Reposted from Art Sentry

Museums naturally want to ensure their pieces are guarded when they are loaned to other facilities. They often stipulate that each gallery – and sometimes specific individual pieces – be continuously monitored by a security guard (or even a team of guards). Unfortunately, museums that cannot afford these stringent requirements are deprived of the ability to host these high-end traveling exhibitions and the associated benefits of visitation and revenue-generating opportunities.

However, some museums have discovered how to leverage Art Sentry’s advanced security technology for a more cost-effective way to meet line-of-sight requirements, and they’ve even been able to convince lending museums to modify their loan agreements to meet their lending security standards. Art Sentry is a camera-based motion detection and alarm system that increases security in museums and galleries. The system helps prevent unwanted touches by creating an invisible protection zone around your most valuable artifacts and collection pieces. For museums seeking to host traveling exhibitions, Art Sentry provides an effective security solution.

Additionally, museums are facing an unprecedented hiring crisis that has left many facilities without a full guard force. Art Sentry fills the gap by providing a practical, cost-effective way to extend their security presence. Lending museums can rest assured knowing that interactions with their artwork are closely monitored and recorded and that guards can respond immediately if an alert is triggered. The presence of Art Sentry can even be a determining factor when a lender is deciding which museums will be approved to host an important work or show. In addition to preventing unwanted touches and extending the existing security presence, museums have other safety and security logistics to consider when hosting a traveling exhibition. Depending on the installation, several general safety factors, ranging from electrical outlets and cords to the stability of heavy displays, may bear consideration, as well as object-specific requirements for lighting, room temperatures, and humidity levels. Art Sentry can be adapted to integrate with new and existing hardware systems to accommodate all the variables that must be addressed for each exhibit. Museum security leaders, directors, curators, and boards understand that traveling exhibitions enrich communities while connecting museums to new visitors and donors. They offer glimpses into new worlds and ideas. Cost shouldn’t be prohibitive in who gets to host the best traveling exhibitions. Art Sentry is here to help you feature the traveling exhibit you’ve longed to bring to your museum.

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Reposted from El Pais

Many techniques and strategies are being put in place to protect large museums and collections from the hazards of global warming. Sometimes it seems like the world is flooding. Other times, it’s on fire. This has been seen from Rhodes and Corfu (Greece) to Palermo and Messina (Italy) and Cascais (Portugal) or Quebec (Canada). The ground burns and, as the mercury rises, the heat puts the world’s artistic heritage in a bind. The climate emergency is descending into Dante’s inferno. In Spain, the Prado and the Reina Sofía museums are a great cause of concern. The latter is more threatened by water than by flames; a stream flows underground, and explosive cyclogeneses are unpredictable. The former has a security protocol that is not public. Some paintings are geolocated with chips. But not many; the technology is expensive. The Reina Sofía — explains restorer Manuela Gómez — writes its rules on the granite of its walls. The temperature in the exhibition areas is 20 degrees Celsius (68 Fahrenheit). A variation of ±2 is allowed. The margin is identical for humidity (50%). They have been working on a security plan for years: the rooms will have personal protective equipment (similar to that used by healthcare workers during the pandemic) and fire blankets. In addition, there will be a digital alarm system linked to the fire department; a screen will show them the problem and its location, so they can put together a strategy without delay. Because the difference between a Picasso being preserved or being destroyed can be a matter of minutes. Even seconds. The past has put the present of art on alert. The historic Hurricane Sandy, which flooded New York in 2012, fell from the sky like an omen. “Art storage facilities have been removed from flood risk areas,” explains curator Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro. Storage giants — like UOVO, which has 10 locations in the United States — are protecting themselves from a potential disaster. Its warehouses located in risky places, like the one in the Wynwood neighborhood in Miami, are built 18 feet above sea level and can withstand a category 5 hurricane (with winds of up to 70 miles per hour).

