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Stolen Art and The Art Loss Register
by:
Anna Kisluk
In 1998 the theft of two paintings by Vincent Van Gogh and another by Cezanne from the National Gallery in Rome made headlines around the world. Fortunately, the Italian police recovered them almost immediately. Many may also recall the theft of the paintings from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in the US in 1990 when thieves posing as police officers gained entry to the Museum and stole the only known seascape by Rembrandt. Also taken were one of the few extant paintings by Jan Vermeer and several other paintings and objects, garnering in all twelve items. Nine years later, these works are still unrecovered.
When such major works of art are stolen, the story almost always makes the headlines internationally. However, such attention getting thefts are only a small portion of the problem of stolen art and cultural property. Art theft is endemic and perennial and not a sporadic event that occurs infrequently as the headlines would suggest. Stolen art runs the gamut from those masterpieces mentioned to the inherited nineteenth-century silver tea set or candlesticks, the Oriental carpet, the Georgian chair and so on and on.
In any discussion of stolen art almost inevitably two questions are asked. The first is: "Who is the typical art thief?" The answer is that there is really no one 'typical thief'. Romantics imagine a suave, debonair, gentleman thief such as the character portrayed recently by Pierce Brosnan in 'The Thomas Crown Affair'. Unfortunately, that is more fiction and fantasy than fact. The truth is much more mundane. Most art thieves are thieves first and foremost. Their motive is that most mundane of all: money. They just happen to steal art rather than a car.
The second question is: "How extensive is the problem?" Many experts have tried to quantify the incidence of art theft but the task has been all but impossible. Estimates vary from $2 billion to $6 billion annually and are extrapolations from thefts reported to major police organisations such as Interpol. Much stolen art is unreported to such central bodies and is perhaps not even reported to the local law enforcement authorities, particularly in developing countries. Therefore, quantifying the problem is difficult but everyone acknowledges that it is a major worldwide problem.
The art market is international. Just as an object legitimately on the market can travel from its point of origin or creation, so can a stolen work. An object stolen in England can turn up in Australia, as was recently the case with a toy pedal car withdrawn from sale by Christie's Melbourne in July 1999. The revolution in transportation in this century means that stolen objects can and do move far and quickly. For those who are committed to stemming the trade in stolen art, the challenge is to circulate information on the stolen art work to potential buyers and law enforcement agencies world wide faster and more efficiently than the thieves can circulate the art. As one of the experts at the Getty Information Institute succinctly phrased it, the challenge is to stay one step ahead of the thieves and their accomplices.
This means providing accurate information rapidly so the stolen work can be identified by someone who has never seen it. Disseminating that information to law enforcement agencies internationally, to potential purchasers, to the art community, or to organisations such as the Art Loss Register which maintain databases of stolen art and cultural property, is the task which faces us. And, that is one of the reasons why the Art Loss Register was established.
The Art Loss Register, which began operations in 1991, was established by the art community and insurance industry to provide a way to combat art theft. It provides a resource whereby the public as well as law enforcement bodies can register stolen art and also check whether that painting, that sculpture, that silver tankard or other object just might be stolen property. Its shareholders include the major auction houses as well as insurance companies and art organisations. The core of the current database, which now numbers over 120,000 items and is the largest private database in the world, came from the International Foundation for Art Research which began collecting records on stolen art in the mid 1970s.
Working with subscribing insurance companies in the US and Europe (no Australian companies are yet participating in the subscription program), the ALR has dramatically increased the level of the reporting of stolen art. On average, the ALR registers approximately 1,200 items a month. Since stolen art comprises almost anything that can be sold on the art or collectables market, so does the Art Loss Register database. Since 1991 the ALR has identified and thereby helped to recover over $100 million in stolen art. Recoveries have occurred through two main activities by the Art Loss Register: the screening of auction house catalogues against the database and inquiries by the public and law enforcement agencies.
At the Art Loss Register, the screening of auction catalogues accounts for almost fifty percent of those items identified and then recovered. Sometimes it is the thief who is attempting to sell the work. More frequently the consignor to the auction house has no idea his art was stolen property. Having passed through many hands, the 'red flags' of a 'deal too good to be true' are no longer there. In the course of a stolen work's travel through the market and over the course of years, it may acquire a veneer of legitimacy in the form of a provenance, which appears, on the surface, to be perfectly respectable and perhaps even distinguished. The ALR database can identify stolen objects regardless of their apparent good provenance. Such recoveries may occur quickly or many years after the theft. A Tiffany lamp stolen from a private collector in 1989 was recovered in 1996 through catalogue screening. More recently, a small still life by the English artist Thomas Bale stolen in Pennsylvania in 1986 surfaced in an auction house in London.
