Chicago painting conservator Barry Bauman, who has also restored works by Thomas Moran, George Inness, and Edwin Lord Weeks for the museum, began an intensive conservation of the rediscovered painting that ended in March 2018. (Read more backstory on DSM.) Security cameras were added before the work goes on permanent display this week.
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The painting includes an exhibition label from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and was gifted to Hoyt Sherman Place in the 1920s.
Warren says van Veen's work historically has sold for between $4 million and $17 million. 
Van Veen is known for his church altarpieces and for maintaining an active studio with numerous students. His most famous pupil was Peter Paul Rubens.


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​Besides sunlight, heat, humidity and other factors, paintings face deterioration over time because of bacteria. A group of Italian researchers now says that old paintings can be better preserved by adding more bacteria to the mix. They discovered that some bacterial spores will fight the bad microbes that eat away at pigments. 

According to a new paper published in PLOS One, the researchers found that several strains of bacteria–mainly Staphylococcus and Bacillus–break down certain pigments. But adding the spores of another strain of the Bacillus bacteria–Bacillus subtilis, Bacillus pumilus, and Bacillus megaterium–helped kill the malignant microbes and fungi.
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The test was successfully applied to a 17th-century painting attributed to Baroque master Carlo Bononi–the “Incoronazione della Vergine” (The Coronation of the Virgin), a huge oil on canvas that was removed from a wall after a 2012 earthquake damaged the Basilica of Santa Maria in Vado, in Ferrara, Italy.

​A famous work by Russian realist painter Ilya Repin was vandalized by a visitor at Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery on May 25.

​Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on November 16th, 1581, a painting dating from 1885, was seriously damaged in the attack, in which the man used a metal fence post to smash the protection glass and rip the canvass.

"The painting is badly damaged, the canvas is ripped in three places in the central part ... The falling glass also damaged the frame," the Gallery said in a statement.
"Luckily, the most valuable images, those of the faces and hands of the tsar and prince were not damaged," the statement said.
The attacker was detained and a criminal case was brought against him, the Interior Ministry reported, without revealing his identity.

Russian news agency TASS quoted an unnamed law enforcement official as saying the perpetrator was a 37-year-old man from Voronezh, a city some 525 kilometers south of Moscow, who attacked the painting because of the "falsehood of the historical facts depicted on the canvas."
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READ MORE: Russia's Dangerous Struggle With Obscurantism


The painting depicts Ivan the Terrible mortally wounding his son in Ivan in a fit of rage, and it is considered the most psychologically intense of Repin’s paintings -- an expression of the artist's revolt against violence and bloodshed.
The painting was subjected to vandalism for the first time in 1913, when Abram Balashov, a mentally ill man, cut it with a knife in three places. Repin himself participated then in the restoration of the painting, the gallery said in its statement.

Sotheby’s joined the long-running dispute over a Leonardo da Vinci painting that has pitted Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev against a Swiss businessman who operates the biggest art storage facilities around the world.
The auction house fired a preemptive shot with a request to a federal judge for an order clearing it of any wrongdoing in the private sale of “Christ as Salvator Mundi” to Yves Bouvier, president of Natural Le Coultre, that operates Geneva Freeport.

The painting was sold in 2013 to a company controlled by Bouvier for $80 million by a consortium of dealers that include Warren Adelson, president of Adelson Galleries, New York art dealers Alexander Parish and Robert Simon, Sotheby’s said. Bouvier flipped the painting to Rybolovlev for $127.5 million. The dealers’ group is now threatening to sue Sotheby’s for the difference, claiming they were shortchanged on the sale, the auction house said in a filing in Manhattan federal court Monday.
The international battle is being watched closely by the art market. The Russian fertilizer billionaire accused the freeport mogul of overcharging him by $500 million to $1 billion during the course of a decade for works by da Vinci, Mark Rothko and Pablo Picasso. Rybolovlev sued Bouvier in Monaco and Singapore, claiming he was the victim of fraud.

