly. It sits squarely within the normal range for many museum thefts. That should worry people more than the headline itself.

The most important lesson from Parma may be the least glamorous one. Famous art is easier to steal than to monetize as Anja Shortland details. Freshly stolen museum objects are extraordinarily difficult to sell on the legitimate market because dealers, auction houses, and registries check title, provenance, and stolen-art databases. That does not mean theft makes no economic sense; it means the economic logic is usually murkier than the movies suggest. These works may be held, moved through criminal networks, used as bargaining chips, or dangled in hopes of some later leverage. The hard part is not the theft. The hard part is cashing out.

And that, in turn, makes the Dutch recovery more interesting. If a stolen object can later become useful in plea bargaining or sentence reduction, then it acquires a kind of underworld value quite apart from its cultural value. That is not a comforting thought. The helmet is priceless to Romania; it may also have become useful to suspects once prosecutors made clear that recovery would matter.

Then there is the Swiss Benin return, which points in a different direction entirely. No broken door, no emergency unveiling. Instead, a transfer of ownership after provenance work, a public ceremony, and a clear acknowledgment that access to cultural heritage means more than a paper change in title.

But even here, where the moral and historical case is much clearer, ceremony still does important work. Returns like this are also public performances—just of a more attractive kind. They signal fairness, accountability, and institutional maturity. They tell a story not about how we have secured this object, but about we are finally doing the right thing. Switzerland’s transfer of 28 objects, and the expectation that 18 will physically move to Nigeria in June, is meaningful precisely because it joins symbolism to substance.

Still, the Swiss story also comes with a caution. Returns create expectations. Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments has had notable success in securing repatriations, but it now faces the harder question of display, stewardship, resources, and internal politics. Justice is not finished when the ceremony ends. Sometimes that is where the real work starts.

Taken together, these stories reveal a familiar pattern in cultural heritage disputes. We are very good at paying attention to dramatic moments: the theft, the raid, the recovery, the unveiling, the handover. We are less good at attending to the quieter work in between: preventive security, provenance research, institutional due diligence, funding, and conservation. Yet that unglamorous middle is where most of the work actually happens.

In Assen, security was performed after failure. In Parma, failure arrived in three minutes. In Zurich, legitimacy was sought through return. None of those performances are trivial. But none should distract from the underlying question either: are institutions actually getting better at protecting and returning cultural objects, or are they just getting better at staging the moment?

Anthony Amore, The Italian Job – A Profile, Big Security, https://anthonyamore.substack.com/p/the-italian-job-a-profile (last visited Apr. 3, 2026).

Eileen Kinsella, Experts Break Down the Brazen $10 Million Museum Theft in Italy, Artnet News, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/magnani-rocca-foundation-heist-experts-2761113, archived at https://perma.cc/9M2G-CZJY (last visited Apr. 3, 2026).

Senay Boztas, ‘A Wow Moment’: Ancient Romanian Gold Helmet Returned in Plea Deal with Theft Suspects, the Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2026/apr/02/stolen-romanian-gold-helmet-recovered-netherlands , archived at https://perma.cc/74V4-PWVR (last visited Apr. 3, 2026).

Claire Moses, Ancient Artifacts Stolen in Dutch Museum Heist Are Recovered, The New York Times (Apr. 2, 2026), https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/02/world/europe/museum-heist-netherlands-helmet-romania.html.

Barnaby Phillips, Switzerland Returns Benin Bronzes, Institute of Art and Law (Apr. 2, 2026), https://ial.uk.com/switzerland-returns-benin-bronzes/, archived at https://perma.cc/2F52-DU6R.

Anja Shortland, Selling Stolen Art is Tricky, so Why Even Bother Heisting It? An Expert Explains, The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/selling-stolen-art-is-tricky-so-why-even-bother-heisting-it-an-expert-explains-279700 , archived at https://perma.cc/D9EX-5R2M (last visited Apr. 3, 2026).

Ali Watkins & Josephine de La Bruyère, Renoir, Cézanne and Matisse Artworks Are Stolen in 3-Minute Museum Heist, Police Say, The New York Times (Mar. 30, 2026), https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/30/world/europe/parma-art-heist-renoir-matisse-cezanne-italy.html.

Donna Yates, Performance of Security at the Drents Museum Helmet Return Press Conference, Anonymous Swiss Collector (Apr. 2, 2026), https://www.anonymousswisscollector.com/2026/04/performance-of-security-at-the-drents-museum-helmet-return-press-conference.html , archived at https://perma.cc/6X68-JZ6J.

