Art
‘Indiana Jones of art world’ recovers stolen Van Gogh painting
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A Dutch art detective has recovered a precious Vincent van Gogh painting that was stolen from a museum in a midnight heist during the coronavirus lockdown three and a half years ago, police have said.
Arthur Brand took possession of the missing painting, The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring, painted in 1884 and worth €3m-€6m (£2.6m-£5.2m), at his Amsterdam home on Monday, stuffed in a blue Ikea bag.
Brand, known as the “Indiana Jones of the art world” for tracing a series of high-profile lost artworks, told AFP that confirming the painting was the stolen Van Gogh was “one of the greatest moments of my life”.
“Arthur Brand, in cooperation with the Dutch police, has solved this matter,” Richard Bronswijk, of the Dutch police arts crime unit, confirmed. “This is definitely the real one, there’s no doubt about it.”
Brand told AFP that frequent calls by him and the Dutch police to hand back the stolen artwork finally paid off when a man, whose identity was not revealed for his own safety, handed Brand the painting in a blue Ikea bag, covered with bubblewrap and stuffed in a pillow casing.
A video clip supplied by Brand showed him unpacking the painting in his lounge and gasping in astonishment when he realised what it was. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said.
The painting was taken from the Singer Laren Museum near Amsterdam on 30 March 2020 in a heist that made headlines around the world.
Dutch police released video images shortly after the burglary showing a thief smashing through a glass door in the middle of the night, before running out with the painting tucked under his right arm.
In April 2021, police arrested a man named in Dutch media as Nils M for the theft. He was later convicted and sentenced to eight years behind bars. He was also convicted for stealing another masterpiece, by Frans Hals, called Two Laughing Boys in a separate burglary.
“After a few months I heard from a source in the criminal world who had bought the Van Gogh,” said Brand, who has gained fame for his remarkable recoveries of stolen art, including the “Hitler’s Horses” bronze statues, a Picasso painting and a ring that once belonged to Oscar Wilde.
This man, identified by Dutch media as Peter Roy K, was behind bars for a separate case involving the large-scale import and export of cocaine, Brand said. K wanted to use the painting as collateral to negotiate a reduction in his sentence.
Brand confirmed Peter Roy K’s identity, stressing he had said before that “no deal for a reduced sentence would be made”. The whereabouts of the Van Gogh, however, remained a mystery until two weeks ago when a man contacted Brand saying he wanted to return it.
After some negotiation, Brand persuaded the man – who had “nothing to do with the theft”, according to the art detective – to hand back the artwork.
“The man told me: ‘I want to return the Van Gogh. It has caused a massive headache,’” because it could not be used as a bargaining chip, Brand said. “In an operation done in close coordination with the Dutch police, we got the painting back,” he added.
The painting, from relatively early in Van Gogh’s career, before the prolific artist embarked on his trademark post-impressionist paintings, has been handed back to the director of the Groninger Museum, from where it was on loan to the Singer Laren Museum.
Hals’ Two Laughing Boys remains missing, but Brand said he hoped that painting would also be returned soon.
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In the first reported case of its kind in Croatia, three museums have restored several pieces of art stolen from a Jewish businessman during the Holocaust to his grandson, according to a report Friday.
The move marks the end of a 70-year struggle by the descendants of Dane Reichsmann, who was a wealthy owner of a department store in the country’s capital Zagreb before the Nazi-led genocide and was deported and murdered at Auschwitz along with his wife.
“This seems almost beyond belief,” Andy Reichsman, Dane’s grandson, and inheritor of the looted works told The New York Times. “I thought that our chances would be one in a million. They never had any interest in giving anything back to Jews.”
The artworks returned include paintings by André Derain, “Still Life With a Bottle,” and Maurice de Vlaminick’s “Landscape by the Water,” which were held by the National Museum of Modern Art, and lithographs from the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts by Pablo Picasso, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne and Pierre Bonnard.
A bronze plaque, copper tray, and bowl from the Zagreb Museum of Arts and Crafts was also restored. However, 19 additional pieces from the institution are still being pursued by Reichsman’s lawyer.
The pieces were looted by the ruling Croatian fascist group, the Ustaše.
Reichsman’s aunt Danica Scodoba and father Franz Reichsman fled Europe before the outbreak of World War II to London and the United States, respectively (Franz dropped the extra N from his family name “Reichsmann” when he immigrated).
Reichsman took up the struggle of his aunt, who tried for half a century to reclaim the property. He recalled that “she traveled to Zagreb every summer and met with gallery directors, government officials and anyone she felt could help her in her attempts to retrieve the art.”
Scodoba died more than two decades ago and was unable to witness a Zagreb Municipal Court ruling in December 2020 that determined the pieces legally belonged to her.
A subsequent decision in 2021 affirmed her nephew as her heir.
Reichsman’s Croatian laywer, Monja Matic, said she valued her client’s patience after she had worked on the case for some 20 years.
“This is a positive step in dealing with outstanding Holocaust Era restitution issues in Croatia,” said Gideon Taylor, President of the World Jewish Restitution Organization.
The National Museum of Modern Art said in a Facebook statement it was “working intensively on researching provenance” of artworks suspected of being looted during the war.
The institution regretted that the resolution took as long as it did.
Croatia rebuffed restitution claims by descendants of Holocaust victims until last year when its government and the World Jewish Restitution Organization published a joint report detailing the looting of art by the fascist regime. Stolen property was subsequently seized and nationalized by the country’s communist government.
The Nazi-allied Ustaše regime, which ran the Independent State of Croatia from 1941 to 1945, persecuted and killed hundreds of thousands of ethnic Serbs, Jews, Roma and anti-fascist Croatians.
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