To protect itself from possible flooding, in 2024 the Louvre will move 250,000 works to its conservation center in the commune of Liévin, in the north of France, one hour from Paris by high-speed train. This might be, they say, the largest movement of pieces of art in history. It was necessary: the banks of the Seine, where the museum is located, are very vulnerable to flooding. Some of its galleries and storage rooms are practically under the river, so a flood would put hundreds of works at risk. Only an irresponsible person would jeopardize their Caravaggios, Leonardos or Goyas. Back in the U.S., despite the fact that flames already surrounded the Getty Center, in California, in October 2019, trust is the main prevention system. The Center is confident that its building (built with marble and cement and protected by steel) is capable of withstanding fire; even its extensive green area, with systematically pruned oak trees, would act as a retardant if a fire breaks out, the institution maintains. Nobody wants to lose their assets. The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, in New York, has created the most ambitious private program in the country’s artistic history (with a budget of $10 million) to confront — through subsidies — the climate crisis. The Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) is designing a cold storage vault. The Philadelphia Museum of Art is building something unprecedented: a floating gallery on a barge on the Delaware River. And the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, is tapping into funds from the Frankenthaler Climate Initiative. Who wants to slow dance in a burning room?

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Reposted from New York Times

A worker at the Deutsches Museum in Munich stole paintings from the collection, replaced them with rough forgeries, then sold the originals at auction, according to the judgment of a court in the city this month. The thief used the proceeds to finance a luxurious lifestyle, the judge said. The worker, who is identified in court documents by the initials S.K., in keeping with German privacy law, was convicted of stealing four paintings by early-20th-century German artists from storerooms over nearly two years and avoiding detection by replacing the artworks with copies. He then sold three of the pieces at auction; the fourth failed to find a buyer. Judge Erlacher of the district court in Munich sentenced the man to a commuted prison term of one year and nine months and ordered him to repay the roughly $63,000 he got from the sale. The thief’s evident remorse and willingness to work with the court were given as a reason for the lenient sentence. He was 23 or 24 years old when he was hired as a technical employee of the museum, in May 2016, according to court documents. He left the museum’s employ in 2018. “The accused shamelessly exploited the access to the storage rooms in his employer’s buildings and sold valuable cultural assets in order to secure an exclusive standard of living for himself and to show off with it,” according to the written judgment.

The Deutsches Museum specializes in scientific and technical displays and does not exhibit art. However, that does not stop private collectors and foundations from bequeathing their art collections to it, Sabine Pelgjer, a museum spokeswoman, explained. The museum’s assets include hundreds of pieces of often valuable art that remain in storage. The museum noticed something was wrong when an in-house appraiser went to check one of the paintings, “The Frog Prince Fairy Tale” by Franz von Stuck, for an unrelated reason and noticed that the canvas on his workbench was not a precise match with its catalog entry. “In the end it was pretty easy to recognize as a forgery,” Pelgjer said. The museum then went through its art inventory and found three other counterfeit pieces. The thief sold the von Stuck piece through a Munich auction house, giving it a new name and claiming that he had inherited it from his great-grandparents. The painting sold for €70,000 to a buyer from Switzerland. Two other paintings, by Eduard von Grützner and Franz von Defregger, sold for considerably less: €7,000 and €4,490.50. The fourth painting — “Dirndl,” also by von Defregger — did not sell, which prompted the man to take it to a second auction house and eventually lower the initial bidding price to €3,000, but it still did not attract a buyer. It remains unclear whether the thief made the forgeries himself.

The case has echoes of another scandal that transfixed the museum world this summer. At the British Museum in London, a tip-off that a curator was selling stolen collection items on eBay snowballed into a crisis for the institution and led to its director’s stepping down. During the brief trial in Munich on Sept. 11, the thief told the judge that he was surprised how easy it had been to steal the paintings. Noting that the man had to submit to a criminal record check when he was hired, Pelgjer, the museum spokeswoman, said, “We actually do have pretty secure facilities, but when it is one of your own employees, it’s pretty hard to keep safe.”

