Art & Crime
Two years ago, Ronald Coles Investment Gallery, an Australian art seller that claimed an annual turnover of $20 million, shut up shop. Coles himself was declared bankrupt and disappeared. Now, after a massive police investigation, he's finally been arrested...
In a brazen theft that combined old-fashioned brutality with high-tech gadgetry, two armed men broke into the home of an elderly art-dealing vicar in northern Ireland on January 3. The pair beat their victim and left him bound and gagged while they perused...
In just seven minutes flat, thieves made off with three treasured artworks from Athens's National Gallery during the early hours of Monday morning. The works, by Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, and 17th-century Italian artist Guglielmo Caccia,...
While the Stop Online Piracy Act (also known as SOPA) now pending in Congress has members of the technology and art world up in arms, a more subtle remedy for small copyright claims is also quietly being developed by the United States Copyright...
As protests against military rule continue in Tahrir Square, with 10 dead and over 500 wounded, the Institute of Egypt has also become a victim of the unrest. After a fire on Saturday, this library with its priceless records of Egyptian history and geography...
As researchers dig deeper into the activities of French institutions during the dark time of the German Occupation in World War II, ever more art controversies are coming to light. During the war, thousands of artworks moved through the former Musée du Jeu de...
Six men are currently appearing in a southern French court, charged with stealing four paintings valued at €22 million ($29.3 million) from Nice's Musée des Beaux-Arts in 2007. And in a turn of events that has taken on all the trappings of a crime drama, they...
Sandy Nairne is a busy man. He is director of London’s National Portrait Gallery, lectures widely on art history and his latest area of interest, art theft, and has a new book out, “Art Theft and the Case of the Stolen Turners” (Reaktion, 2011). The very...
You never know what you might find hidden in your bathroom. A stash of art dating from the High Renaissance through the Modernist period and worth millions of dollars has been discovered in the outhouse of a 92-year-old former bricklayer in Poland.The...
When a profile of megadealer Larry Gagosian lands, it lands with a bang. The Armenian-born imperial gallerist very rarely gives interviews, for one thing — even the New York Times failed to nail him down for comment in their lively 2009 attempt, noting that...