Rybolovlev declined to comment on the Sotheby’s filing. Simon also declined to comment on behalf of the consortium.
Sotheby’s had nothing to do with the private deal Bouvier struck with Rybolovlev and it didn’t make any money on the sale, the auction house said in the court filing.​

Estate SaleParish had apparently bought the painting for less than $10,000 at an estate sale in Louisiana in the early 2000s, Sotheby’s said in the filing. It was long believed the work was a copy of a da Vinci, but Sotheby’s said in the filing it later helped in the authentication of the painting as having been done by the master around 1500.
The group that sold the painting may be “experiencing seller’s remorse,” Sotheby’s said in its complaint. “The defendants no doubt wish they had made even more money.”
Sotheby’s asked for an order declaring that it’s not liable to the selling group for any losses they claim to have suffered from the sale.

by Katya Kazakina

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Canadian art historian Bogomila Welsh-Ovcharov's new publication 

Vincent van Gogh: The Lost Arles Sketchbook (Abrams) was unveiled in Paris on Tuesday. But with all the fanfare, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam was notably not on board with the supposed discovery of some 65 sketches by the famed artist from his pivotal period in the south of France.
Van Gogh scholar Ronald Pickvance wrote a foreword about the sketchbook, claiming: “The most revolutionary discovery in the entire history of Van Gogh’s oeuvre. Not one drawing; not ten, not fifty, but sixty-five drawings.”



​An expert on van Gogh, Welsh-Ovcharov says she was contacted in 2013 by a local scholar about the find. She made a detailed analysis of each drawing, connecting them to final works made by van Gogh in Provence. She points out new insights on his last years and masterworks such as The Night Café and The Starry Night.
"The patina is there, the brushwork with the reed pen, the way he executes with such vibrato, with such passion, with such force every individual object in nature — you can't duplicate that," she said to CBC.
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The Van Gogh Museum has contested the sketchbook's authenticity, based on a review of high-quality photographs, releasing a statement that says, in part, "...it contains distinctive topographical errors and...its maker based it on discoloured drawings by Van Gogh."
Welsh-Ovcharov's publisher says they will issue a response to the museum's claims later this week, reports CBC.

"This donation, exceptional both in its size and its consistency, is the biggest received by a French museum from a French museum since 1945," the French culture ministry said on Friday.
The 89-year-old couple have bequeathed their huge collection to Paris's Seineside museum of 19th-century art when they die but 187 works, worth 173 million euros, were to be donated on Saturday.


Degas, Corot and les Nabis

The collection includes works by well-known artists like Edgar Degas, Odilon Redon, Gustave Caillebotte, Camille Corot and Amedeo Modigliani but the couple are most interested in the works of the Nabis, a group named after the Hebrew word for prophet who aimed to revitalise painting, and its members are well-represented with 23 works of Edouard Vuillard, 12 by Pierre Bonnard and four by Maurice Denis.
Their enthusiasm is shared by Musée d'Orsay president Guy Cogeval, who has known the couple since 2001.


The collection includes works by well-known artists like Edgar Degas, Odilon Redon, Gustave Caillebotte, Camille Corot and Amedeo Modigliani but the couple are most interested in the works of the Nabis, a group named after the Hebrew word for prophet who aimed to revitalise painting, and its members are well-represented with 23 works of Edouard Vuillard, 12 by Pierre Bonnard and four by Maurice Denis.
Their enthusiasm is shared by Musée d'Orsay president Guy Cogeval, who has known the couple since 2001.

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The art dealer Guy Wildenstein should be sentenced to four years in prison—with two years suspended—and pay a penalty of €250 million ($275 million) for acts of alleged tax evasion and money laundering, prosecutors urged France’s high court for financial crimes on Thursday.

Two other members of the Wildenstein clan, Alec Jr. and Liouba Stoupakova (the widow of Guy’s brother), were recommended suspended prison sentences of 6 months and one year, respectively, in what prosecutor Monica D’Onofrio called “the most sophisticated fraud of the 5th Republic.”
The Wildensteins are accused—along with two offshore banks, two lawyers, and a notary—of using a complex system of trusts and shell companies to hide the vast majority of their family’s wealth from French tax authorities.

