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Source-linked reporting
theartnewspaper.com
Maria Altmann seeks six Klimt paintings looted by Nazis, including Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907), and sued Austria and the Austrian National Gallery in US courts. The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments on 25 February 2004 regarding whether Austria can be sued for pre-1976 events under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.
theartnewspaper.com
The Art Newspaper reports that MoMA is selling nine works from its permanent collection at Christie’s New York on May 4 and 11, 2004, including pieces by Chagall, De Chirico, Léger, Magritte, Picasso and Pollock, with an estimated total of up to $27.9 million. The sales are framed as funding for new acquisitions, though they risk controversy and reflect MoMA’s ongoing deaccessioning under director Glenn Lowry.
nytimes.com
The article discusses Nazi actions against modern art, including the 1937 seizure of works from the Kronprinzen Palace, and the fate of German modernists such as Max Beckmann, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Franz Marc, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Wilhelm Lehmbruck; it also covers the 1968 opening of the Neue Nationalgalerie and the re-creation of the Kronprinzen Palace collection.
nytimes.com
The painting Les Jeunes Amoureux by François Boucher, looted by the Nazis, was returned to Claude Delibes and Suzanne Geiss Robbins, descendants of the original owner, from the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. The piece had been donated to the museum in 1993, and the family notes that about 400 paintings were looted with roughly 25 percent returned; the Louvre recently returned a painting to the family after confirming ownership by Andre Jean Seligmann who died in 1945.
welt.de
The Dutch painting Dame with a Parrot by Willem van Mieris, stolen by British soldiers from the Jagdschloss Grunewald, was returned to the Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg in Caputh. The work, an icon of Dutch painting created around 1683, exchanges ownership history involving Christie’s, various misattributions, and a restitution process that culminated in a bilateral agreement. Visitors can view the small oil painting in Caputh from Good Friday during Easter opening hours.
thetimes.com
The Times article notes Jasper Johns as America’s greatest living artist and the most expensive living artist, with his Gray Numbers selling for $40 million. It also mentions Cy Twombly’s Lepanto selling for over $20 million, Lucian Freud’s Large Interior W11 (after Watteau) selling for $5.8 million in 1998, Robert Rauschenberg’s Factum II for $12 million, Brice Marden’s Cold Mountain painting for $10 million, Bruce Nauman’s Henry Moore Bound to Fail for $9.9 million, and Gerhard Richter’s works fetching $9–$10 million.
theglobeandmail.com
Jean-Paul Riopelle heirs, including his daughters and widow Huguette Vachon, are expected to reach an agreement to end lawsuits, with some canvases sold to cover inheritance costs including 2.7 million owed to a Quebec bank. Some art may be donated to museums in the coming months, and the process is anticipated to be completed in the summer; Riopelle died leaving an estate valued at 30 to 50 million dollars.