Among the dozens of allegedly looted antiquities that the government of Turkey is asking American museums to return are ten objects at the J. Paul Getty Museum.

The Getty declined to provide a list of the objects in question, as did the Met, the Cleveland Museum and Harvard’s Dumbarton Oaks. We obtained a list from Turkish authorities and asked the Getty to provide the collecting history for those objects.

Unlike those other museums, the Getty is obligated by its 2006 acquisition policy to provide the public with provenance information about objects in the collection. Thanks to that policy, we now know something about how the contested objects came to the Getty.

The most prominent are four marble Muses now on display in the Getty Villa’s Basilica Room. All four appear to come from Cremna, Turkey and were first acquired by antiquities dealer Elie Borowski sometime before 1968, the Getty records show.

Borowski, who died in 2003, had ties to the illicit antiquities trade. His name appears in Robert Hecht’s memoir as a client of convicted antiquities dealer Giacomo Medici; it also appears on a handwritten organization chart of the illicit trade seized by Italian authorities in 2001. Former Getty antiquities curator Marion True told Italian authorities that Borowski had also been a client of Gianfranco Becchina, the Sicilian antiquities dealer (also named on the org chart) who is on trial in Italy.

Several other Getty objects sought by Turkey came through another dealer connected to the illicit trade: Nicolas Koutoulakis, now deceased owner of the Paris gallery Segredakis. Koutoulaksi also appears in the org chart and last September, the Getty returned to Greece fragments of a grave stone it had acquired from Koutoulakis after scholars concluded they adjoined an object now in a Greek museum.

Portrait of a Man. (73.AB.8) Purchased in 1973 for  $125,326  from Nicolas Koutoulakis

Bronze bust. (71.AB.458) Purchased in 1971 for $90,000 from Nicolas Koutoulakis.

Bronze foot from “Bubon, Turkey, Asia” (72.AB.103) acquired from Nicolas Koutoulakis. (See the Cleveland bronze from Bubon here.)

Bronze bed (82.AC.94) purchased for $150,000 from Nicolas Koutoulakis; Koutoulakis purchased from Gilette’s estate; Joseph Gilette of Lausanne, ca 1936.

The final two Getty objects come from a private dealer and an auction house:

Roman Eagle (72.AB.151) purchased in 1972 for $200,00 from French & Company.

Bronze bust of Lucius Veres  (73.AB.100) purchased in 1973 for $37,701 from Spink & Son, London.

When asked for comment about Turkey’s request, Getty spokesman Ron Hartwig said, “We are in dialogue with officials from the Turkish Ministry of Culture regarding some objects in our collection. We expect those discussions to continue and while they do, we will not be getting into specifics.”

Article source: http://chasingaphrodite.com/2012/04/20/the-getty-list-10-objects-at-the-j-paul-getty-museum-that-turkey-says-were-looted/

Courtesy Casoria Contemporary Art Museum

Antonio Manfredi torches a painting by French artist Séverine Bourguignon in front of the Casoria Contemporary Art Museum

by Reid Singer

Published: April 17, 2012

In Saturday’s Los Angeles Times, Jason reports on Turkey’s bid to repatriate dozens of allegedly looted antiquities in American museums.

The requests include 10 objects at the J. Paul Getty Museum; 18 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; 21 objects at the Cleveland Musuem of Art; and the Sion Treasure at Harvard’s Dumbarton Oaks.

Below we’ve provided the complete article. In the coming days, we’ll be providing additional details on the objects sought at each of the museums.

Turkey asks U.S. museums for return of antiquities

THE GETTY AND THE NEW YORK MET ARE AMONG THE U.S. INSTITUTIONS THE TURKISH GOVERNMENT HAS CONTACTED OVER ARTIFACTS IT BELIEVES WERE SMUGGLED OUT OF THE COUNTRY.

By Jason Felch, Los Angeles Times

8:48 PM PDT, March 30, 2012The government of Turkey is asking American museums to return dozens of artifacts that were allegedly looted from the country’s archaeological sites, opening a new front in the search for antiquities smuggled out of their original countries through an illicit trade.

The J. Paul Getty Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Cleveland Museum of Art and Harvard University’s Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection are among the institutions that the Turkish government has contacted, officials say.

Turkey believes the antiquities were illegally excavated and smuggled out of the country after the passage of a 1906 law that gave the state ownership of antiquities in the ground.