French tax authorities say they were shortchanged by the Wildensteins by an estimated half billion euro in estate taxes following the 2001 death of Daniel Wildenstein. The ultimate amount of underpaid taxes and interest owed by the family will be determined in a separate civil procedure.
Prosecutors say that the Wildensteins and their associates have continued to create fictional loans and secret agreements to transfer money to foreign accounts in order to keep revenues from the trusts from appearing on the books of French tax authorities.
This is the first time offshore financial institutions have been tried in France for helping clients to hide their wealth in tax havens.
Prosecutors say that the family never ceased to exercise control over thousands of paintings, a stable of racehorses, and immense real estate holdings that were formally owned by offshore trusts.

Prosecutor Mireille Venet recommended fines of €187,500 for both Guernsey’s Northern Trust and The Royal Bank of Canada Trust Company (Bahamas) for actively assisting the Wildensteins by “furnishing the structures that allowed the family to no longer own their belongings” on paper.
Prosecutors recommended a 3-year sentence—with one year of hard prison time—and a penalty of €1 million for the Swiss lawyer Peter Altorfer for helping manage the family’s system of offshore trusts and for advising them in the use of fictional loans to keep revenues off the books.
Altorfer had attempted during the trail to exculpate himself from potentially incriminating remarks in his correspondence with the Wildensteins and their advisors by citing an incomplete grasp of the French language.

Monica d’Onofrio read one such email aloud to the court, saying: “There are few errors here and I would even say that his French is, in fact, remarkable.”
The prosecution urged the court to serve another of the family’s lawyers, Olivier Riffaud, with one year of hard prison, one year suspended sentence, and a three-year ban from practicing law.
As a specialist in tax law, Riffaud “was conscious of the legal risk” of the Wildenstein’s offshoring scheme, and behaved like “pyromaniac fireman,” according to prosecutor Venet. “At no moment did he say, ‘I think we’re going too far.”
The prosecutors recommended two-years suspended sentence for the retired notary Rober Panhard, whom they accuse of “cooking up” the allegedly fraudulent tax declaration for Daniel Wildenstein’s estate.

“This is shameful,” said Ms. D’Onofrio. “Daniel and Alec [Guy’s father and brother] both ended their days, very sick, in Paris—where the hospitals are paid for by our taxes.”
Lawyers for the Wildensteins and their associates will be given the chance to defend their clients before the court during the three remaining sessions of the trial, which ends next Thursday.
A date has not yet been set for the court’s final ruling.

by Robert Williams

First it was suspected counterfeit chairs, and now, counterfeit tickets—the Palace of Versailles is having a rough year. Five employees of the opulent tourist attraction were indicted for fraud on Monday, after French police confirmed a fake ticket conspiracy suspected by innocent colleagues, Le Parisien reports.

Three men and two women, aged 26 to 34, allegedly sold re-used and counterfeit tickets to tourists paying in cash. Employees at the welcome desk issued the fraudulent tickets, and staff members at the castle’s entrance accepted them, without putting them through the ticket-taking machine.
When a co-worker noticed that some tickets were not being scanned, he notified the authorities, who arrested the five. One of whom allegedly had 150 fake tickets on his person at the time of the arrest.

