Stolen! How, when and why?
Ten-week art history and theory course
9 October 2018 6.30 - 8pm16 October 2018 6.30 - 8pm23 October 2018 6.30 - 8pm30 October 2018 6.30 - 8pm6 November 2018 6.30 - 8pm13 November 2018 6.30 - 8pm20 November 2018 6.30 - 8pm27 November 2018 6.30 - 8pm4 December 2018 6.30 - 8pm11 December 2018 6.30 - 8pm
The Benjamin West Lecture Theatre, Burlington Gardens, Royal Academy of Arts.
6.30–8.00pm each week (registration from 6pm). £420 for full course, £260 for weeks 1–5 OR weeks 6–10. Includes all materials and wine reception at the end of session 5 and session 10.
Terms and conditions
A distinguished line-up of academics and art-world professionals investigate the rationale behind and impact of the theft of paintings from public institutions, with insight into the world of art crime.
On 21 August 1911, a painting – now considered the ultimate masterpiece – was stolen from the Louvre. For the following week, the museum was closed and suspects brought in for questioning, among them Guillaume Apollinaire and Pablo Picasso. The culprit would not be found – nor the painting returned – for over two years, when it was recovered in December 1913.
The extraordinary case of the Mona Lisa is the starting point for this ten-week art history and theory course, which will analyse the phenomenon of art theft in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Would the Mona Lisa be as famous today if she had never been stolen? What impact does a theft have on the value of an artwork – and on the reputation of the institution it was stolen from?
The risk and impact of art theft is now widely considered in the contexts of public collections, museums and institutions. However, while stealing art from private collections could be said to be as old as collecting itself, art thefts from public institutions are a relatively modern phenomenon. Understanding criminal organisations’ complex networks and techniques – how an artwork is stolen, taken hostage, and eventually resold or perhaps returned – is crucial to preventing corruption and reducing the impact of the black market.
Through discussion of a selection of infamous stolen artworks – some priceless treasures never to be recovered – this course will consider the historical development of art theft, the potential rationales behind these crimes, and the anti-crime institutions developed to tackle them. The act of stealing a piece of art is very seldom the work of one individual – several people, groups, institutions and even nations may be involved. Examples from different time periods and contexts will show what theft can reveal about a historical period and the changing reputations of objects and institutions.
This course will consider a number of key questions, including:
• What is the difference between art theft, reappropriation and scandal-seeking?
• Why might it be important to consider the rationale behind the theft of cultural property?
• Who are the key players in world of art crime?
• How can art theft be prevented? How have anti-crime institutions developed over time?
• How sophisticated have art thefts become?
• Does press coverage of a theft have an impact on the value of a stolen artwork? How does the general public perceive the theft, and why?
• Should institutions expose art thefts or keep them secret?
• What impact does digitalisation have on this phenomenon?
This course provides a unique opportunity to learn about masterpieces such as the Nativity by Caravaggio, Jacob de Gheyn III by Rembrandt, The Scream by Munch, Seascape at Scheveningen by Van Gogh and many other iconic works of art which have been targeted by thieves.
The course will be broadly chronological, with individual sessions taught by leading scholars, art-world practitioners and professionals from both the private and public spheres. Each session allows time for questions and a group discussion.
This course runs on consecutive Tuesday evenings from 6.30pm - 8.00pm
6.30–8.00pm each week (registration from 6pm). £420 for full course, £260 for weeks 1–5 OR weeks 6–10. Includes all materials and wine reception at the end of session 5 and session 10.
Terms and conditions
About the course
This course provides a unique opportunity to learn about art thefts, the possible rationales behind stealing art and the impact of thefts on the value and reputation of both artworks and institutions. Starting from a number of infamous cases, expert course leaders will uncover this complex and mysterious world.
This course is available to book as a full ten-week course OR as two individual blocks of five weeks.
Weeks 1 – 5
(Tuesday 9 October – Tuesday 6 November)
Weeks 6 – 10
(Tuesday 13 November – Tuesday 11 December)
The course is held in the newly opened Benjamin West Lecture Theatre, Burlington Gardens, Royal Academy of Arts.
The course is designed to provide an historical overview for those new to the field, but is also relevant for those with prior knowledge who are keen to learn more from experts.
