In Brief
New Yorker Arrested and Charged for Stealing a $16,000 Sculpture from a Manhattan Gallery
Surveillance camera footage shows the suspect allegedly walking off with the sculpture in broad daylight.
Art Crime
In Brief
World’s Most Successful Art Thief Told His Secrets in a GQ Interview
Unmotivated by profit, Stéphane Breitwieser stole over a billion dollars worth of art and artifacts to fill his obsessive treasure trove, which he stored away in an attic.
In Brief
Serial Art Thief, Who Stole Nearly 250 Artworks, Arrested Yet Again
His mother has destroyed almost 100 art objects to minimize evidence of the stolen goods.
News
World’s Largest Native American Art Forgery Ring Distributed $12M of Fakes
The US government attorney supports 18-month sentences and fines for the accused, but in many ways the damage is done, casting both real and fake Native American artworks into doubt.
News
Protesters Object to Display of Looted Objects at Israel's Bible Lands Museum
Finds Gone Astray features 40,000 artifacts confiscated from looters and unauthorized dealers in antiquities over the past 50 years. The protestors demand the immediate removal of the exhibition and the repatriation of the stolen items to the Palestinian Authority.
In Brief
Uffizi Gallery Launches Online Campaign for Return of Painting Stolen by Nazis
The Uffizi's director has used social media to call out Germany authorities who have yet to respond to his requests for restitution.
Art
Understanding the Migrant Caravan in the Context of Imperial Plunder and Dispossession
The publication of Felwine Sarr and Benedicte Savoy’s report recommending the restitution of stolen African objects and the approach of what is called a “migrant caravan” toward the US is not a coincidence.
In Brief
Easter Islanders Are Visiting British Museum to Request Repatriation of Ancestral Heritage
"For us [the statue] is a brother; but for them it is a souvenir or an attraction,” said a member of the Easter Island development commission, Anakena Manutomatoma.
In Brief
Easter Islanders Ask British Museum to Return Sacred Statue, Offering Replica in Return
The Rapa Nui community has offered a basalt replica of the eight-foot, four-ton sculpture called Hoa Hakananai’a, which was stolen in 1868.
In Brief
Guggenheim Museum Returns Looted Painting to a German Art Dealer’s Heirs
When Alfred Flechtheim fled Germany, an Ernst Ludwig Kirchner painting of his ended up in the hands of a Nazi, and eventually at the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim.
Art
Seizure of Looted Antiquities Illuminates What Museums Want Hidden
Over 20,000 precious art objects were seized in a raid at dawn — what can this elucidate about beauty, theft, and the museum?
In Brief
Sacré Bleu! French Museum Is Full of Forgeries
The Musée Terrus in Elne recently brought in an art historian to examine its holdings; he found that 82 of the 140 works in the museum's collection are fake.