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Derek Fincham 🌵🗿🏛️🖼️🏴‍☠️ @dfincham.bsky.social · 9h

On this day in the Art Law Almanac: in the early hours of Oct. 16, 2012, thieves broke into Rotterdam's Kunsthal and took seven works, including a Picasso, a Matisse, two Monets, a Gauguin and a Lucian Freud. No guards were on site. #ArtLawAlmanac

A man pauses to look at the empty space where Henri Matisse's La Liseuse en Blanc et Jaune used to hang at Rotterdam's Kunsthal. Photograph: Peter Dejong/AP

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Derek Fincham 🌵🗿🏛️🖼️🏴‍☠️ @dfincham.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

In exchange, a 1992 agreement gave the Menil a 20-year loan. In 1997 it opened the Byzantine Fresco Chapel in Houston, designed by François de Menil and consecrated, so the dome's Christ Pantokrator and the apse's Virgin hung in a working sacred space.

Exterior of the Byzantine Fresco Chapel at the Menil Collection in Houston. A windowless building of smooth, pale gray panels rises in stacked, boxy volumes behind a low wall of rough-cut limestone. On the left, a tall dark pillar stands beside a shadowed entrance. Large live oaks frame the building against a clear blue sky.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ByzantineFrescoChapelMuseum.jpg

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Derek Fincham 🌵🗿🏛️🖼️🏴‍☠️ @dfincham.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Dikmen's name was already known in Houston. In 1983, Dominique de Menil and Walter Hopps viewed two 13th-century frescoes in a Munich apartment Dikmen rented. Thieves had cut them into 38 pieces from a chapel near Lysi in occupied northern Cyprus.

The ancient church of St. Evphemianos in Lysi, Cyprus. Picture taken in June 2010
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lysi_Chapel.JPG

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Derek Fincham 🌵🗿🏛️🖼️🏴‍☠️ @dfincham.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

The first sweep found the St. Thomas mosaic from Panagia Kanakaria and frescoes from Antiphonitis. A November search turned up dozens more crates. Archaeology magazine put the haul at over $40 million.

Church of Panagia Kanakaria, apse conch, mosaics, Lythragkomi, Cyprus - Virgin Mary and Christ Child in mandorla, with archangels, mutilated, with segmented restoration lines https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Church_of_Panagia_Kanakaria,_apse_conch,_mosaics,_Lythragkomi,_Cyprus_-_Virgin_Mary_and_Christ_Child_in_mandorla,_with_archangels,_mutilated,_with_segmented_restoration_lines_-_MSBZ004_A71_017_EH_-_Dumbarton_Oaks.jpg

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Derek Fincham 🌵🗿🏛️🖼️🏴‍☠️ @dfincham.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Then a photo surfaced from Thanksgiving Day 1985: the Alters with family in Tucson, smiling side by side at the dinner table over pumpkin pie. The theft was the next day. In hindsight, the police composite sketches look a lot like the couple in that photo. www.azcentral.com/story/news/l...

A smiling couple seated side by side at a dining table, in a snapshot that looks like it's from the 1980s. The man wears glasses, a plaid shirt, and a dark blazer; the woman has shoulder-length auburn hair, a magenta-and-navy top, and a pendant necklace. In front of them are plates of food, a pie, glasses, and a white pitcher.

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Derek Fincham 🌵🗿🏛️🖼️🏴‍☠️ @dfincham.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

The museum opened the morning after Thanksgiving 1985 and a man and a woman came in. She distracted the guard while he went upstairs, cut the canvas from its frame, rolled it up and carried it out under a coat. Then the thieves and the painting vanished without a trace.

A Dec. 6, 1985 sketch of the suspects in the theft of a Willem de Kooning painting from the University of Arizona Museum of Art. They were described as a woman in her mid-50s with shoulder-length reddish-blond hair, wearing tan bell-bottom slacks, a scarf on her head and a red coat, and a man with olive-colored skin, wearing a blue coat. Both had thick-framed glasses.

