September 2018

Deli-cious News. Sylvie Sulitzer, the owner of a delicatessen shop in the south of France and heir of French art collector and maquisard Alfred Weinberger, was finally reunited with her great grandfather’s looted Renoir, “Two Women in a Garden” (1919). The ceremony took place in New York, and symbolizes the cooperation between France and US law enforcement.

Return to Sender. The Metropolitan Museum of Art will be returning two Indian sculptures, which were donated in 2015, as it turns out that they had been extracted from an Indian archeological site. This is part of the Met’s provenance and collaboration efforts to restitute pieces which do not belong in an American museum.

Failed Promise. Before Barney Ebsworth died last April, the art collector and “travel magnate” promised to donate “Chop Suey” (1929), one of Edward Hopper’s most famous paintings, to the Seattle Art Museum. But today the piece is scheduled to be sold at auction, despite the museums’s attempts to stop the sale. Binding promise or gratuitous gift?

Love and Hate. The estate of pop artist Robert Indiana is facing two lawsuits, involving Jamie Thomas, the artist’s former caretaker, and the Morgan Art Foundation (“MAF”) which owns the artist’s intellectual property.

Andra Goda Nyheter.* The Swedish museum Moderna Museet returned a painting by Oskar Kokoschka to the heirs of Alfred Flechtheim, a Jewish art dealer who had to flee Nazi Germany in 1933. To further their restitution efforts, the museum submitted a proposal to the government for the appointment of an advisory panel dedicated to keeping with the museum’s commitments under the Washington Principles. *Swedish for “another great news.”