Inspired by the success of its Mediterranean neighbors Italy and Greece, Turkey is taking a more aggressive stance toward its claims, many of which were first made decades ago.

“Turkey is not trying to start a fight,” said Murat Suslu, Turkey’s director general for cultural heritage and museums. “We are trying to develop … cooperation and we hope these museums will also understand our point of view.”

Turkey is presenting the museums with supporting evidence and has threatened to halt all loans of art to those institutions until they respond to the claims. Loans have already been denied to the Met, a Turkish official said.

American museums’ antiquities collections have been the subject of intense scrutiny in recent years as evidence emerged of their ties to an illicit trade in artifacts found in archaeological sites around the world.

Confronted with that evidence, the Getty, the Met, the Cleveland, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Princeton University Art Museum returned more than 100 looted objects to Italy and Greece, changed their acquisition policies and formed collaboration agreements that allow for loans to replace acquisitions of suspect material.

But new evidence continues to emerge, underscoring that the scope of the problem is far wider. In January, Italy announced that it had recovered an additional 200 objects and fragments from the Met and Princeton after they were tied to an ongoing criminal investigation of Italian antiquities dealer Edoardo Almagia and Princeton antiquities curator Michael Padgett.

None of the museums facing requests from Turkey would release a list of the contested objects in their collections, but The Times obtained a partial list from Turkish officials of what the country is asking for. Judging from publicly available records, most of the objects were acquired by the museums since the 1960s and have little or no documented ownership history before that, suggesting they could have come from illicit excavations.

Statue of a Muse. From Cremna, Turkey, circa 200 AD. (JPGM 94.AA.22)

The 10 Getty objects sought by Turkey were acquired from dealers, auction houses or collectors for more than $1 million between 1968 and 1994 and include four marble muses now on display in the Getty Villa’s Basilica gallery. According to ownership histories provided by the Getty in accordance with its reformed antiquities policy, several originated with Elie Borowski or Nicolas Koutoulakis, two antiquities dealers known to have ties to the illicit trade.

“We expect those discussions to continue and while they do, we will not be getting into specifics,” said Getty spokesman Ron Hartwig.

The 18 contested objects at the Met are all from the private collection of Norbert Schimmel, a longtime Met trustee who died in 1990. The museum acquired the Schimmel collection in 1989, and several of the contested objects are now highlights of the museum’s Ancient Near East Galleries.

A Hittite gold pendant of a goddess with a child, circa 1400 BCE from Central Anatolia. (MMA 1989.281.12)

Harold Holzer, a spokesman for the Met, initially denied the museum had received a request for specific objects. He later acknowledged in a statement that Turkey had requested information about the 18 objects in September, adding that the museum is “in the process of providing” that information. Turkish officials say the Met’s only response has been to write a letter to the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

At Dumbarton Oaks inWashington, D.C., ancient silver plates and other decorative objects known as the Sion Treasure are among the items Turkey is seeking to recover. The treasure was reportedly found in the early 1960s in an ancient burial mound in Kumluca, Turkey. It was acquired by the museum in 1966 from a private collector who bought them that same year from George Zakos, an antiquities dealer with documented ties to the illicit trade.

Twenty-one objects are being sought from the Cleveland Museum, which Turkish officials say has not responded to their inquiries. A museum spokeswoman declined to comment or release a list of contested objects.

Turkey has long sought the return of objects taken illegally from its borders, with occasional success.

Most famously, the country’s government fought a six-year legal battle with the Met for the return of the Lydian Hoard, a collection of goods looted from a burial mound in western Turkey. (It, too, had passed through the hands of Zakos.) The Met agreed to return the objects in 1993 after evidence emerged that museum officials had been aware of the material’s illicit origins and sought to hide it. To the chagrin of Turkish authorities, soon after its return a key piece of the treasure was stolen from the local museum to which it was returned.

CMA 1942.204

A similar battle played out between Turkey and the Boston MFA over the Roman statue Weary Herakles. Turkey requested the statue’s return in the 1990s after finding its bottom half in an excavation in Perge. The MFA had purchased the top half in 1981 jointly with New York collectors Leon Levy and Shelby White. The MFA’s piece has been known to fit the bottom half in Turkey since 1992, but the museum only returned it last September as part of a broader cultural cooperation agreement.