This course is for you if:
• You have a general interest in the history of art and art crime and would like to approach the subject in a new way
• You want to learn about the art world in general and/or the connections between the legal and illegal art markets, from both a historical and practical perspective
• You currently work, or aspire to work, in the arts and cultural industry and want to understand art theft and its risks from the perspective of professionals and leading scholars
The course will be delivered in a lecture format, with the opportunity for questions and discussion between speakers and participants.
Minimum age 18
£420 for full course
£260 for weeks
(weeks 1–5 OR weeks 6–10)
Tuesday 9 October – Tuesday 11 December
Included:
• A rich combination of lectures, discussion and expert-led Q&A sessions
• An introduction to the origins of art theft from public institutions
• A deeper understanding of the art world and the crimes which affect it
• Skills and knowledge relevant to those with art-historical, curatorial and arts management interests
• The opportunity to learn and reflect within a peer group, with discussions facilitated by an expert in the field
• The opportunity to socialise and network in a friendly environment
• A certificate of participation at the end of the course
• Wine reception at the end of session 5 and session 10.
Guest speakers include
Emeritus Professor of Comparative European History Queen Mary, University of London.
Donald Sassoon is emeritus professor of Comparative European History at Queen Mary, University of London. Born in Egypt, raised in France and Italy, studied at UCL, Penn State (USA) and obtained his PhD at Birkbeck College under Eric Hobsbawm. He has held visiting posts and fellowships in a number of universities, including New York University, Paris, Trento, Modena, Boston College, Queensland and Padua. He has written on socialism , fascism, and Italian communism. His book The Culture of the Europeans (1,660 pages, 2006) has been translated into five languages and his book Mona Lisa: The History of the World’s Most Famous Painting (2001) has been translated into ten languages. He is the author of over 90 articles in scholarly journals and in edited books and has given papers and lectures in over 100 institutions. Penguin will publish his next book,The Anxious Triumph of Capitalism 1860-1914, in 2019
Writer and Curator
Sandy Nairne is a writer and curator based in London. From 2002-15 he was Director of the National Portrait Gallery, London, where he oversaw the considerable expansion of its exhibition programmes, the increase in its annual level of visitors to 2 million, the extension of its learning and digital work, and a number of very notable acquisitions. He has worked previously as Assistant Director, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford; Director of Exhibitions at the ICA; Director of Visual Arts for the Arts Council of Great Britain and Director of Programmes at Tate. Sandy Nairne has published State of the Art, 1987, the co-edited anthology Thinking about Exhibitions, 1996, and most recently *The Portrait Now, A Guide to Contemporary Portraits; The 21st Century Portrait and Art Theft and the Case of the Stolen Turners. He is currently Chair of the Fabric Advisory Committee at St Paul’s Cathedral, and of the Art Advisory Group for Maggie’s Cancer Care Centres as well as chairing the Board of the Clore Cultural Leadership Programme. He is a Trustee of the National Trust and the Samuel Courtauld Trust at the Courtauld Institute Gallery.
Director of Cultural Heritage Protection and Security
Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
Vernon Rapley is the Director of Cultural Heritage Protection and Security at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London (UK). Vernon is a Special Advisor for the UK Government’s Cultural Heritage Protection Fund, he is the founder and chairman of the National Museum Security Group, Chairman of the Security of Major Museums Europe Group (SOMME), the UK lead for Tourism on the Cross-sector Security and Safety Communications Team a board member of the International Council of Museum Security and a member of the NPCC (National Police Chiefs’ Council) Heritage & Cultural Property Crime Working Group. Before joining the V&A in 2010, Vernon served as a Scotland Yard Detective for 24 years; the last 10 years spent as the head of the Art & Antiques Unit. During that time he overtly and covertly investigated all manner of art and cultural property crime. He was a member of The Interpol Tracking Task Force (Iraq), as well as representing UK Law Enforcement on International initiatives to combat the illicit trade of cultural goods from places such as: Afghanistan, South America, Eastern Europe and South East Asia. He formed a number of long lasting community partnerships, including the creation of ArtBEAT, a unique use of expert volunteers drawn from the cultural sector to assist the police. Towards the end of his police career he organised two exhibitions on Fakes & Forgeries, the second of which, displayed in 2010, attracted 30,000 visitors in just 3 weeks.
