Art & Crime
There are a number of surprising statements in Jonathon Keats’s new book “Forged: Why Fakes Are the Great Art of Our Day” (Oxford). “No authentic modern masterpiece is as provocative as a great forgery.” “Forgers are the foremost artists of our age.” “Fakes...
Ralph Esmerian, the disgraced former owner of luxury jewelry retailer Fred Leighton, was sentenced to six years in prison for wire fraud and other charges in July 2011. As he serves his sentence, a battle among his creditors — including Christie’s, Sotheby’s...
If anyone would want to steer clear of the Russian legal system you’d think it would be the anarchist art collective Voina, whose members are routinely jailed for provocations like painting a 210-foot penis on a St. Petersburg drawbridge and overturning...
MAINE-ET-LOIRE — A recent article in Der Spiegel urged Germany to do some real soul-searching — as well as museum-searching — over the fate of artwork looted by the Nazis that has never been returned to its rightful heirs. Now, a French senator is demanding...
NEW YORK — On Tuesday, the now-defunct Knoedler Gallery was slapped with a lawsuit for selling an allegedly fake modernist masterwork — again. On January 29, the Martin Hilti Family Trust filed suit in U.S. District Court against the blue-chip gallery, its...
A 1920 painting by Henri Matisse stolen from the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1987 has resurfaced in Essex.Art dealer Charles Roberts was asked by an elderly Polish client to sell “Le jardin” in order to raise funds for his grandchildren. The dealer...
KOCHI — The Kochi-Muziris Biennale made worldwide headlines when it opened on December 12 — as India’s first biennale, the three-month long Kerala-based event signifies the area's debut of a major international contemporary art platform. But on...
What is the most frequently stolen artwork in history? The answer is The Ghent Altarpiece by Jan van Eyck, stolen six times (seven, depending on who you ask). The most frequently given incorrect answer (even the Guinness Book of World Records got this...
Secondary market private sales have long been an important part of the art business. They are also, perhaps, the most opaque. When negotiating between a buyer and a seller, how private should the terms of a sale be? How much about a gallery’s closed-door deal...
We yearn to understand the motives of criminals. It’s natural. So when a museumgoer by the name of Vladimir Umanets brashly tagged of one of Mark Rothko’s Seagram murals at the Tate Modern on Sunday with the words “A potential piece...