The scheme is suspected to have been led by a seasonal employee, who worked at the historic site in the busy summer months. The co-conspirators coordinated their schedules via text message, investigators confirmed.
In all, the plot is estimated to have cost the historic estate €250,000 ($275,000) in damages, beginning in August, although authorities are now looking into the whole of 2016.
Tickets to the Versailles Palace and estate cost anywhere from €6 to €25, and the fake tickets were reportedly being sold for €10 a pop, which the suspects likely pocketed.
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​LONDON — The art dealer Robert Mnuchin was testing his theory of parallels between the painter Willem de Kooning and the sculptor John Chamberlain by juxtaposing their work in his booth at Frieze Masters, the major art fair that opened here this week.
“You’ll see the yellow here and the yellow there,” Mr. Mnuchin said, grabbing a few minutes to sit down amid the flurry of visitors at Frieze’s preview on Wednesday. “We’re fascinated by their mutual interest in color and shapes and abstraction.”
Mr. Mnuchin is planning to pair the artists at his Upper East Side gallery in an exhibition opening on Nov. 2 that features de Kooning paintings from the 1970s and ’80s and Chamberlain sculptures from the 1960s and ’70s.
“You never see them side by side,” Mr. Mnuchin said, pulling out images of Chamberlain’s 1964 sculpture “Spike” and an untitled de Kooning from 1977, as well as Chamberlain’s “Miss Lacy Pink,” from 1962, and de Kooning’s “Screams of Children Come From Seagulls,” from 1975. “You look at these and say, ‘Of course,’” Mr. Mnuchin said.
An imploding of typical categories and boundaries seems to be the name of the game in the art world these days. It was certainly in evidence under the billowing tents at both Frieze Masters and at Frieze London (which focuses on contemporary artists), which jointly drew 27,629 people — a figure on par with last year’s previews — to Regent’s Park on Wednesday.​

​Jeanne Greenberg of Salon 94 gallery, for example, and the Brussels dealer Bernard de Grunne teamed in their shared Frieze Masters booth to present Judy Chicago’s miniature goddess sculptures (Ms. Greenberg) and miniature African figures from the ninth to 17th century (Mr. de Grunne). Ms. Greenberg said she sold the series of Ms. Chicago’s figures for near the asking price of $390,000.
Arnold Lehman, a senior adviser to Phillips auction house since retiring as president of the Brooklyn Museum — home to Ms. Chicago’s influential installation “The Dinner Party” — passed by to say he was pleased to see Ms. Chicago’s black-and-white cartoons for the woven banners in “Dinner Party” in the booth; the museum has them in black and red.
Hauser & Wirth had a strong first day with an eclectic booth at Frieze Masters, selling a small Alexander Calder stabile for $600,000; a Dieter Roth cheese painting for more than $500,000; a Fausto Melotti sculpture for 300,000 euros, or about $335,000; a Francis Picabia painting for $220,000; and two Marlene Dumas works on paper for $45,000 each.
“The concept of the fair works — to expose 6,000 years of art in one room,” said Iwan Wirth, a president of the gallery. “People are price-conscious, but their appetite for great works is unbroken.” Indeed, while the overall climate felt more muted than it was last spring at Art Basel in Switzerland, important works were still changing hands.
Dealers were also encouraged by the results of an auction of the collection of Leslie Waddington, a pioneering Modern-art dealer who died last November, at Christie’s in London on Tuesday night. Every item sold. Francis Picabia’s “Lampe” (1923) — a work on paper in watercolor, India ink and pencil — went for $4.6 million, well over its presale estimate of $1 million to $2 million. It was an auction record for a work on paper by the artist.
The New York dealer Tanya Bonakdar said of Frieze: “It’s better than I thought it was going to be. Every year, you wonder if art fairs have exhausted themselves. That’s definitely not the case. They still keep giving.”

​Janelle Reiring, a founder of Metro Pictures, whose gallery hadn’t been represented at the London fair since 2008, said that fair visitors had responded to her mural by Louise Lawler ($175,000), who has a show opening at the Museum of Modern Art in April. She also sold a Cindy Sherman untitled 2016 portrait for $325,000, and works by Robert Longo, Nina Beier and Camille Henrot. Often, “people are interested in younger artists,” she said.
Matthew Marks said that on the first day, he sold pieces by Rebecca Warren, Ellsworth Kelly and Nan Goldin. “It’s not a frenzy, but it’s still active,” he said.
During the fair’s opening hours, Pace sold “Cave Girl,” a new marble bust by Kevin Francis Gray — who will have a solo show at the gallery in New York in March — for 80,000 pounds, or about $102,000; a small-scale painting of copper wire and gesso, “fourteen/sixteen” (2016), by Prabhavathi Meppayil, for $20,000; and two life-size works by Kohei Nawa, featuring glass-encrusted taxidermied deer, for $380,000 and $230,000.
The Goodman Gallery of South Africa reported that William Kentridge’s “Observer” (2016), a charcoal and red pencil on paper, sold for $450,000.
“The blue chip end is easier,” said the dealer Marianne Boesky, who exhibited Frank Stella paintings from 1958, including his first black painting, “Delta,” at Frieze Masters.
“We’ve been so focused on showing what he’s been doing now, and he is so contemporary,” she said of Mr. Stella. “We wanted to remind people where he cameBy from.”