Intellectual historian and journalist
Peter Watson was educated at Cheltenham Grammar School and the Universities of Durham (psychology prize), London, and Rome (Italian Government Music Scholarship). He became founder editor of Race Today, the journal of the Institute of Race Relations. In 1970 he joined New Society, where he soon became deputy editor. Two years later he moved to The Sunday Times, where he remained until 1981. During that time he was Home Affairs Correspondent, Education Correspondent, and for four years a member of the ‘Insight’ investigative team. In 1997 he published the book: Sotheby’s: The Inside Story. and int he same year he was invited to join the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, at Cambridge University, as a Research Associate. He is co-author of Stealing History, an official report of the Museums Association of Great Britain, published in July 2000. Peter Watson also researched and presented many television programmes, and written for the Observer, the *Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Sunday Times, the New York Times and the Spectator. Peter Watson publications include The Caravaggio Conspiracy (1983); From Manet to Manhattan: The Rise of the Modern Art Market (1992); Sotheby’s Christie’s, Castelli & Co (1993) and The Medici Conspiracy (2006).
Director of Recoveries & General Counsel
Art Loss Register
James leads the recoveries team at the Art Loss Register (ALR), the world’s largest private database of stolen and looted art and antiquities, holding records of half a million items. The ALR offers a due diligence service to the international art market to assist in identifying items that are subject to a claim. At any one time the ALR is working on the recovery of hundreds of stolen or looted items identified through this system. Prior to joining the ALR, James worked as a solicitor in London, having originally trained as an archaeologist. This makes the ALR’s work on the return of looted antiquities a particular interest, and he was delighted to recently attend a ceremony celebrating the return of a number of looted sculptures to the National Museum in Beirut.
Historian and barrister
Maitland Chambers
Thomas Grant QC is a historian and barrister practising in the commercial and chancery fields. As well as many legal text books, Thomas is the author of the best-selling Jeremy Hutchinson’s Case Histories and the forthcoming Court Number One, The Old Bailey (both John Murray), both of which explore the overlap between the law and England’s social and cultural history. He wrote the introduction to the recent edition of Sybille Bedford’s The Trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and is regular contributor to The Times.
CEO Art Recovery International LLC
Christopher A. Marinello is one of the world’s foremost experts in recovering stolen and looted works of art. A practicing lawyer for over 30 years, Chris began his career as a litigator and became uniquely proficient in negotiating complex title disputes on behalf of collectors, dealers, museums and insurance companies. He has been involved in several of the best-known Nazi restitution cases on behalf of foreign governments and the heirs of Holocaust victims. Chris successfully recovered the first work of art to be restituted from the infamous Gurlitt hoard and was responsible for the recovery by the heirs of Parisian art dealer Paul Rosenberg of several Nazi-looted artworks held in museums and private collections. In 2013, Chris founded Art Recovery International – a specialist practice providing due diligence, dispute resolution and art recovery services for the art market and cultural heritage sectors. Within this, Chris has overseen the development of the non-profit Artive Database project – the most technologically advanced system in existence for the identification and recording of issues and claims attached to works of art. Over the years, Chris has recovered stolen and looted artwork valued at over £400M and, working pro bono, has restituted dozens of antiquities on behalf of the governments of Italy, Egypt, Iraq, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Romania and Poland. Art Recovery International has been called “a behind the scenes force in the International Art World”.
Writer
Tom Mashberg is a regular contributor to The New York Times Culture section, focusing on art and antiquities theft, smuggling and repatriation. In combination with Ralph Blumenthal, a veteran Times journalist, he has broken many stories about the presence of illicit Cambodian statues in the United States. One series of articles prompted the Metropolitan Museum of Art to relinquish two major statues from its Asian collection. Museums in Cleveland, Denver and Los Angeles were also required to return antiquities, and Sotheby's auction house was forced to hand back a statue worth $1million at auction. Mashberg is an award-winning investigative reporter and editor, a 2014 Pulitzer Prize finalist, and former Sunday editor and investigative and editor at the Boston Herald. He has worked as an editor and reporter for The New York Times and The Boston Globe, and written for Vanity Fair, Salon, Technology Review and dozens of other magazines and newspapers over a 30-year career. He is co-author of Stealing Rembrandts: The Untold Stories Behind Notorious Heists (Palgrave Macmillan), a Wall Street Journal true crime bestseller.