In hopes of avoiding such protracted disputes, Turkey adopted a more aggressive stance in 2010, barring loans to institutions harboring contested objects. The Art Newspaper reported earlier this month that two British museums have recently been denied loans.

“It’s part of a broader shift in the government saying, ‘culture matters to us,’” said Christina Luke, a lecturer in archaeology at Boston University. While working in Turkey over the last decade, Luke has seen Turkey make major investments in regional cultural sites, efforts to educate children about the value of their heritage and attempts to clarify and strengthen the country’s cultural policies.

“Turkey is offended because of having insincere responses to her claims,” said Turkish official Suslu. “Turkey has been fighting against illicit trafficking of cultural objects since the Late Ottoman Period. Many ways were tried during the past years but they were not sufficient.”

jason.felch@latimes.com

 

Article source: http://chasingaphrodite.com/2012/03/30/scoop-turkey-asks-getty-met-cleveland-and-dumbarton-oaks-to-return-dozens-of-antiquities/

On March 18th, the Asia Society convened a discussion titled, “Collecting Ancient Art in the 21st Century.” For anyone with an interest in the ethics of collecting ancient art, it is required viewing.

The conversation touched on many of the key issues facing collectors and museums today: the AAMD’s 2008 acquisition guidelines, which were roundly denounced; recent attempts by archaeologists and museum directors to find a solution to the question of archaeological ”orphans”;  WikiLoot, our recent proposal to crowd-source the analysis of the illicit trade; the need to move beyond ownership to stewardship; and the various regimes used by source countries to limit the illicit trade.

But there was one recurring theme among participants, who included collectors, museum officials, legal experts and an archaeologist: the pervasive climate of fear brought on by recent attention to the link between looting and American museums and collectors. Several said this fear had all but halted museum acquisitions and would soon bring an end to American collecting. Participants may have exaggerated those fear somewhat — just a few days later, Sotheby’s South East Asian auction took in $13 million for ancient art. Still, it is remarkable to see many of the leading advocates of collector’s rights wrestle with the core issues facing today’s art market.

The participants were Naman Ahuja, an associate professor of Ancient Indian Art at Nehru University; Kate Fitz Gibbon, a Santa Fe attorney and vice-president of the pro-collecting Cultural Policy Research Institute; Kurt A. Gitter, a prominent collector of Japanese art; Arthur Houghton, coin collector, former Getty antiquities curator and president of the CPRI; James Lally, Asian art dealer;  James McAndrew, former senior special agent at the Department of Homeland Security focused on cultural property and currently an adviser to collectors; Julian Raby, director of the Freer Gallery of Art and the Sackler Gallery; and Marc Wilson, former director of the Nelson-Atkins Museum. 

I’ve posted the full video below. Here are some highlights that caught our attention.

Kate Fitz Gibbon opened the session with a strident call to arms: “We are facing a crisis. What began a decade ago as a few front page legal cases highlighting the greedier and less scrupulous side of the art business and the excesses of a few museums has grown into a sea change in arts policy and museum policy. There has been, I think, an over-reaction rather than an appropriate response, and the consequences are incredibly far reaching. These new policies threaten the very future of collecting and collecting museums. That may sound like an exaggeration today, but if we continue on this path there may not be a next generation of collectors, donors and patrons of ancient art. Not in the United States of America.”

She also described the current legal regime governing looted antiquities: “Under the current legal system we inherited from Britain, stolen is stolen forever, no matter how many times an artwork changes hands. So when an art source country passes such a [national ownership] law, there are no time limits, and knowing possession can be a crime.” Under such laws, she said collectors were being “victimized by a misinformed or over-zealous [federal] agent.” She called the AAMD’s 2008 policy a “self-administered self-poison, completely illogical and not required by any law.”

Mark Wilson: “Younger people have been deliberately misled into believeing that everything in museums is stolen. This is very bad…”

Naman Ahuja said that in many countries modern development proved as serious a threat to archaeologist sites as looting. It was imperative for collectors to engage with the views of archaeologists, whose position should not be so easily dismissed. “It’s not an outrageous argument, it’s a noble argument,” he said. He challenged collector groups to find ways to help source countries stop looting, not just defend American’s right to collect.

Julian Raby spoke about the need to move beyond fights over ownership of disputed antiquities. “We’re possibly on the cusp of a new model, a model that moves away from ownership to stewardship.”