Renoir, Cézanne and Matisse Works Stolen in ‘Three-Minute’ Italian Museum Heist, The Art Newspaper – International art news and events, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2026/03/30/renoir-cezanne-matisse-works-stolen-in-three-minute-italian-museum-heist , archived at https://perma.cc/563Y-H7LT (last visited Apr. 3, 2026).

Gerstenblith on Provenance

John Myatt forged a number of prominent Old Masters, and his conspirator John Drewe invented provenance for many of the works.

Prof. Gerstenblith has a new Piece in the International Journal of Cultural Property titled “Provenances: Real, Fake, and Questionable“. Here’s the abstract:

Provenance, the ownership history of an artifact or work of art, has become one of the primary mechanisms for determining the legal status and authenticity of a cultural object. Professional associations, including museum organizations, have adopted the “1970 standard” as a means to prevent the acquisition of an ancient object from promoting the looting of archaeological sites, which is driven by the economic gains realized through the international market. The Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), one of the museum world’s most influential professional organizations, requires its members to list the ancient artworks and artifacts that they have acquired after 2008 that do not conform to the 1970 standard in an online object registry. The study presented here of the AAMD’s Object Registry for New Acquisitions of Archaeological Material and Works of Ancient Art analyzes the extent to which AAMD member museums do not comply with the 1970 standard and, perhaps of greater significance, the weaknesses in the provenance information on which they rely in acquiring such works. I argue that systematic recurrences of inadequate provenance certitude are symptomatic of the larger problem of methodology and standards of evidence in claiming documented provenance. A museum’s acceptance of possibly unverifiable provenance documentation and, therefore, its acquisition of an object that may have been recently looted, in turn, impose a negative externality on society through the loss of information about our past caused by the looting of archaeological sites.

Gerstenblith, P. (2019). Provenances: Real, Fake, and Questionable. International Journal of Cultural Property, 26(3), 285-304. doi:10.1017/S0940739119000171

What Blockchain can (and can’t) do for the antiquities trade

Can Blockchain help ensure the Metropolitan Museum will not acquire more looted material like this Gilded Coffin?

Last March I participated in Cardozo’s Arts and Entertainment Law Journal Spring Symposium on the topic of Digital Art & Blockchain. I learned a lot about this new technology, and wrote a bit about how Blockchain can impact the antiquities trade. Here’s the abstract to my essay:

Blockchain, the technology underpinning Bitcoin and other digital currencies, offers promise to shift the gathering and sharing of information in profound ways. It could help form a new kind of financial system that limits current inefficiencies, or even radically change how parties enter into contract, or monitor supply chains. The technology’s distributed ledger allows users in a network to monitor and access peer-to-peer digital transactions in real time. This digital ledger allows users to maintain this information securely by encrypting and allowing access only to those who have permission, given by cryptographic keys.

For the art market, blockchain offers a tantalizing possibility: a verifiable provenance research platform that would eliminate or minimize the problems with title history, authenticity, and looting, which have long-plagued the art and antiquities market. This essay examines whether blockchain might offer a chance for the antiquities market to remedy its persistent problems. The antiquities market has been beleaguered by the sale of forgeries, allowed stolen material to find a market, been hampered by market inefficiencies, and even been a haven for looted archaeological material. Distributed ledgers and blockchain could alleviate or eliminate these problems, but only if the market and those who shape it want to utilize them. No technology, no matter how ingenious or elegant, can end problems caused by the unprincipled actors in the antiquities trade. Such change has to come about with a culture shift and continued pressure by regulators and cultural heritage advocates.
Assessing the Viability of Blockchain to Impact the Antiquities Trade
Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal, Vol. 37, No. 3, 2019

Pilot Project by the German Lost Art Foundation

Catherine Hickley reports for the Art Newspaper that a new study has shown that serious state-sanctioned seizures of privately-held artworks continued long after the conclusion of World War II, particularly in east Germany. The study examined acquisitions between 1945 and 1989 by four museums: the Viadrina Museum, and museums in Strausberg, Eberswalde, and Neuruppin. The study was conducted by the German Lost Art Foundation, and was intended as a pilot project to guide further research.

