IFAR Journal

The authors, both of whom are art and cultural property attorneys, discuss efforts by museums and other nonprofit and government entities in the U.S. and Europe to examine and, if warranted, restitute objects in their collections that were removed under colonial rule.

Ukrainian born art historian and journalist Konstantin Akinsha, who is also the founder of the Avant-garde ART Research Project Ltd. and co-organizer of the November 2020 Ludwig Museum symposium, "Russian Avant-Garde: Original and Fake," discusses the presence of fake Russian Avant-Garde art in major museum collections throughout Europe and the U.S. and how the market for this art has always been tainted due to the absence of verifiable provenance. Minimal access to Soviet archives and museum collections for comparative research during the Cold War ear contributed to the problem.

 

The author, an art historian and the author/editor of numerous books and articles on Gustave Courbet, discusses the Courbet paintings that were destroyed or went missing during WWII and the correlation of this loss with the heightened interest in collecting Courbet paintings in pre-War Germany.

A tribute by IFAR’s Executive Director, Dr. Sharon Flescher, to Jack A. Josephson, Egyptologist and IFAR Chairman Emeritus, a member of IFAR’s Board since the 1980s.

David Mitten, archaeologist and member of IFAR’s Art Advisory Council for 23 years, is remembered.

In a follow-up to an article published in the 50^th Anniversary issue of the IFAR Journal (Vol. 20, nos. 3&4), the director of IFAR’s Art Research Service reveals that one of the first paintings submitted to IFAR for authentication research in 1970, a Fragonard portrait whose whereabouts were subsequently unknown to IFAR, has surfaced at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, to which it was donated in 1993.

IFAR’s Executive Director and its Legal Research Consultant discuss Schoeps v. Sompo Holdings , Inc., an ownership lawsuit, which the heirs of the pre-WWII art collector and banker Paul Mendelssohn-Bartholdy launched against a Japanese insurance company that acquired one of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in 1987. The heirs believe Mendelssohn-Bartholdy sold the painting under duress in the 1930s. 

A discussion of the ownership claim Bennigson et al. v. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in which the heirs of pre-WWII art collectors Karl and Rosa Adler are suing the foundation that runs the Guggenheim Museum for ownership of Picasso’s Woman Ironing, which they claim the Adlers sold under duress to the dealer who later bequeathed the painting to the Foundation.

The authors report on the outcome of an ownership claim by Howard University for Charles White’s Centralia Madonna. The work, which disappeared from Howard University in the 1970s, ended up in the collection of a North Carolina couple, who consigned it to Sotheby’s in New York in 2020. The case raised issues of laches and statutes of limitations.

A summary of new requests from North Macedonia and Uzbekistan for U.S. import restrictions on at-risk cultural objects from their countries and of a renewal request from Cambodia. The article also mentions pending renewal requests from China and Bulgaria.

Stolen items include an untitled J.M.W. Turner painting and four other works stolen in Devon, England in 2020; a Roberto Buhrle Marx untitled painting stolen in transit in 2020; a Jules Pascin painting, Woman in an Armchair, stolen in Germany in 2019; a Wole Lagunju painting, The Man Who Gazed at the Daylight Moon, stolen in Memphis, TN in 2021; and a Fantin-Latour flower painting stolen in 1997.

Recovered items include five works by 20^th century American artists, including Elaine de Kooning’s Untitled (Madrid Series #3), stolen in Boulder, CO, ; John Bradley’s Portrait of Ann Totten, stolen from a museum in Staten Island in 1970; two Kandinsky paintings lost in The Netherlands during WWII; a Kandinsky watercolor, Composition, stolen from a Polish museum in 1984; two Paul Klee works on paper stolen from a New York gallery in 1988.