At minute 60, Arthur Houghton introduced the audience to our initiative WikiLoot, warning the audience, “We’re that far away from launching a vigilante effort that may flood the Asia Society and other American museums with people wanting to find out, Is this object looted or not? If it is unprovenanced, how do you know where it came from? And what should we all do about it?”

Houghton denounced the AAMD’s 2008 policy, saying, “Hundreds and hundreds of Americans, even thousands, have collections that are no longer available for study, protection, or exhibition or conservation.” A CPRI study suggested there were millions of objects in private collections that can no longer be donated to museums, he said.

Arthur’s provocation sparked a revealing debate about what the AAMD’s policy did and did not allow museums to acquire. “The real fact of the policy is to freeze acquisition boards,” argued one panelist. Others argued acquisitions of unprovenanced antiquities were still possible, but had to be posted on the AAMD’s object registry. Others noted that the AAMD position was merely a guideline, and museum directors and their boards were free to set their own acquisition policies.

At minute 72, the conversation moved to possible solutions.

Julian Raby said that in addition to the stated arguments for “retentionist” views — protecting archaeological context and defending the ownership rights of source countries — there was a third, more primal motive: the emotional impact of possession and control felt by both sides. “I can understand why my possessions might feel like others losses,” he said. “How can we rebalance a feeling of asymmetry between those who have and don’t have?”

Raby proposed two paths forward: advocacy for the creation of licit markets, and the development of a modern version of partage in which museums help fund excavations and participate in long-term loans and shared stewardship.

By minute 90, the panel was ready to conclude when the crowd nosily demanded that the all-but-forgotten James McAndrew be given his chance to speak. His message: “Don’t be fearful. US laws are very specific.” But his description of the law no doubt raised some concerns. All the talk about UNESCO and 1970 was irrelevant to law enforcement, he said. What they looked to instead was the source country’s date of state ownership laws, many of which go back a century or more. His advice to collectors and museums was to avoid the temptation to fudge import documents, which are the first thing federal investigators will seize on. “If you document your imports properly, you should have nothing to worry about,” he concluded.

The Q&A began at minute 102, and touched on the AAMD policy and the orphan issue, among other issues.

The session concluded with a plea for support by the event’s co-sponsor, William Perlstein of American Committee for Cultural Policy (AACP), whose mission Perlstein said was “to get US policy back to the reasonable middle ground.”

Watch the entire video here, and leave us your thoughts in a comment.

The U.S. House of Representatives by voice vote yesterday passed the Foreign Cultural Exchange Jurisdictional Immunity Clarification Act (FCEJICA).  The legislation seeks to protect foreign artwork on loan to American museums by clarifying a part of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA).

The legislation was introduced by Judiciary Committee member Rep. Steve Chabot (R-OH) in February and co-sponsored by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), and Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TX).  Their intent is to have a law that encourages more foreign lending of art to America without the fear of lawsuits.

Under the current federal statute known as Immunity from Seizure Under Judicial Process of Cultural Objects Imported for Temporary Exhibition or Display (the Immunity from Seizure Act (IFSA), 22 U.S.C. § 2459), foreign lenders are encouraged to lend cultural objects to museums in the United States without risk that those objects will become targets of litigation while on American soil.  The statute protects imported objects determined by the State Department to be (1) of cultural significance, (2) intended for temporary, nonprofit exhibition, and (3) in the national interest.  Museums importing objects into the U.S. for temporary display must apply for this legal protection.  The notice of immunity is then published in the Federal Register.

The FSIA, meanwhile, is a law that generally protects foreign states from lawsuits.  The FSIA embodies a long held principle of American jurisprudence.  But the law has been interpreted to sometimes grant jurisdiction to the courts over foreign governments when their artwork is displayed in the U.S. because such loans are deemed “commercial activity.”  Specifically, 28 U.S.C. 1605(a)(3) of the FSIA states:“A foreign state shall not be immune from the jurisdiction of courts of the United States or of the States in any case . . . in which rights in property taken in violation of international law are in issue and that property or any property exchanged for such property is present in the United States in connection with a commercial activity carried on in the United States by the foreign state; or that property or any property exchanged for such property is owned or operated by an agency or instrumentality of the foreign state and that agency or instrumentality is engaged in a commercial activity in the United States.”

