News from the art world
The gangster vanishes
A veteran Irish criminal has “vanished” after entering into negotiations to find masterpieces stolen in the biggest art heist in history, says Vanessa Thorpe in The Observer. In the early hours of 18 March 1990, two men dressed as police officers entered Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and made off with a billion-dollar haul, including works by Rembrandt, Manet and Vermeer – whose painting The Concert is the most valuable missing artwork in the world. Despite a $10m reward offered by the museum, the paintings have never been recovered. Police have long assumed that the loot remained stashed in the Boston area. However, Charles Hill, a former Metropolitan Police detective who helped to recover Edvard Munch’s The Scream in 1994, believes that they were in fact smuggled to Ireland. In a forthcoming BBC documentary, he reveals that he held “a string of secret meetings” with gangland figure Martin “The Viper” Foley, who said he would make a deal with the gang responsible for the robbery. However, when publicity about negotiations began to circulate, Foley, who is also wanted on tax charges, disappeared. He is thought to have gone into hiding because serious threats were made against his life.
The case of the glazed tiles
The British Museum is helping to repatriate six glazed tiles which were smuggled into the UK after being stolen from a medieval site in Uzbekistan, says Mark Brown in The Guardian. Dating from the 13th-14th centuries, during the reign of Genghis Khan’s son, the tiles are worth thousands of pounds and are of huge symbolic importance to their country of origin. The objects were confiscated by the UK Border Force when a man brought them into the country on a flight from Dubai in January, claiming that they were replicas that had been “made to look old”. He had even forged paperwork asserting that he had bought them in the Emirate of Sharjah for 315 dirhams (about £70). “The brazen nature of it really illustrates the scale of the crime,” said Dr St John Simpson, the British Museum curator tasked with identifying the objects. Simpson liaised with dozens of experts across the Middle East, Russia and the US, who eventually established that they had come from the Shah-i-Zinda memorial complex outside the ancient trading city of Samarkand. The tiles will be put on temporary display at the museum until they are returned to Uzbekistan next year.