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Reposted from Artnet News

Nine items made from imperial Chinese porcelain believed to be worth millions were stolen from a museum in Cologne, Germany, in a brazen art heist carried out, per the museum “with great effort and violence.” It is the latest in a spree of troubling incidents on which the museum is hoping to crack down. Shao-Lan Hertel, the scientific director of Cologne’s Museum of East Asian Art, revealed the theft in a statement on the institution’s website and provided a full listing of the stolen items. Further details, such as their value, were not provided for insurance-related reasons.

The suspects, who still not have been identified, broke into the museum on the night of September 12 and stole nine Chinese porcelain objects dating from the 16th to 19th centuries. Security workers immediately notified police and nobody was injured. “The staff members of the Museum for East Asian Art are shocked and deeply consternated by the burglary. More than financial and material damage, the museum mourns a loss of intangible nature,” Hertel said in the statement. Hertel said most of the stolen objects were acquired by the museum founders Adolf and Frieda Fischer in China between 1906 and 1911, documenting the acquisitions in detail in their purchase diary. Another item was a Ming-dynasty yellow-glazed dish, which was gifted to the museum in 2015. The museum has faced security vulnerabilities this year and a crime spree it has been trying to address, Hertel noted. A failed burglary was foiled by an alarm in January and followed by another in June in which the burglars broke a window at the museum.

The museum “massively heightened” its security systems, Hertel said. Further details about the increased measures were not provided. However, German public broadcaster WDR reported the window was only repaired with a wooden panel—which is how the burglars entered in the recent heist. The only major lead in the case came from the statement of a lone security guard who said possibly two men were involved in the break-in, one of whom was wearing a backpack like a delivery driver. The security measures were decided in consultation with local police and the Department for Art and Culture of the City of Cologne. The museum is collaborating with authorities in planning how security can be further expanded and the case has been registered with Interpol. “The international dimension of the investigation corresponds to the cultural significance and financial value of the stolen property,” Hertel said. “The objects are very well documented and therefore clearly identifiable, and so it is hoped that they will eventually find their way back into the museum collection.”

Reposted from Newsweek

An American tourist has been arrested in Israel after allegedly smashing and severely damaging two Roman-era statues.  The incident occurred at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem on Thursday, according to officials. The statues date to the 2nd century C.E. and were part of the Archeology Wing's permanent exhibition. "In a severe incident [Thursday] afternoon, a tourist from the U.S. intentionally caused damage to two ancient Roman statues from the second century C.E.," a museum spokesperson said in a statement provided to Newsweek. "The museum's staff alerted the police, which is handling the matter. The damaged statues have been moved to the museum's conservation lab for professional restoration. The museum's management, which views this as a troubling and unusual event, condemns all forms of violence and hopes such incidents will not recur. "The sculptures were knocked off their pedestals and had broken into several pieces. One is a marble head of the ancient Greek goddess Athena that was discovered in 1978 in Tel Naharon, northern Israel, Haaretz reported. The head was likely once part of a larger-than-life statue that may have stood more than 8 feet in height. The other sculpture is a depiction of a griffon—a horned, winged creature with a beak and the body of a lion—holding a wheel of fate representing the Roman god, Nemesis. This artifact was discovered in the Negev desert in southern Israel in 1957.

Police said in a statement provided to Newsweek that museum security personnel detained the tourist, a 40-year-old Jewish American man before officers arrived and apprehended him. Police then questioned him, determining that he destroyed the statues because of his religious sensibilities, believing them to be "idolatrous" and contrary to the Torah. The man's lawyer, Nick Kaufman, told the Associated Press that the 40-year-old, who has yet to be named, had not acted out of religious fanaticism. Instead, Kaufman said the tourist was showing signs of "Jerusalem syndrome"—a unique psychiatric phenomenon that occurs in some tourists and pilgrims who visit the holy city, which is sacred to Jews, Christians and Muslims.

