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August 12, 2008
That rare bird, the collector of stolen art?
Whenever a major work of art is stolen people wonder if a reclusive billionaire is sending out minions to add to his collection. Somehow that notion usually gets dismissed - especially when stolen famous art turns up later and it appears the criminals were unable to move it on any market.
Here's an example to test the rule from the New York Times.
The curious case of William Milliken Vanderbilt Kingsland, a threadbare eccentric and an amateur genealogist of the Upper East Side, began in the summer of 2006, when, a few months after he died (at the age of either 58 or 62), it was discovered that his birth name was Melvyn Kohn, that he resided not on Fifth Avenue but in a small apartment on East 72nd Street, and that he had not — counter to his claims — attended Groton or Harvard, nor had he once been married to a French royal.He left no will, and the apartment turned out to be full of artworks — including a bust by Giacometti that has since been valued at $900,000 to $1.2 million and a small painting by Giorgio Morandi that would eventually be auctioned for about $600,000 — that turned out to be stolen. (The Morandi was subsequently returned to the care of the Manhattan public administrator, who oversees legal details for the intestate.)
Some of the art in Mr. Kingsland’s collection does appear to have belonged, in the legal sense of the word, to him. But the F.B.I., brought in to sort through the trove, discovered that of the more than 300 pieces found in his apartment, — including stolen works by Picasso, Copley, Fairfield Porter and Odilon Redon — most anything of commercial significance was difficult, at best, to verify as his.
Mr. Kingsland doesn't seem to have been a Napoleon of Crime, Stolen Art Division, but it's a good story. I don't know that they'll ever work it out - he didn't leave much paper trail. On a guess, he seems to have been willing to buy things that weren't well-documented.
Follow the link and watch the slide show - maybe you own one of these?
Posted by CrankyProfessor at August 12, 2008 7:33 AM