The Week That Was (Feb. 15 – 22, 2008)

NEW YORK—Until two of the four artworks stolen from a Swiss museum two weeks ago turned up in a van parked outside a psychiatric hospital in Zurich, the heist kept newspapers and Web sites alive with chatter about the nature of art theft. One expert posited that organized crime was probably behind it. The Independent reminded readers that that “after drugs and weapons, [art theft] is the third most lucrative international criminal operation, according to the FBI, and it is thought to be worth around £3 billion a year.” Why is it so easy to steal art in Europe? “Smaller galleries and no guns,” Slate explained. In the Wall Street Journal, Eric Gibson wondered, why steal art at all, if it’s so difficult to sell? “In spite of its inherent difficulties and risks, art theft may be driven primarily by art’s easy availability and its high social profile," he concluded. In any event, it’s far less glamorous and infinitely more stupid than its portrayal in movies and books.  

An 18th-century Japanese carving stolen nine years ago from a museum in Birmingham, England, was discovered just before it was to be auctioned in Germany. Italian police say they have recovered looted artifacts found in collections in Switzerland, France, and Spain. Treasure hunters in Germany claim to be 90 percent sure they’ve found the Amber Room (made of amber and gold leaf) that the Nazis stole from the Soviet Union during World War II. A long-lost study for Seurat’s celebrated painting La Grande Jatte, assumed to have been stolen by the Nazis during World War II, was seized from an art dealer in Paris. The Israel Museum in Jerusalem opened two exhibitions of art looted by the Nazis: the first included pieces looted from France and then returned; the second highlighted work, now in the custody of the Israel Museum, whose original owners are unknown.

After long delays, the Bernard Tschumi-designed Acropolis Museum in Athens, originally planned to open for the 2004 Athens Olympics, is scheduled to open in the fall. The building will likely mean increased pressure on the U.K. to return the Elgin Marbles, now housed in London’s British Museum. Renzo Piano will design a new library and opera house complex near Athens, funded at $442 million by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. The Austin Art Museum in Austin, Texas, has begun an anticipated $23 million capital campaign for a new building that will double its exhibition space.

Friedrich Christian Flick donated 166 contemporary artworks to the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. The art collection of the late Efstratios Eleftheriades, which includes a dining room decorated by Matisse, has been donated to the Matisse Museum in the French village of Le Cateau. A Russian prince who is now a U.S. citizen donated two paintings to the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. The U.K. decided to address a tax policy that seemed to discourage foreign-born art collectors from living and donating art in Britain. After trying to sell part of the Alfred Stieglitz Collection of modern art, Fisk University is in a court battle with the Georgia O’Keefe Museum to keep it. Writer Nicholas Blincoe complained that museums, increasingly given over to children, are becoming like playgrounds. “I want to be reassured that the point of culture and history is to grow up, to strive to become an adult,” he fumed on the Guardian’s blog. “Not an adult-shaped thing, forever walking in a Hogwarts-Teletubbies-Disney world of plastic and primary colors.”

Japan’s Supreme Court reversed a 2003 decision and found that a book of erotic photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe does not, in fact, violate obscenity laws. New York magazine ran a spread of Bert Stern’s photographs of actress Lindsay Lohan reprising the famous 1962 nude photo shoot of Marilyn Monroe; the online version generated 20 million page views in 2 days—a 2,000% increase over the same day last year. Dorothy Podber, the artist who shot one of Warhol’s Marilyn paintings in 1964—resulting in what is now known as “Red Shot Marilyn,” which sold at auction for $4 million in 1989—died. The 55th Carnegie International, an exhibition of contemporary art that opens at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh in three months, will take on the theme of life on Mars. “Are we alone in the universe?” its curator, Douglas Fogle asked. “Do aliens exist? Or are we, ourselves, the strangers in our own worlds?” The Getty acquired an 18th-century alabaster bust by Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. It is known as The Vexed Man.