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Reposted from Interfax-Ukraine

Kyiv municipal museums received from international partners special equipment worth EUR 215,000 as part of a joint project to protect cultural property, the press service of Kyiv City State Administration (KCSA) said on the official website on Friday. "The results of a joint project to protect cultural property of twelve municipal museums in Kyiv were discussed during a meeting with Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of France to Ukraine Gaël Vessières and Executive Director of the International Alliance for the Protection of Cultural Heritage in Conflict Zones (ALIPH) Valérie Frélan at the KCSA," it
said. Thanks to the financial support of ALIPH within the framework of a joint project worth EUR 215,000, special protective equipment was purchased dehumidifiers, humidifiers, fireproof safes, and cabinets. Automatic fire extinguishing systems were also partially installed.
In addition, during the meeting the question was raised about the prospects for further cooperation, in particular in protecting the national cultural heritage and cultural heritage of Kyiv.

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Reposted from Barron's

 Six artworks stolen by the Nazis and returned recently to the heirs of th Austrian Jew who owned them will be auctioned in New York next month, Christie's said Thursday. New York authorities announced on September 20 that leading institutions that include New York's Museum of Modern Art had agreed to return seven works by the Austrian Expressionist artist Egon Schiele to the family of Fritz Grunbaum, a cabaret performer and art collector who died in the Dachau concentration camp in 1941. Three of the works -- watercolors on paper, thought to be worth up to $2.5 million each -- will be auctioned on November 9 and three others will go up two days later as part of Christie's fall auctions. The seventh work, which was returned by the Museum of Modern Art, has been acquired privately by "a prominent collector who has a demonstrated record of supporting Holocaust survivors," said Raymond Dowd, the Grunbaum heirs' New York attorney. Grunbaum's heirs had been fighting for the artworks' return for years. He owned hundreds of works of art, including more than 80 by Schiele. Schiele's works, considered "degenerate" by the Nazis, were largely auctioned or sold abroad to finance the Nazi Party, according to the Manhattan district attorney's office. Arrested by the Nazis in 1938, Grunbaum was forced while at Dachau to sign over his power of attorney to his spouse, who was then made to hand over the family's entire collection before herself being deported to a different concentration camp, in current-day Belarus. The seven works whose restitution was announced last month had reappeared on the art market after World War II, first in Switzerland and then making their way to New York. The Grunbaum heirs are pursuing other works as well.
 Last week, three Schiele drawings were seized by the Manhattan district attorney's office from the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh and the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College in Ohio.

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Reposted from The Guardian

Unesco, the United Nations’ culture body, has announced plans for what it says will be the first virtual museum of stolen cultural artefacts, aimed at raising public awareness of trafficking and the unique importance of cultural heritage. “Behind every stolen work or fragment lies a piece of history, identity and humanity that has been wrenched from its custodians, rendered inaccessible to research, and now risks falling into oblivion,” said the Unesco director general, Audrey Azoulay. “Our objective with this is to place these works back in the spotlight, and to restore the right of societies to access their heritage, experience it, and recognize themselves in it,” Azoulay told a meeting of national representatives in Paris. Developed with the international police organization Interpol, whose database of cultural objects stolen from museums, collections and archeological sites worldwide lists more than 52,000 artefacts, the $2.5m (£2.05m) virtual museum should open in 2025. Visitors will be able to navigate a succession of virtual spaces containing detailed 3D images of the artefacts, each accompanied by materials explaining their unique cultural significance including stories and testimonies from local communities.

Unesco does not expect to be able to name the items that will make up the initial collection until shortly before the museum’s opening. According to the Antiquities Coalition, a US-based NGO, the most significant looted and stolen artefacts currently missing globally include a third century alabaster stone inscription taken from Awwam temple in Yemen between 2009 and 2011. Also on the coalition’s list are a seventh century BC ivory relief of a lion attacking a Nubian, stolen from the Baghdad Museum in 2003; a green stone mask looted from the Maya site of Rio Azul, Guatemala in the 1970s; and a fifth-sixth century figurine of Varaha taken from a temple complex in Rajasthan, India in 1988. “These are objects that exist physically, but we don’t know where,” Ernesto Ottone, the organization’s assistant director general for culture, told the Guardian. “We will exhibit them virtually, in a space where we can really tell the story and the context behind them.” Ottone said the aim was to “help young people especially to understand that a stolen artefact is one that has been ripped from its community, but also to help recover stolen objects and promote the repatriation of cultural property generally”.

