ALR Quarterly Newsletter Issue 12 – October 2018
Etruscan lar and Tiwanaku jar returned to Italy and Bolivia
The Art Loss Register is delighted to announce the repatriation of two stolen objects to their countries of origin.
The object returned to Italy in early October was an Etruscan bronze ‘lar’ statuette that was stolen from the Archaeological Museum in Siena in 1988. Read more about the case in last week’s Antiques Trade Gazette.
In another case, earlier this year Bolivian authorities were notified of a sale of an important Pre-Columbian jar from the site of Tiwanaku. The ALR and the Met Police’s Art & Antique Squad advised the Bolivian Embassy in the UK on their claim, and the object is being repatriated.
Royal Academy Short Course: “Art Crime: the myth vs the reality”
The Royal Academy has developed a weekend course in association with the Art Loss Register.
The ALR’s James Ratcliffe, Amelie Ebbinghaus and guest speakers and panellists will discuss various facets of art crime, and its relevance in the art market and wider world today.
The course on 6/7 April 2019 is almost fully booked, but there are still places available – find out more.
Henry Moore sculpture recovered
We are pleased to announce the recovery and sale of Henry Moore’s Upright motive E, stolen from a London gallery in August 1983.
The sculpture was matched to the stolen one on the ALR database when it came up for auction in 2016. At the time, the insurers of the work who had paid out on the loss appointed the ALR to represent them in its recovery. It has now been sold at auction for the benefit of the insurers in the past few months.
Comment: Restituted Kokoschka and Kirchner
The restitution of two works by Oskar Kokoschka and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner to the heirs of Alfred Flechtheim made
international headlines over the past couple of months. Kokoschka’s portrait of Marquis Joseph de Montesquiou- Fezensac is one of the first works to be restituted from Swedish museums, having been acquired by the Moderna Museet in 1934. The case raised demand in Sweden for an independent panel supporting the resolution of such claims similar to the Spoliation Advisory Panel in the UK. The fact that this work was identified in a Swedish (public) collection supports the ALR’s experience that Nazi-looted art can be found across the globe, whether the respective countries were occupied by the Nazis, or directly involved in the Second World War, or not. We hope the case encourages further provenance research at museums and in private collections throughout Sweden and elsewhere.
TWR Website and Certificates
The new website for The Watch Register has now been launched, along with a dedicated watch Certificate. This document is issued when our checks on a watch are clear and serves as a proof of the searcher’s due diligence.
Visit the new TWR website now!
Thanks to the remarkable increase in trade searches in the last year, The Watch Register has already located well over 100 stolen watches this year and prevented their further sale to unsuspecting buyers.
The Art Loss Register Network
Another edition of our pub quiz went very well last month – congratulations to the winning team and all 60+ of you that attended! The new ALR tote bags seemed to go down quite well!