Art crime not always black and white

The fascinating combination of art and crime make Jonathan Webb's coffee table book Stolen well worth a look.

STOLEN: The gallery of missing masterpieces
Jonathan Webb
Cameron house, hbk, $75

Review by Peter Entwisle

Stolen, by Jonathan Webb, is a well-produced coffee-table book about stolen art. It is based on information held by the Art Loss Register, an organisation established in London in 1991 by Julian Radcliffe, who wrote the introduction.

Art is fascinating. So is crime. The glamour surrounding the sale of much art is alluring.

The book's subject is interesting. It would be easy to sensationalise it but Webb doesn't unduly press the buttons.

His style is not tabloid, though certainly not flat.

This is not a history of art theft in recent times but it covers some interesting cases and reveals how attitudes have changed, even since 1991.

The first short chapter is about one stolen work. The next is longer and more generally about art crimes. The next is called "Tainted Legacy" and is about war loot, especially art stolen by the Nazis from Jewish owners, which became a new focus of interest and recovery in the 1990s.

The following chapter is about the illegal excavation and export of antiquities, in which some large museums have been embarrassed.

Another chapter, "The Unbreakable Art Bubble", is about the selling of stolen art which has touched such illustrious names as Sotheby's and Christie's, although the collusion in fixing commissions, to which Webb refers, is not any form of art theft, or receiving.

There's a final section illustrating various stolen works and an index.

The book covers the Dunedin case of the Macchiaioli paintings bought by the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in 1994 and seized in Rome in 1998 in transit to an exhibition.

They had been identified as having been stolen in Tuscany during World War 2.

Eventually, the gallery struck a deal with the former owner's descendants, giving them two in order to recover the others.

Webb's account is limited and a bit flawed. It's based on an article by John Timmins which is accurate so far as it goes.

But this is a long story and Mr Timmins was not involved in the purchase of the works, or with them when they were seized, as I was.

There are minor errors. Dorothy Fraser, the vendor, was not Arthur Fraser's widow but his sister.

More seriously, Webb's account has become skewed by distance from the facts. He acknowledges the works were bought by the gallery in good faith.

He doesn't make it clear I had also established, with a paper trail, that they had been bought legitimately by Mr Fraser in Senna in 1943 and legally exported.

He says the gallery did not, however, check the new purchases with the Art Loss Register. True, but if I had, I would have discovered nothing.

At that time and until after the time of the works' seizure, no publication carried this information. (The official who seized them had seen an as yet unpublished new register.) Mr Webb says no-one at the gallery had been following developments in the art world regarding the recovery of Holocaust art.

I was aware there were stirrings, but in 1994 that was all they were.

Also, the Fraser paintings were not Holocaust art.

The original owner died in Israel after the war and the works were probably stolen by Italian contadini, "peasants" in our poor translation, certainly not by the Nazis.

More to the point, I had been able, unusually, to establish they were bought and exported legally and that under New Zealand and Italian law the gallery had good title to them.

Talk of a reform of the gallery's procedures is overdone. If anything, the institution is more vulnerable now than it was in 1994.

It's an attractive book but has some limitations.

Peter Entwisle is a Dunedin historian and art curator.