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Art Business News, Feb, 2001

WASHINGTON, D.C.

* The National Gallery of Art announced that it will return a 16th-century Flemish oil painting to the heirs of a Jewish family from whom the Nazis looted it sometime before 1941. The painting, "Still Life with Fruit and Game" was probably confiscated by Hitler's second-in-command, Luftwaffe Chief Hermann Goering. The move to return the painting to the Stern family of Paris came weeks before a U.S. presidential commission was to recommend what to do with "innumerable other looted works of art yet to be discovered and certainly yet to be returned," according to Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress.

* At the same time, the National Gallery of Art also reported that it had bought its second work by John La Farge, "The Last Valley-Paradise Rocks," an early landscape by this American master. The work was sold recently at Christie's for $2 million. "It is one of the first plein-air landscapes in American art," said Earl A. Powell III, the gallery director. He described it as "a forerunner of American Impressionism done at a time when LaFarge turned his back on the Hudson River School."

NEW YORK

* The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum has won the right, and the financial backing of the city, to build a curvilinear art complex on the East River, City Hall announced, calling the museum's $678 million proposal crucial to an effort to revitalize a large chunk of Lower Manhattan. The new 40-story museum, designed by the Los Angeles architect Frank O. Gehry, would rise above three East River piers at the foot of Wall Street on land that would be conveyed to the Guggenheim by the city.

* Police have recovered 11 paintings by actor Matthew Modine that disappeared from his home years ago. Acting on a tip, Detective Scott Dillin, who sometimes moonlights as an actor himself, went in search of the paintings at the apartment of Matthew Prasad at 6 Chatham Square. After obtaining a search warrant, police recovered 11 paintings valued at $100,000 and a photo album belonging to Modine. Prasad, 32, denied the theft but was charged with criminal possession of stolen property.

* A rare 16th-century painting of Jesus by Venetian artist Jacopo de' Barbari, which had been looted from a German castle by American troops at the end of World War II, has been returned to German custody by the U.S. Customs Service. Customs Commissioner Raymond Kelly, a former New York City police commissioner, used the ceremony at the World Trade Center to announce the creation of the agency's seven-member Art Recovery Team. Up until now Special Agent Bonnie Goldblatt was the lone agent assigned full time to art cases. The unit will be based in New York, Kelly said, "because, to paraphrase Willie Sutton, that's where the art is."

Decadent Art from the Art Deco Period Comes to Christie's Auction Block

LONDON--The fourth Classic Art Deco sale will be held at Christie's South Kensington on Feb. 15. The sale features a varied array of British and Continental ceramics, glass, works on papers, bronzes and furniture.