In 2012, Greece succumbed to a nation-wide anguish after three pieces of art were stolen from the National Gallery in Athens.
Now, Greek police say they’ve arrested a suspect in connection with the heist and have located the missing pieces, except for a sketch by Italian Mannerist Guglielmo Caccia, which police say was flushed down a toilet by the suspect after being damaged.
The paintings retrieved include Spanish artist Pablo Picasso’s Woman’s Head andDutch artist Piet Mondrian’s Stammer Mill with Summer House. Picasso gave Woman’s Head to the Greek people to observe the country’s resilience against the Nazis.
The recovered paintings serve as a triumph to the Greek art community. Stelios Garipis, an art advisor in Greece, is among the many people celebrating their return.
Listen: Garipis tells As It Happens about the recovered paintings:
7:00Stelios Garipis tells Nil Köksal about the recovered stolen paintings
Garipis spoke to As It Happens guest host Nil Köksal on Wednesday. Here is part of their conversation.
Is relief the right word to describe … how you are feeling now that the Picasso and the Mondrian have been recovered?
Since I am a collector and an art enthusiast, I was thrilled to hear these paintings were found and soon they will be exposed [at the] National Gallery.
Concerning the Picasso painting, it was a national joy, a day of joy, because this Picasso painting was a personal gift to the Greek people.
Picasso, after World War II, offered this painting…. It was a portrait to Greek people as a recognition for their resistance to Germans and the Nazis.
That’s why it was the painting with not only artistic value, but also a real historic and national value.
It was the painting with not only artistic value, but also a real historic and national value. – Stelios Garipis, art advisor
How did the robbery unfold, if you could take us back to nine years ago?
There were two robbers that entered the building. The guards said that they acted very fast. They grabbed the three paintings and they got out.
The security guards were sure and they said definitely there were two robbers. Now the police found a man who was allegedly the one robber. And according to his statements, it was a one-man show.
And for nine years, he was trying to [figure out] what he’s going to do with these paintings. He didn’t have, according to his statement, an objective. … He just had these paintings at his house.
Stelios Garipis is an art advisor who works at auction houses and museums in Athens, Greece. (Submitted by Stelios Garipis)
He said he was an art lover, as I understand it.
According to his Twitter account that we’ve started following, he was following all auction houses…. He was following all the litigations concerning the stolen artworks.
And he was an art dealer. Something like that. He was presented as an art dealer. Now, according to his defence, he was a construction worker. But no one believes this.
What happens next in terms of the case?
We are waiting for the next hearing, which is scheduled for [Thursday]. And I am very curious to listen to his statements and his defence concerning the third painting.
The Picasso left, and the Mondrian are displayed by police officers in Athens during a press conference on Tuesday. (Petros Giannakouris/The Associated Press)
The mystery continues in some ways —in a lot of ways. But how did police finally figure out who they believe had these paintings? How did police get to the bottom of the case?
We still don’t know, since the inquiry is still secret. We don’t know how they managed to arrest him.
He was about to fly to Amsterdam and he was arrested and he indicated to the policeman the place where he had hidden the two of these stolen paintings. Because, as he said, he was embarrassed. He was really embarrassed after some newspaper articles concerning the case last February.
What finally is it going to feel like for you, Mr. Garipis, to see the Picasso hanging, as it should, inside the gallery?
It will be a very big relief for me because when I heard the news, I started shouting in the street … I started shouting like crazy. I was about to cry.
This painting has the value of the Guernica painting. It reminds [me] of my people’s, Greek people’s, fight against Nazism during World War II. It’s a Picasso painting, after all.
My son has never seen the Picasso painting in Greece. We have to go to parties, we have to go to Barcelona to see Picasso paintings. It’s the only Picasso painting in Greece.
Written by Keena Alwahaidi. Interview produced by Niza Lyapa Nondo. Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
