No more jail time for disgraced dealer involved in Knoedler scandal
31 January
Glafira Rosales, the art dealer who played a key role in the $80m forgery scandal that brought down the Knoedler gallery in New York, was sentenced by a federal judge to the 82 days she spent in prison after her arrest in May 2013, plus nine months of house detention and three years of supervised release. In September 2013, Rosales pleaded guilty to numerous charges and admitted that paintings she passed off as works by artists such as Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock were fakes.
Louvre shuts after knife attack of ‘terrorist nature’
3 February
French police evacuated 1,250 people from the Musée du Louvre in Paris after a man attacked a soldier with a machete near the museum’s entrance. The French prime minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, described the attack as being of a “terrorist nature”. Police said that the assailant, who was shot by another soldier, shouted “Allahu Akbar” (God is the greatest) . A second man was also detained. The Louvre, the world’s most visited museum, suffered a 15% drop in attendance last year, which it attributed to a sharp fall in the number of foreign tourists to the city.
Bern and Bonn schedule exhibitions of Cornelius Gurlitt’s art for November
16 February
The Kunstmuseum in Bern and the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn announced that they will show works from the art collection of Cornelius Gurlitt in November. It is four years since the cache of Nazi-looted paintings, including pieces by Matisse and Renoir, was discovered in Gurlitt’s apartment in Munich. He inherited the hoard from his father, Hildebrand Gurlitt, an art dealer. After Cornelius’s death in 2014, the collection was bequeathed to the Kunstmuseum in Bern.
Artists’ campaign targets right-wing populism
16 February
More than 200 artists, curators and writers—including Olafur Eliasson, Isaac Julien, Ed Ruscha and Tacita Dean—threw their weight behind a project aimed at “confronting the rise of right-wing populism in the US and Europe”. The new global art coalition, called Hands Off Our Revolution, will include exhibitions and events. The organisation’s mission statement says: “As artists, it is our job and our duty to reimagine and reinvent social relations threatened by right-wing populist rule. It is our responsibility to stand in solidarity. We will not go quietly.”
Stolen Guercino surfaces in Casablanca
17 February
A large painting by Guercino that was stolen from a church in Modena, Italy, in August 2014 has been traced by the country’s Carabinieri art-crime squad to Casablanca in Morocco. The Italian government is negotiating to return Madonna with the Saints John the Evangelist and Gregory the Wonderworker (1639) to the Church of San Vincenzo “as soon as possible”, said Italy’s culture minister, Dario Franceschini, in a statement.