The First Art Newspaper on the Net
Abraham Bloemart s Moses Striking the Rock, a painting from 1596 now in its collection. The museum said it had investigated and did not find compelling evidence that Curt Glaser had been forced to sell the painting. Metropolitan Museum of Art via The New York Times.
by Catherine Hickley
(NYT NEWS SERVICE)
.- The Nazi authorities removed Curt Glaser from his post as director of the Berlin State Art Library in April 1933 because he was Jewish. He was also evicted from his home and, the following month, sold most of his art collection at two auctions. Since 2007, 13 private collectors or institutions including the Dutch Restitutions Committee, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the city of Basel have concluded that Glaser sold his collection in May 1933 as a result of Nazi persecution, and agreed to either return or pay some compensation to his heirs for art he sold that wound up in th
The First Art Newspaper on the Net
by Jean-Louis De La Vaissiere
PARIS
(AFP)
.- A French journalist s investigation into the alleged forgery network around art collector Giuliano Ruffini has also criticised the great negligence of art world experts. The doubts first became public when French police seized a painting owned by the prince of Liechtenstein from an exhibition in Aix-en-Provence in 2016. The prince had paid seven million euros at auction for the portrait of the goddess Venus by 16th century Italian painter Lucas Cranach, yet tests would soon reveal that the pigments used in the painting dated from the 20th century. Ruffini was well-known in the art world. Since the 1990s, he had sold dozens even hundreds of paintings by such luminaries as Parmigianino and El Greco to some of the great museums of Europe, including the Louvre, often through intermediaries. Many, he said, had come from the collection of an ex-girlfriend s father, Andre Borie, a civil engineer