By way of example, in the 2005 case of Malewicz v. City of Amsterdam the heirs of Kazimir Malevich sued Amsterdam in federal court in Washington, DC to either recover artworks that the city’s Stedelijk Museum loaned to American museums or to acquire $150 million in damages.  The heirs claimed that the foreign museum unlawfully obtained the paintings.  Amsterdam argued that the Immunity from Seizure Act protected it from a lawsuit, but the federal district court ruled that Amsterdam had engaged in “commercial activity” under the FSIA by loaning the art to American institutions.  While IFSA may protect artwork from seizure, the FSIA did not protect Amsterdam from related damages said the court.  So the lawsuit moved forward.

The FCEJICA was introduced in order to remedy potential conflicts between IFSA and the FSIA.  The bill adds a new section to the FSIA that protects foreign nations from lawsuits in American courts related to loaned artwork.  The bill that passed the House on March 19 states:

“If a work is imported into the United States from any foreign country pursuant to an agreement that provides for the temporary exhibition or display of such work entered into between a foreign state that it is the owner or custodian of such work and the United States or one or more cultural or educational institutions within the United States, [and] the President, or the President’s designee, has determined . . . that such work is of cultural significance and the temporary exhibition or display of such work is in the national interest; and the notice thereof has been published . . . any activity in the United States of such foreign state, or of any carrier, that is associated with the temporary exhibition or display of such work shall not be considered to be commercial activity by such foreign state . . . .”

The bill adds that art stolen by the Nazis shall not be protected from legal claims filed in federal court.

PARIS — More than 70 years after it was plundered by the Nazis, a missing painting by Monet that depicts the shimmering blue rapids of the Creuse River has pitted two of the wealthiest and most prominent families in France against each other.

Ginette Heilbronn Moulin, 85, the chairwoman of the Galeries Lafayette department store chain, is pursuing a claim that the Wildenstein family, an international dynasty of French art dealers, is concealing information about the stolen work. The canvas, which belonged to the Heilbronn family, vanished in 1941 after a Gestapo raid on a family bank vault.

Last summer, after Ms. Moulin filed a criminal complaint against the Wildensteins, the French authorities ordered a preliminary investigation. An anti-art-trafficking squad is sifting through World War II documents to pick up the trail of the work, “Torrent de la Creuse,” Monet’s 1889 study of the confluence of the Creuse and the Petite Creuse Rivers.

“It’s not a question of the price of the painting,” Ms. Moulin said in an interview here in her art-filled apartment. “It’s a question of a victory against the Germans and. …” Her voice trailed off.

The Wildensteins, who have been selling art for five generations, have steadfastly denied any knowledge of the painting’s whereabouts. But Daniel Wildenstein, an Impressionist scholar who died in 2001, included it in two of his widely embraced inventories of Monet’s work. In both he listed it as being in a private collection: an anonymous owner in the first reference and an unidentified American owner in 1996.

The suspicions of Ms. Moulin and her family were aroused last year when more than 30 artworks that had been reported missing or stolen were found in a vault at the Wildenstein Institute, a nonprofit research organization the Wildensteins run from a mansion on the Right Bank. The items, most of which had vanished years earlier during the settlement of estates, were recovered in an unrelated investigation.

But members of one Jewish family told the police that they believed a sculpture of theirs recovered from the vault could have been looted by the Nazis because it appeared on no postwar estate lists.

Guy Wildenstein, the billionaire who leads the family business from New York, declined through his lawyers to comment on Ms. Moulin’s accusations. But he has contended that the institute never hid missing works, saying it simply lacked a full inventory of what was in its vault.

Lawyers for Mr. Wildenstein, who is Jewish, have strenuously denied that any of the seized items were Nazi loot.

The Monet vanished in a Gestapo raid on a bank vault in the southwest of France, from which 10 paintings belonging to Ms. Moulin’s father, Max Heilbronn, were taken. Heilbronn was a member of the Resistance whose French Jewish family was forced out of the historic Galeries Lafayette store on Boulevard Haussmann in Paris and replaced by Nazi collaborators. He was imprisoned in Buchenwald with other French resisters, including Étienne Moulin, who later married Mr. Heilbronn’s daughter, Ginette, and took charge of Galeries Lafayette.

