Spain’s Guggenheim Bilbao Sacks CFO for Embezzlement

Spain’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao has sacked its Chief Financial Officer, Roberto Cearsolo Barrenetxea, Wednesday over confessed embezzlement totaling nearly $800,000 USD over the past decade through small transactions dealing with two companies related to the museum.

Museum officials were unaware of the theft until local authorities raised questions about an unrelated financial transaction.

According to Guggenheim Bilbao director Juan Ignacio Vidarte, Cearsolo confessed in a letter and has returned nearly $462,000 to the museum and has also pledged to return the remainder and to co-operate with a formal investigation.

Does the whole = the sum of it’s parts?

Umanita (or humanity in Italian) is… or was six feet (1.8 meters) high and weighed over 170 pounds (77 kilograms). It stood outside the Newberry Library on the north side of the city of Chicago. That was until it was stolen late Feb. 16 and the afternoon of Feb. 18. Torn from its base and lugged away, Umanita is worth as much as $70,000, said Virginio Ferrari, who created Umanita in 1987 by cutting, shaping and welding stainless steel.

Sadly with steel prices near all time highs there is a real fear that the work is no more and has been melted down into a $300 cube easily sold on the open scrap market.

“The price of steel and metal is very high right now and historically when that happens people remove art,” said Elizabeth Kelly, director of Chicago’s Public Art Program. “Scrappers seize the opportunity.”

Police spokesman Marcel Bright said he can’t recall a work as big as Umanita getting snatched in the city, sometimes called the museum without walls because of its more than 700 pieces of outdoor art.

Miami Art Collection Crumbles

Miami-Dade has spent three decades — and more than $33 million — building one of the largest and richest art collections in Florida, destined to enhance courthouses, libraries, transit stations, the airport and the seaport. Now many are missing, dying, destroyed or just in general disarry. Romare Bearden’s etching The Train [missing], George Tice’s photograph Petit’s Mobil Station [missing], Robert Rauschenberg’s lithograph Unit (Buffalo) [missing] and the same goes for dozens of other artworks that have gone missing from Miami-Dade’s Art in Public Places program.

• A county audit of the program is under way to determine, among other things, why dozens of artworks have been lost or stolen.

• Signature works by seminal artists have deteriorated, with no money and no plans to restore them, while others sit in storage, belying the notion of art in public places.

• At least 20 works that together cost more than $800,000 have been dropped from the collection inventory because they are either damaged or missing.

• Program administrators still rely on an inconsistent, incomplete inventory to track and manage the collection. [Read more]

Detroit art gallery wins Van Gogh case

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

DETROIT — A family that claimed a Vincent van Gogh painting at a Detroit museum rightfully belonged to them since it was sold during the Nazi era lost their case because they waited too long to sue.

Martha Nathan, a member of a notable banking family who emigrated from Germany to France in 1937 to escape Nazi persecution, sold the Van Gogh to a consortium of three Jewish art dealers in Paris in 1938 for $9,360. One of the dealers sold the picture for $34,000 in 1941 to Detroit art collector Robert Tannahill.

The Detroit Institute of Arts received the painting, called “Les Becheurs,” as a bequest from Tannahill in 1969.

In 2004, Nathan’s relatives sought to claim the painting. In an order released Saturday, U.S. District Judge Denise Page Hood cited the expiration of Michigan’s statute of limitations and dismissed the claims.

A parallel dispute between Nathan’s heirs and the Toledo Museum of Art over a Gauguin painting was similarly dismissed by an Ohio judge in December.

“It’s tremendous relief,” Detroit Institute of Arts Director Graham Beal said. “You always fear the worst, and while we felt we had the strongest possible case, and we wouldn’t have taken our stand if we hadn’t felt so strongly, it’s still a great relief to know that this is finished.”

Detroit Institute of Arts