 By ROBIN POGREBIN 
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​The proceeds of the sale allowed its Jewish owners to flee to Switzerland

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One of the most valuable paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection is the subject of a new lawsuit which alleges that the piece, Pablo Picasso’s The Actor (1904–5), worth an estimated $100 million, was sold under duress when its owner fled Nazi Germany.
The New York Times reports that Laurel Zuckerman, the great-grandniece of German-Jewish businessman Paul Leffmann and administrator of his estate, filed suit against the museum in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York on September 30. The complaint states that Leffmann was forced to sell his Cologne home and businesses in 1935, leaving the country for Italy two years later.
Related: Report Reveals Germany Returned Nazi-Looted Artworks to Nazi Families Instead of Victims
The couple had stored The Actor with an acquaintance in Switzerland, which saved it from being seized along with most of their possessions. By 1938, however, it became clear that Italy was adopting anti-Semitic policies similar to those of Germany. Residency there became untenable, and the Leffmanns desperately need to raise money to be able to move again.
Leffmann sold The Actor for $13,200 ($12,000 minus the seller’s commission) to two Parisian art dealers, Hugo Perls and Paul Rosenberg, allowing him to flee to with his wife Alice to Switzerland and later Brazil. “The Leffmanns would not have disposed of this seminal work at that time, but for the Nazi and Fascist persecution to which they had been, and without doubt would continue to be, subjected,” states the complaint.
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​The complaint argues that Perls and Rosenberg purchased the artwork for below market value, pointing out that when Rosenberg loaned the artwork to New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1939, he insured it for $18,000—50 percent more than he had paid just a year earlier.
Thelma Chrysler Foy, who donated the painting to the Met in 1952, purchased The Actor from New York gallery M. Knoedler & Co. in 1941. She paid $22,500, or 70 percent more than what the Leffmanns got for the work.
The complaint also notes that the Met’s listed provenance for the painting inaccurately mentioned an anonymous German collector as having owned it until 1938, even though Leffmann had purchased it in 1912. The museum attributes this omission to incomplete information provided by Perls.
Zuckerman and her attorneys, Herrick, Feinstein LLP, have been seeking the return of the painting from the museum since 2010.
In a statement, the Met insisted it had the “indisputable title” to the painting. “While the Met understands and sympathizes deeply with the losses that Paul and Alice Leffmann endured during the Nazi era, it firmly believes that this painting was not among them.”
The museum alleged that The Actor was sold for “a higher price than any other early Picasso sold by a collector to a dealer during the 1930s.” The Met website describes the painting “simple yet haunting.”

​“We believe the painting is tainted by the history of the Holocaust, and the Leffmanns, given the circumstances under which they sold it, never lost title,” said Lawrence Kaye, who represents Zuckerman, to Reuters.
This isn’t the first time The Actor, which has been on continuous view at the Met since its donation, has made headlines. In January 2010, a visitor to the Met accidentally fell onto the historic canvas, tearing a six inch hole on the work. It was successfully restored in time for the opening of a major Picasso exhibition at the museum in April.
Related: Neue Galerie Returns a Nazi-Looted Painting, Then Buys It Back from Heirs
Last week, the Neue Galerie, also in New York, announced that it had returned and repurchased a work from its collection after learning that it had a disputed provenance with ties to the Nazis. The 1914 nude by German Expressionist artist Karl Schmidt-Rottluff had been owned by art collector and shoe manufacturer Alfred Hess and his wife, Tekla, but went missing in 1939 when Tekla fled Germany for the UK.

by Sarah Cascone
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