Celebrating Women’s History Month with Holly Hotchner, President and CEO of the National Women’s History Museum: On Record PR
I was proud to advise the Allentown Art Museum, which announced today that it has reached an agreement with the heirs of Henry and Hertha Bromberg concerning Portrait of George, Duke of Saxony by Lucas Cranach the Elder and...more
I was honored to be among the speakers this week at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on March 5, 2024. Convened by the World Jewish Restitution Organization and the U.S. State Department, the event announced the...more
A trial court in Indiana recently dismissed a lawsuit challenging the proposed sale of three works of art by Valparaiso University: Rust Red Hills by Georgia O’Keefe, Mountain Landscape by Frederic Edwin Church, and The...more
No, this isn’t a Halloween-themed piece about the infamous Cleveland Torso Murderer from the 1930s, but an issue that is less sensational but far more contemporary — the quest to return looted art to its rightful owners....more
In 1966, an ancient bronze bust found its way to the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts. Believed to depict the daughter of the Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius, it was titled “Portrait of a Lady (A Daughter of Marcus...more
(Germany’s highest court issued a much-anticipated ruling on a challenge by a collector to the listing of his painting in the so-called Lost Art database in Magdeburg, Germany. The Bundesgerichtshof (BGH) ruled that the...more
New York Governor Kathy Hochul has signed into law a new requirement requiring museums to indicate publicly any object in their collection that was displaced by the Nazis as part of what Congress has rightly called the...more
Robin Pogrebin at the New York Times has written an excellent piece on the news that the Brooklyn Museum intends to sell several works from its collection to raise money. The museum explicitly relies on the pandemic-inspired...more
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit yesterday affirmed the 2019 judgment that allowed the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Museum in Madrid to retain Camille Pissarro’s Rue St. Honoré, après-midi, effet de pluie (Rue...more
Since analyzing the likely consequence of gallery and auctioneer insolvencies last month, we have been keeping an eye on how the economic crisis borne of the COVID19 pandemic is affecting the art world. Essentially every...more
There has been some renewed interest in the case a decade or so ago involving a claim by the heir of Oskar Reichel’s family to a painting in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston: Two Nudes (Lovers) by Oskar Kokoschka. In response...more
The Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz (Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, or SPK) in Berlin announced that it had agreed to restitute a 1537 painting of the biblical figure Lot by Hans Baldung Grien to the heirs of Hans...more
While the incomparable Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd does not take place in Dresden, that is where today brought news of a robbery at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, the State...more
The Supreme Court of North Carolina recently held in Meinck vs. City of Gastonia that a city’s lease to a non-profit arts group in connection with a downtown revitalization project was a “governmental function”, which...more
One of the longest-running court cases in the United States about art looted by the Nazis has been decided in favor of the current possessor, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, an instrumentality of the Kingdom of...more
Debate has peaked in the last year or so about the treatment and possible restitution of so-called colonial artifacts in Western (i.e., European and North American) museums. The conversation is important for many reasons, but...more
In recent art world news, a mystery is unraveling at The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens (“The Huntington”) right here in the Los Angeles area (in San Marino to be exact). It involves a sharply...more
After four months of silence, the Berkshire Museum suddenly demanded last week that my clients dismiss their still-pending lawsuit over the governance of the museum by claiming that the April decision by the Single Justice of...more
In recent art world news, the technology augmented reality (the cousin of virtual reality) has been making headlines in the media these days. Simply defined, augmented reality (AR) technology superimposes a computer-generated...more
In recent art world news, a Norman Rockwell painting titled “Blacksmith’s Boy—Heel and Toe” (1940) from the Berkshire Museum’s collection sold for $7 million (with buyer’s premium added, the figure is about 8.13 million) to a...more
(Boston, MA, February 13, 2018) Sullivan & Worcester LLP clients and Berkshire Museum members James Hatt, Kristin Hatt, and Elizabeth Weinberg sharply denounced today the agreement that was announced Friday evening between...more
The Boston Museum of Fine Arts has added a new employee to its roster, a Weimaraner puppy named Riley. Riley will patrol the gallery on a quest to locate insects or other pests that can damage fine art and tapestry. ...more
In recent art world news, the Board of Directors of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston has voted to extend the $10 million reward for information leading to the return of 13 art works (valued at half a billion...more
The Single Justice of the Massachusetts Appeals Court (Joseph A. Trainor) has extended the injunction against the Berkshire Museum's proposed sale of 40 works of art in its collection until at least January 29, 2018. In its...more
Massachusetts Appeals Court Justice, Joseph A. Trainor, granted a motion for an injunction on the sale of important works of the Berkshire Museum. The auction was to be hosted by Sotheby’s this week. The controversial...more