Art News Galore

Art treasure trove goes to auction

Filed under: Art Sales — Alan @ 5:37 pm

A large treasure trove of books, paintings, drawings, and prints from some of the premier 20^th century artists is slated to be auctioned off after sitting in storage and kept from the public eye for about seventy years.

The works are from Derain, Cezanne, Picasso, Renoir, and Gauguin and are billed as the ‘Tresors du Coffre Vollard.’  Together they compile a timeline from some of the key composers of modern art and outline the previous century’s most historical moments.

Altogether there are 140 works, which were placed in a Paris safety deposit box in 1939 and stayed there for forty years.  However, now they will soon go up for sale at the Sotheby’s in London and Paris.

Vice chairman of Sotheby’s modern art and impressionist department, Helena Newman, stated that the sale is like exploring a lost world as she only saw the collection for the first time just a couple of weeks ago.  Newman continued to say that it was like taking a step back in time because a great many of the works had not actually been viewed since 1939.

The collection at one point belonged to the imminent art dealer Ambroise Vollard who was killed in 1939 in a car crash.  A young Jew was in charge of his works and as the Nazis got closer he decided to put 140 of the works into a bank vault.

In 1942 the young man was killed at the Sajmiste concentration camp and the vault remained unopened due to the fact that French law mandates forty years must pass before the bank can sell the pieces to cover storage fees.

Italian police find Parmalat hidden masters

Filed under: Art crime — Alan @ 3:16 am

Italian investigators made something of a coup this past weekend after repeated attempts to get at the assets from the Parmalat collapse, by seizing art and paintings valued at around £90m.

The works belonged to the group’s founder Calisto Tanzi.

The group has been nicknamed the Enron of Europe since its collapse in 2003 leaving behind debts that total up to 14 billion euro.  Parma police said they found the assets after a series of telephone intercepts were made.  One of the paintings discovered by police was about to be auctioned off.

The art included many famous works by Degas, Picasso, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Cezanne.   The artwork was all found in homes of the Tanzi family’s friends.

Chief Parma prosecutor, Gerardo Laguardia, stated that they have had some suspicions about certain people for a while, which is why they tapped the phone lines.  After further investigation they found that one of the Monet’s was involved in negotiations for sale.

Parmalat was the largest corporate bankruptcy in Europe’s history.  Its founder, Tanzi, is serving his ten years in prison after sentencing last year for his part in the fraud.

The company came back from bankruptcy in 2005 and is not run by the administrator Enrico Bondi.

Bondi has been searching for the lost assets to repay debts since the collapse, while also going after international investment banks that had a role in advising the company on bond issues.

The fraud affected about 100,000 shareholders in Italy who lost their life savings.