The other mechanism through which the ALR identifies stolen works is what we call the 'ad hoc search'. This may be an inquiry from a police officer, a dealer, a museum or a collector. For example, in March 1996 thieves stole a statue of a young girl by the American artist Bessie Potter Vonnoh, used as a fountain by a cemetery in Missouri. It was recovered in New York State five months later by police who could not identify the owner or its origin. The ALR provided that crucial information to the police and the couple whom the police arrested was convicted of the US Federal felony of 'transportation of stolen property across a state line'. The statue was a key piece of evidence in their prosecution. Inquiries from law enforcement, a service that the ALR provides as a free public service, accounts for 31 percent of the works identified and recovered.
Increasingly, the steps a purchaser takes to determine the status of an acquisition are important when or if a question arises regarding the legal ownership of a work of art. This 'due diligence', as it is labelled, may be difficult for the purchaser, relying solely on their own knowledge or memory. Research can help and plays a crucial role in establishing the status of a work. However, it may be only the first step. With the developments in the past decades of new technology, most visibly that in the field of computers, and the advent of the much heralded 'information age', the collector, the gallery and the museum, as well as law enforcement agencies, have new tools at their disposal to assist them in exercising their responsibility of 'due diligence'. Among those tools available to the purchaser are databases of stolen and missing works of art like the Art Loss Register. Some such databases or compilations of stolen works have existed for decades, most notably that maintained by Interpol. With respect to the ALR database, one difference is that, unlike the information gathered by many law enforcement agencies, the ALR database is available for consultation by the public.
In the past few years the Art Loss Register has made a concerted effort to encourage dealers and purchasers to check before they buy. This procedure has proved very effective. A small bronze Etruscan sculpture of a discus thrower was recovered in 1997 (almost nine years after it was stolen in Switzerland) when a dealer checked with the ALR. Many major museums in the United States and Europe now incorporate a check with the Art Loss Register as a formal step in their acquisition process. The same is true of many major art dealers in both the US and England. As this practice increasingly becomes the 'custom of the trade', as dealers and other art buyers increasingly check up on their proposed purchases, the more art will be recovered. Moreover, this will increase the risk for the thief that they will be caught. It will also decrease the profitability of theft to the thief. As the market begins to dry up, stolen art will be less marketable so there will be less incentive to steal it.
The principle of 'due diligence' is applicable to the buyer but many believe it is also applicable to the victim of theft. Just as a purchaser has, in the opinion of many, the obligation to check by available means whether a work is possibly stolen property, so too does the victim have an obligation to notify the appropriate agencies of the theft. Several American legal cases in the recent past have focused attention on this issue. In the American case of Guggenheim v. Lubell, a gouache by Marc Chagall was identified by a former employee of the Guggenheim Museum when a transparency of it was brought to an auction house for appraisal for possible sale. It had disappeared from the Museum sometime in the late 1960s. In the course of the protracted legal dispute over ownership of the painting, it was determined that the Museum had not reported the loss to any agencies - not to the police nor to their insurer. This of course raised the question of how a purchaser could have determined that it had been stolen. Some institutions have argued that reporting a theft and alerting the public to the loss drives it further underground and decreases the chance of recovery. However, the tangled, not to mention costly, legal battles waged by opposing parties over the issue of ownership of stolen art in recent years have demonstrated that appropriate reporting of a loss helps to establish the rights of a legal owner when a recovery occurs and does not necessarily impact adversely on the chance of recovery.
In effect, the 'due diligence' coin has two sides: firstly, the victim has the responsibility to report a theft to law enforcement and other agencies. Secondly, the purchaser has the responsibility to 'do their homework', so to speak, by researching the proposed acquisition and consulting available databases and registries of stolen and missing works.
In closing, I would like to mention briefly an issue that has focused public attention on the issue of stolen art: the art looted during the Second World War. More than fifty years after the end of the war, victims of the Holocaust, their heirs and other victims have come forward to claim works which in some cases have for decades adorned the walls of prominent collectors and even museums. It raises many difficult legal and moral issues and the various parties involved are only beginning to grapple with them. Several organisations in the Unites States such as the Commission for Art Recovery of the World Jewish Congress, as well other groups and projects in other countries, are attempting to find ways to deal with those issues. Again information will be critical. As a service to the public and the art community, the Art Loss Register has undertaken a special project in co-operation with other organisations to gather the data on those losses and has waived all fees. That data has been incorporated into the ALR database and will add immeasurably to the information available to the purchaser of art, whether a private collector, a dealer or a museum.
This article has been adapted from a talk delivered at the Art Crime Conference held by the Australian Institute of Criminology in Sydney on 2 December 1999. |
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