One of the most common ways that art confiscated from individuals wound up in East German museum collections was through the clearance of the residences of people who had fled the country, especially in the second half of the 1950s, Sachse says.
At the end of 1961, just a few months after the Berlin Wall was erected, East German Minister for State Security Erich Mielke gave orders for a secret operation to force open and empty unused, privately rented bank vaults, safety deposit boxes and safes at around 4,000 locations across the country and empty them of their contents.
The stealth operation, known as Aktion Licht (Operation Light), amounted to an orchestrated, state-sanctioned mass theft from people who had left the country. The treasures belonged to East Germans who had escaped to the West, but also to Jewish people forced to flee or who were taken to concentration camps during the Third Reich. The Stasi valued its findings at 4.1m deutschmarks (around $10m at the time).
After 1970, the preferred method of theft by the East German authorities was to invent astronomical tax bills and then seize art when the victims could not pay.
Catherine Hickley, Mass theft of art from East German citizens revealed in new report, The Art Newspaper (Jun. 12, 2019), http://theartnewspaper.com/news/mass-theft-of-art-from-east-german-citizens-revealed.

“Beltracchi’s forgeries have made the covers of Christie’s catalogs”

This work sold for 7 million euros in 2006, and is a fake

The art forger Wolfgang Beltracchi was the subject of a lengthy 60 minutes profile last night. It was a reminder of how little safeguards protect genuine works of art from forgeries. Fakes defraud the public and dilute an artist’s body of work. When a staged photo counts as the ‘gold standard’ for provenance, the art trade is in serious trouble.

Beltracchi is reported to have been the most ‘successful’ art forger in recent history. He was caught and prosecuted by German authorities. Titanium White was able to do what the art trade could and would not: determine a fake from the real thing. Here’s an interview with forensic authenticator Jamie Martin:

Bob Simon: You actually take little pieces off of the painting?

Jamie Martin: We take very little pieces. We take only the minimum amount that’s required. Smaller than the width of a human hair.

He uses what is called Raman spectroscopy, which can help detect historically inaccurate pigments. That’s what cut Beltracchi’s career short. He was sentenced to six years in a German prison. His wife, Helene, to four. But the chaos they wrought has not been undone. Now, galleries and auction houses who vouched for his forgeries have been sued by the collectors who bought them.

Why then was Beltracchi so forthcoming to 60 minutes producers?

And no one disputes that they are awfully good. Beautiful. This $7 million dollar fake Max Ernst is being shipped back to New York. Its owner decided to keep it even after it had been exposed as a fake. He said it’s one of the best Max Ernsts he’s ever seen.

Beltracchi spent a year and a half in this grim penitentiary, but is now allowed to spend many days at home, where he is launching a new career. Beltracchi is painting again and is signing his works Beltracchi. He needs to get his name out there, which is probably why he agreed to talk to us. He’s lost everything is now facing multiple lawsuits totaling $27 million.

Art forger Wolfgang Beltracchi’s multimillion dollar scam, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/art-forger-wolfgang-beltracchis-multimillion-dollar-scam/ (Feb 23, 2014).

Continue reading ““Beltracchi’s forgeries have made the covers of Christie’s catalogs””

The Art Loss Register profiled in the New York Times

The Art Loss Register and Julian Radcliffe got the New York Times treatment last week. I think it was an accurate portrayal of the ALR and its role in the art market. I couldn’t help but be a little disappointed in many of the same art crime tropes that some are unable to resist in a piece like this. Things like Radcliffe’s physical appearance, his almost spy-novel backstory, and other aspects distracted me from some of the good reporting in the piece.

The main point holds true I think, that nobody really loves the ALR, but they do perform a service for the Art Market. Much of the criticism lobbied against the organization is entirely justified, but many critics point to the fact that the ALR not only is a database, but also acts as a stolen art recovery service, in exchange for a sizable portion of the value of the work. That has often put them in an uneasy position.

For example the incident involving a Norman Rockwell painting, ‘Russian Schoolroom’ is discussed:

Judy Goffman Cutler, an art dealer who became entangled in a Register hunt for a Norman Rockwell painting, has sued the company twice, contending that it harassed her for years in its zeal to collect a fee for recovering the work.

Mrs. Cutler had clear title to the painting in 1989, when she sold it to the director Steven Spielberg. Later it was mistakenly listed as stolen by the F.B.I. and, consequently, the Register, which tried for years to recover it.