Four of the family’s works have been recovered, including a Renoir painting of pastel roses that the family spotted when it came up for sale at Christie’s in 2004. Two Pissarro landscapes were also recovered from the Berlin home of Hermann Goering, Hitler’s second in command.

Even now, though, more than half the artworks taken from Jewish families in France and Belgium during World War II remain missing.

Alexandre Bronstein, whose family’s sculpture was found in the Wildenstein vault, said new clues could come when archives from a 1949 war-crimes trial of a German diplomat who organized the looting are unsealed in 2024.

What drives Ms. Moulin to keep searching after so many years?

“This painting represents some of the history of our family,” she said. “It was my grandson who pushed me to react. He doesn’t understand how this could happen.”

Ms. Moulin said that in the 1950s, her mother, Paulette Heilbronn, met with an art dealer who had a photograph of the painting, and that he pledged to recover it. But when Mrs. Heilbronn approached the dealer again, he told her it was in the possession of people who were “untouchable,” Ms. Moulin said

Years later the family discovered references to the missing painting in the 1979 and the 1996 editions of Daniel Wildenstein’s five-volume inventory, or catalogue raisonné, of Monet’s work. Such catalogs list all known authenticated works by an artist and serve as something of an imprimatur. No major auction house, for example, will sell a work as a Monet unless it is listed in the Wildenstein inventory.

The catalogs’ mention of the missing Monet fueled suspicions in Ms. Moulin’s family that the Wildensteins either had the painting or knew where it was, she said. But the Wildensteins repeatedly stymied her family’s inquiries, she added.

In 2002 records show that her lawyers asked Guy Wildenstein for help in locating the painting and that he referred them to the Wildenstein Institute, which said it had no information about the painting’s whereabouts.

In recent months Guy Wildenstein has been interviewed at least seven times by investigators in connection with the institute case, according to confidential French judicial records. That case is an outgrowth of the family’s long-running internal clash over the multimillion-dollar estate of Daniel Wildenstein, Guy Wildenstein’s father.

The elder Wildenstein’s widow, Sylvia Roth, pursued lawsuits against her stepson Guy until her death in 2010 and accused the family of hiding its wealth and artworks through trusts in offshore accounts. The raid on the Wildenstein Institute was part of the fact-finding in that case.

“When we heard about these strange stories, I thought it was the right moment to struggle to get back the painting,” said Guillaume Houzé, 30, a grandson of Ms. Moulin’s.

The quest to find the missing Monet has reached the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It owns a Monet that is described as a near twin of the missing painting. Its work, “Torrent of the Petite Creuse at Fresselines,” was purchased by the Wildensteins in 1958 from a private collector, then sold to another collector, Adelaide Milton de Groot. She bequeathed it in 1967 to the Met, which lists it as “Rapids on the Petite Creuse at Fresselines.”

It is not on display, though the museum has posted a copy online with a notation that says it “is nearly identical to another painting (private collection.)” The Met says its information about the other painting came from the Wildenstein catalog.

Last summer the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, a New York-based organization that tries to arrange for the restitution of property to Holocaust survivors and their heirs, asked the museum about its painting’s provenance.

The museum said the paintings were clearly different. It also produced a typed, unsigned English translation of a 1961 letter from Max Heilbronn to Daniel Wildenstein, in which Mr. Heilbronn acknowledges that the Met’s work “cannot be the one which was stolen from me during the war.” The museum has not been able to find a copy of the original letter.

“There’s no question that this is not the canvas,” said Harold Holzer, a spokesman for the Met. “The Met has made its collections available to scholars and to students and, when necessary, to people doing research on paintings for legal questions. There is nothing hidden here.” He said there had never been a formal challenge to the painting.

The person who could perhaps provide the most information, Daniel Wildenstein, is buried below two obelisks in Montparnasse Cemetery here. A few months before Mr. Wildenstein died, Ms. Moulin’s New York lawyer asked him why he reported in his 1996 catalog that her painting was held by a private collector.

A few weeks later a brief letter was sent out by the Wildenstein Institute, dated Sept. 12, 2001, carrying Daniel Wildenstein’s typed name and signature.

“I regret,” the letter said, “that this error slipped into the new edition of the book.”

It contained no other information about the painting.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/20/arts/design/prominent-french-families-battle-over-a-missing-monet.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1332348526-ZU9TOBL93VqGavd6+3b46g