Four Nazi-looted works identified by Gurlitt Provenance Research project

Our daily round-up of news from the art world

Four Nazi-looted works identified by Gurlitt Provenance Research project | The German Lost Art Foundation yesterday announced that the Gurlitt Provenance Research project has identified four Nazi-looted drawings in the collection of Benita Renate Gurlitt, sister of Cornelius Gurlitt. At the time of her death in 2012, Benita Renate Gurlitt had 18 artworks from the collection of her and Cornelius’s father, the Nazi collaborator and art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt, in her possession – in July 2017 they were all published on the Lost Art Database. Four of these works, by French artists Charles Dominique Joseph Eisen, Augustin de Saint-Aubin and Anne Vallayer-Coster, were found to have been confiscated from the home of the Jewish Deutsch de la Meurthe family, who lived in Paris during the Nazi occupation. Their current owner has agreed to restitution of the drawings.

Eduoard Kopp appointed chief curator of Menil Drawing Institute | The Menil Collection today announced the appointment of Eduoard Kopp as chief curator of its new Drawing Institute, which opens to the public in November. Kopp has been curator of drawings at the Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, MA since 2015, and prior to that he worked in the drawings department at the J. Paul Getty Museum in LA for nearly seven years.

Women arrested for damaging artefacts in Athens | Reuters reports that two Bulgarian women are being investigated for ‘damage to public property’ after being arrested on suspicion of applying oil to ancient artefacts in the National Historical Museum in Athens on Sunday. The incident comes after previous accounts from earlier this summer, in which what appeared to be oil stains were reportedly found on various items, including icons and inscribed tablets, in other museums in the city. According to Athens News Agency, the women admitted to police that they believed the oil had healing properties and were following biblical instruction.

LarbitsSisters win inaugural prize for interactive and new media art | The LarbitsSisters, collaborative duo and siblings Laure-Anne Jacobs and Bénédicte Jacobs, have won the inaugural $16,000 NOVA New Media Interactive Art Prize, presented by the Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation and the Big House Contemporary Art Center in Wuhan, China. The award will also see the Brussels-based duo present a solo exhibition at the 2018 Prix Arts Electronica Festival in Austria, which will tour to China and later New York.

Archaeologists discover Roman coins beneath disused theatre in Como | CNN reports that archaeologists have discovered hundreds of Roman coins at a site in Como in northern Italy. Excavated from the site of a disused 19th-century theatre, the coins reportedly date back as far as 474 AD. Speaking at a press conference on Monday, rare coin expert Maria Grazia Facchinetti suggested that original owner of the trove may have been ‘a public bank or deposit’ rather than an individual person. The coins are now being examined by archaeologists and restorers in Milan.