Mrs. Cutler said that the Register pursued her even after company officials had reason to know she had done nothing wrong. Neither of her suits against the company succeeded, and she is still angry.

“They knew better but chose to follow the greedy path,” she said.

The Register has characterized its dispute with Mrs. Cutler as a misunderstanding based on faulty information it received from the F.B.I. and others that suggested that the painting was stolen.

I have heard many similar arguments and criticisms of the ALR. Dorothy King relates a similar example from last year.

Have any experience dealing with the ALR that you’d like to share? Comment below or drop me a note.

Kate Taylor & Lorne Manly, Tracking Stolen Art, for Profit, and Blurring a Few Lines, The New York Times, September 20, 2013.

Provenance and the 1970 UNESCO Convention

17 of the 21 objects at the Phoenix Ancient Art
Exhibition lack pre-1970 documentation

In a lengthy recent piece in Art & Auction, Souren Melikian argued that fewer and fewer antiquities without histories which pre-date 1970 are appearing at auction. The main argument for the piece, that the 1970 Convention is slowly encouraging a reformed antiquities market, rests on the idea that higher prices are paid for objects with documented and reliable evidence showing the object was either legally exported or removed from the probable country of origin before 1970.

Yet just because higher prices are paid for licit objects (or at least objects which were only illicit before 1970) does not necessarily mean that other looted or illicit objects are appearing on the market. Nord Wennerstrom makes this point, detailing four examples of antiquities up for sale which lack provenance information predating 1970. Of course the fact that an object does not come with this history does not mean automatically that it has been looted or stolen. But it is a very very big red flag.

Nord concludes by arguing:

All of the works discussed in this blog post may well have secure provenance dating before the November 14, 1970 UNESCO accord (or other corroborating evidence) – but if that’s the case, why isn’t it being provided? Melikian is right – caveat emptor – buyers need to demand secure provenance that dates before the UNESCO accord for any antiquities they contemplate buying. However, sellers – including auction houses and private galleries – also have a responsibility. And, it would be helpful if the media, when covering the sales, also mention the number of lots lacking that all important pre-1970 provenance. Melikian writes that we should “give it another 10 years” – that’s not a long time, but it could mean a lot of looting.

Yes it does.

Souren Melikian, How UNESCO’s 1970 Convention Is Weeding Looted Artifacts Out of the Antiquities Market, ARTINFO (2012).

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

A New Museum Position: Curator of Provenance

A Medallion looted during WWII

Geoff Edgers had a terrific piece over the weekend profiling Victoria Reed, curator of provenance at the MFA Boston. Her position was created in 2010, and is unique in the museum community. She is according to the piece the only curator of provenance at an American museum, a post which can put her in an uneasy position, recommending that the museum should not acquire objects with insufficient history.

Enter Victoria Reed, the MFA’s curator of provenance. Her job, which is almost as rare in the museum world as is the medallion, is to research works with questionable histories both in the collection and on the MFA’s shopping list. As a result, Reed’s other job is to break curators’ hearts. Through months of research, Reed traced the medallion to a museum in Gotha, Germany, that she knew had been looted during the Nazi era. With that information, the MFA’s jewelry curator, Yvonne Markowitz, put the brakes on its purchase. And in September, the Art Loss Register announced that S.J. Phillips Ltd., the dealer who had offered the medallion, would be returning it to the Castle Friedenstein museum.

This can’t be an easy position to be in, but as more scrutiny attaches to museums, their collection, and their acquisitions, this kind of position will likely become more and more common. The market and dealers have not been adequately accomplishing this painstaking but necessary task, but perhaps they should be.

Paying for a position like this can be difficult given the funding climate for many museums. The piece notes that the position was funded by an MFA Boston donor, Monica S. Sadler, who stipulated that her position should not be cut from the museum’s budget. So other benefactors to museums out there, if you are concerned with the practice at your local museum, give a gift with similar stipulations. Easier said than done of course, but all parties involved should be praised for undertaking an important piece of reform which really could continue to substantially change the importance of provenance research. The piece deals primarily with works of art and paintings, but a position like this which examines antiquities could have even more far-reaching consequences for repatriation and acquisition.

Geoff Edgers, A detective’s work at the MFA, The Boston Globe, December 11, 2011, http://bostonglobe.com/arts/2011/12/11/detective-work-mfa/6iaei4YOQOj83s9u3YfDXO/story.html?s_campaign=sm_fb (last visited Dec 13, 2011).

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com