This week, a large 17th-century Baroque painting by Italian artist Guercino went missing in the northern Italian city of Modena.
Art Theft
Posted inIn Brief
Criminals Love Weapons, Drugs, and … Art
Art theft is the third-highest grossing criminal trade in the world, preceded only by drugs and weapons. This claim comes from a smart, extensive Newsweek article covering a three-day conference held at New York University Law School last month called “Art Crime and Cultural Heritage: Fakes, Forgeries, and Looted and Stolen Art.”
Posted inIn Brief
Stolen Matisse Returned to Venezuela
A Matisse painting valued at $3 million was returned to Venezuela yesterday, after disappearing from an art museum there at least a decade prior, Reuters reported.
Posted inBooks
Gathering the Phantoms of Lost Art
Art history is very much a haunted field, with the specters of works obliterated, lost, hidden, or just vanished floating around it. Our visual culture is defined as much by destruction as it is by creation.
Posted inNews
Three Arrests Made in Major Holland Art Heist
In October, seven works of art worth tens of millions of dollars, by artists ranging from Picasso to Matisse, Gauguin, and Lucian Freud, were stolen from the Kunsthal Rotterdam in Holland at 3 am. Three people have now been arrested in connection with the heist.
Posted inOpinion
A New Possible Lead in Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Theft [UPDATED]
The Hartford Courant reports that one of the world’s great unsolved art thefts may have a new lead.
Posted inOpinion
Required Reading
This week … insights into Ai Weiwei’s photos, photos of Japan’s gangs, aesthetics of interactive space, William Gibson on cities, fake Guggenheims, superhero costumes, art thefts in Toronto, vintage street art & graffiti spots in New York.
Posted inNews
Thief Steals Artifacts From Forbidden City
Think Beijing’s historic Forbidden City is pretty well guarded? Well, you’d be right, the place is infested with security. Yet that didn’t stop a thief from grabbing $1.5 million worth of artifacts from the Palace Museum in the Forbidden City.