Public Prosecutor's Office, Amsterdam
Ursula Weitzel studied international criminal law at Leiden University. After an internship at the United Nations Secretariat in New York City and working for the international division of the Dutch Ministry of Justice, she started her work in the Dutch judiciary first as judge and thereafter as prosecutor. At the Prosecutor’s Office in Amsterdam she joined the International Center for Judicial Cooperation, the IRC. The IRC Amsterdam is the central national authority dealing with all incoming European Arrest Warrants. As a prosecutor in the IRC, Ursula has pleaded on behalf of the prosecutor’s office before the Court of Justice of the European Union in Luxembourg in a number of European Arrest Warrant cases in which the Amsterdam District Court had asked for a preliminary ruling. Additionally, Ursula is responsible for all other kinds of mutual legal assistance requests from outside of the Netherlands received by the IRC Amsterdam. Often enough, these requests involve stolen or illegally exported works of art. Combining this international legal perspective with art, Ursula deals with all criminal cases dealing with art and antiques at the Amsterdam Prosecutor’s Office. Furthermore, Ursula is member of the Arts Committee, which is a collaboration between the Prosecutor’s Office and the Amsterdam District Court. With that international focus on art, she was involved with the return of the stolen Van Gogh’s in 2017. Ursula is lecturer with the Netherlands’ Training and Study Centre for the Judiciary and the ERA, Academy of European Law. Her lectures focus on work ethics and attitude of starting prosecutors, and on mutual legal assistance, the European Arrest Warrant and the European Investigation Order, with an audience of defense lawyers, prosecutors, judges, police officers, academics and students.
Public Prosecutor's Office, Amsterdam
W.J. (Willem) Nijkerk studied (criminal) law at the University of Amsterdam. He started his career with the Public Prosecutor’s Office in 1996. First as a legal policy advisor and since 2002 as a public prosecutor in the city of Utrecht. In 2009, he switched jobs and went to work at the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Amsterdam. Besides prosecuting cases in court himself, he was the head of a team of prosecutors and legal staff that was involved in the investigation and prosecution of suspects of so-called High Impact Crimes in the southern and western parts of Amsterdam. High Impact Crimes involve crimes such as murder, manslaughter, sexual offenses, robberies and other violent crimes. It was in this team that he got involved in art crime and more specific in the search for and the return of the two paintings of Van Gogh, that were stolen from the Van Gogh Museum in December 2002. Since the beginning of 2016, Willem heads the Policy and Strategy Team at the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Amsterdam. He also serves as a deputy spokesperson for the Prosecutor’s office. Willem has been a frequent guest speaker on the work of public prosecutors at the Faculty of Law of the University of Amsterdam, since 2010.
Art Crime Investigator
Dick Ellis is an internationally recognised art crime investigator with over 30 years’ experience and a director of the Art Management Group, which he co-founded in 2005. He served in Special Operations at New Scotland Yard where he founded and ran the Art & Antiques Squad until 1999 when he left the police to become General Manager of Christie’s Fine Art Security Services. In 2000 he became Managing Director of Trace recovery services running a database and magazine for stolen art and antiques. Recoveries include Munch’s The Scream, Beit Collection paintings, Audubon’s Birds of America stolen from Russia’s State Library and over 7,000 antiquities looted from China and Egypt. Acting for insurers and private clients he has recovered paintings by Picasso, Delacroix, Lempicka and Dali in Serbia, The Netherlands and UK where, since 2008 he has been an Expert Advisor to Government on International Loans to Museums. He initiated the Council for the Prevention of Art Theft’s code of due diligence and has attended UNESCO workshops as an expert on the protection and recovery of cultural property. He is a founding trustee of the Association for Research into Crimes Against Art (ARCA) and lectures extensively on art crime.
The new RA, 2018
The Benjamin West Lecture Theatre
New for 2018, the lecture theatre builds on the RA’s heritage of rigorous and lively debate. This magnificent double-height space, with over 250 seats, allows us to share our artists and scholars with the world. Original clerestory windows provide a spectacular day-lit space, brought to life with a continuous programme of events including lectures, debates, film screenings and concerts.
Our courses and classes programme
Our programme of short courses and classes offers the opportunity to explore a range of subjects, led by expert tutors and practising artists.
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