Logically, he said, the museum’s ultimate aim should be its own disappearance: “It’s the opposite of a regular museum, whose collection will continue to expand. With this one, we hope its collection will shrink, as items are recovered one by one.” The project’s architect, Francis Kéré, the 2022 – and first African – winner of the prestigious Pritzker prize for architecture, said the project was about “awakening the imagination”. Cultural artefacts embody “a value in their physical presence, but also a value to their communities … that we cannot describe”, he said. Kére, who was born in Burkina Faso, compared an object torn from its community to a tree uprooted from its soil. “Something happens that we don’t fully understand in the relationship between a tree, its roots, and its nourishment,” he said. “Something similar happens, that we also don’t understand, in the relationship between a cultural artefact and its community. Cultures that have been robbed of artefacts are like a tree’s roots looking for nourishment.” The architect has designed an extendable virtual “ramp”, contained within a globe connecting regions, countries, cultures and the 600 artefacts that will make up the opening collection, and has begun work with web developers to turn the concept into a digital reality. 

Ottone said that while designing and building the virtual museum was a complex job, the most time-consuming task was creating scalable 3D images of the artefacts, for many of which there is no physical record beyond a small black-and-white photo. “No one has imagined a museum like this,” Azoulay said. “The works’ presentation is enhanced by a deep dive into their universe, into the cultural and social movements from which they were born – linking the material and the immaterial.” Unesco’s 1970 convention on prohibiting and preventing the illicit import, export and sale of cultural property urges signatory states to take measures to stop trafficking, which Interpol has said is increasingly the preserve of organized crime.

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Reposted from NPR

La Casa del Libro Museum Library in San Juan was among the many cultural institutions to suffer devastating consequences after hurricanes Irma and Maria walloped Puerto Rico in 2017. Human-driven climate change was the engine behind both. Strong winds caused the museum's power to go out. This meant no air conditioning. And the high humidity levels threatened the museum's world-class collection of 15th century books and artworks with mold. About a month after disaster struck, the institution put out a call to the National Heritage Responders Hotline for help.

The National Heritage Responders is a volunteer network of around 100 experts in cultural heritage conservation from around the country. They assist individuals and institutions in figuring out how to save important objects and buildings after disasters. Their crisis hotline has been busier than ever in recent years because of more frequent and severe weather brought on by climate change. In 2023, there have been around 70 calls so far, up from fewer than 10 in 2008, when the hotline first appeared. (The hotline is intended for the use of cultural institutions; individual members of the public can get in touch with the network via email.) "Climate change is increasing the frequency and the severity of the disasters that we're experiencing," said Ann Frellsen. The Atlanta-based book and paper conservator is a longtime heritage responder volunteer with more than three decades of experience helping out cultural institutions after disasters. She was among those deployed to Puerto Rico over several visits starting a couple of months after the hurricanes hit. "It's just a constant battle." After providing initial support via the phone, Frellsen and her team came in to help La Casa del Libro and other local institutions in crisis with equipment, supplies and advice. (Much of the advice the hotline provides is via phone or video-chat; volunteers are sent out into the field in certain cases, on an as-needed basis.)"There were no stoplights and there were no signs on the highways, because they'd all blown away," Frellsen said. Frellsen said figuring out how to reach the more than 20 institutions that needed assistance in Puerto Rico was challenging — and that's to say nothing of the on-the-job hazards. "As hot and humid as it was, we were in full Tyvek suits the entire time because the mold situation was just unfathomable," Frellsen said. When she isn't heading into disaster zones to help salvage artifacts and heirlooms from fires, hurricanes and floods, Frellsen trains others in the heritage conservation field to do the same.

Recently, she co-led a workshop of professional librarians, archivists and conservators at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. Some of the participants may eventually take the test to become National Heritage Responders. But at this moment, they were deep in a hands-on training exercise, based on an imaginary scenario cooked up by Frellsen and her co-trainers. In the scenario, a blizzard had triggered the museum's sprinkler system — which can happen in strong winds — and all that water has left behind soggy carpets, excess humidity, and many precious presidential artifacts in a World War II exhibition in peril. Huddled around a tall glass case containing a ball-gown worn by John F. Kennedy's sister, Rosemary Kennedy, in 1938, the trainee heritage responders tried to figure out how to protect the gauzy, peach-colored dress — and the other treasures on display — from the ravages of mold. "I would mitigate the high humidity in the space," said Evan Knight, the preservation specialist with Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners, the state agency that supports libraries in Massachusetts. "And if we deal with the humidity, then that should help at least arrest mold growth to some extent before a conservator can come in." But Annie Rubel, a historic preservation expert in Deerfield, Mass., wasn't too keen on this idea. "Well, I think that this is an extremely fragile piece," Rubel countered. "If there is no textile conservator on the way immediately, I would fashion some kind of support sling and very gently remove it from the area."

Ultimately, they decide to remove the carpet from under the case and stabilize the environment in the case itself. The National Heritage Responders was launched by the Foundation for Advancement in Conservation in 2006. But it was in the 1940s that the United States and Europe first started thinking seriously about how to recover culturally important artifacts and sites after a crisis. World War II compelled countries to band together to protect cultural treasures, forming a group of 345 men and women from 13 countries known as The Monuments Men. Since then, efforts around saving cultural heritage after disasters have evolved beyond historic buildings and celebrated works of art. For example, after floods devastated Eastern Kentucky in 2022, National Heritage Responders helped salvage thousands of reel-to-reel tapes documenting Appalachian cultural traditions. They also recently ran online workshops on disaster recovery for people in Maui following this summer's wildfires. "A community can't recover if they lose those cultural identities," said Frellsen, "and their cultural identity is often tied up in the objects and the spaces that they live with." Frellsen said she's excited about the next generation that she's training — especially with human-caused climate change creating a lot more work. "It's really comforting to know that there are a lot more people who can come in and replace us, with a lot more stamina and energy than I find I have," she said. "I would really love to be deployed," said Rubel, the preservation expert who attended the training in Boston. Rubel said she hopes her background in building conservation will secure her a spot in the National Heritage Responders' network. "That's an underrepresented skillset on the team," Rubel said. "So I'm hoping that that comes up sooner rather than later."

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Reposted from Chronicle

Hadrian's Wall "sustained some damage" after the world-famous Sycamore Gap tree near it was felled, inspectors have found. The landmark tree in Northumberland, believed to have been around 300 years old, was cut down overnight between Wednesday and Thursday last week, in what detectives called a "deliberate act of vandalism". The incident led to widespread anger and upset across the region. Early signs suggest that Hadrian's Wall, which stands next to where the sycamore had been, sustained "some damage", according to preservation body Historic England. It comes after Northumbria Police arrested a man in his 60s and a 16-year-old boy in connection with the incident. Both have been released on bail.

A Historic England statement read: "We visited Sycamore Gap on Friday for a preliminary inspection. Whilst we identified that Hadrian's Wall has sustained some damage, we have not been able to access the site to carry out a full investigation so a further archaeological appraisal will take place once the site is considered safe. "As the Government's heritage adviser, we are involved because Hadrian's Wall is protected as a scheduled monument. We appreciate how strongly people feel about the loss of the tree, and its impact on this special historic landscape, and will continue to work closely with key partners as these progresses." The wall, built by the Roman army on the orders of emperor Hadrian, has Unesco World Heritage status. The sycamore was looked after by Northumberland National Park Authority and the National Trust. It was among the UK's most photographed trees and was made famous in a scene in Kevin Costner's 1991 film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Experts have said new shoots are expected to grow from the tree, but it will never be the same again.

Over the weekend, a fence was erected around the sycamore to protect the site and visitors were urged not to touch the tree or remove any pieces from it. A sign, placed there by the National Trust, said: "Please respect the tree and avoid touching it or removing pieces from it. We will find a way to commemorate it. Thank you."

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