UAPD

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Derek Fincham 🌵🗿🏛️🖼️🏴‍☠️ @dfincham.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

On this day in the Art Law Almanac: Oct. 8, 2022. Willem de Kooning's "Woman-Ochre" (1955) went back on view at the University of Arizona Museum of Art, 37 years after thieves cut it from its frame. A thread on one of the strangest recoveries in US art crime. #ArtLawAlmanac #arttheft #artcrime

A painting by Willem de Kooning showing a standing female figure that dissolves into thick, slashing brushwork. Her body is built from patches of warm ochre, flesh pink, and cream, with dark outlines suggesting breasts, hips, and legs. Her face is masklike, with large round eyes and a wide, bared-teeth smile. The background breaks into fragments of yellow, white, and muted blue that blend into the figure.

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Derek Fincham 🌵🗿🏛️🖼️🏴‍☠️ @dfincham.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

What came back: 335 objects of the Lombok treasure, seized when Dutch troops sacked the Cakranegara palace in 1894, and four 13th-century Singhasari statues, removed from a Javanese temple around 1804. Both handed over in Leiden on July 10, 2023.

Two grey volcanic-stone statues of Hindu gods, photographed side by side against white museum walls. Left: Ganesha, the elephant-headed god, stands upright on a round pedestal in front of an arched back slab. He wears a tall ornate crown and jewellery, his trunk curls toward a bowl held at his round belly, and two more arms rise at his sides. Right: Brahma, carved in high relief against a broken back slab, wears a tall crown. Three of his four faces are visible: one facing front, two turned to the sides. He has a pointed beard and holds his hands together in front of his waist above a richly decorated sarong. A slender vase appears on the slab beside him.

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Derek Fincham 🌵🗿🏛️🖼️🏴‍☠️ @dfincham.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Why it still matters: it moved restitution from case-by-case goodwill toward a stated national policy, and it set up the Netherlands' 2023 returns of the Lombok treasure and Singhasari statues to Indonesia.

Objects from the Lombok treasure against a black background. On the left, a gold kris (dagger) hilt shaped as a crouching demon-like figure, studded with dark blue gemstones, rising from a gold collar set with large pink and red cabochon stones. In the centre, a pale hilt carved in ivory as a grimacing, wild-haired figure with one arm raised behind its head and a small gem set at its waist, on a matching gold collar with red cabochons. On the right, five small round gold ornaments, each with a red stone at the centre ringed by tiny clear stones.

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Derek Fincham 🌵🗿🏛️🖼️🏴‍☠️ @dfincham.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Weapon remnants pointed to munitions that can be aimed precisely; both strikes hit within about two meters on the same roof section. The second wounded three Russian journalists. The laws of war give religious buildings and historic monuments special protection.

The cathedral was bombed twice on 8 October 2020 by Azerbaijani armed forces during Nagorno-Karabakh conflict

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Derek Fincham 🌵🗿🏛️🖼️🏴‍☠️ @dfincham.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Also on this day in the Art Law Almanac: Oct. 8, 2020 — two strikes hours apart hit Ghazanchetsots Cathedral in Shusha (Shushi) during the Nagorno-Karabakh war. Human Rights Watch later found it was likely targeted deliberately, a possible war crime. #ArtLawAlmanac

View of the Ghazanchetsots Cathedral with the renovated yard in 2018

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Derek Fincham 🌵🗿🏛️🖼️🏴‍☠️ @dfincham.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

On this day in the Art Law Almanac: Oct. 6, 2020 — France's National Assembly unanimously backed a bill to return 26 Abomey royal treasures to Benin and El Hadj Omar Tall's sabre to Senegal, a carve-out from the inalienability of French public collections. #ArtLawAlmanac

Group of statues from royal palaces in Abomey, Benin, as exhibited in Quai Branly museum, Paris, in May 2021

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Derek Fincham 🌵🗿🏛️🖼️🏴‍☠️ @dfincham.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Palmyra shows both the reach and the gap: strong norms, very few defendants in the dock. Replicas of the arch have toured the world; the original is gone. Here's a replica in Geneva in 2019 #CulturalHeritage #ArtLaw

Marble replica of the Palmyra Arch on April 14, 2019, Place des Nations Geneva

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Derek Fincham 🌵🗿🏛️🖼️🏴‍☠️ @dfincham.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

On this day in the Art Law Almanac: Oct 5, 2015, Syria's antiquities director Maamun Abdulkarim told AFP that ISIS had detonated explosives around Palmyra's Monumental Arch, a Roman gateway ~1,800 years old. Only its columns were left standing.

The Monumental Arch at Palmyra, Syria, photographed in 2010, five years before ISIS destroyed it. The weathered, honey-colored limestone gateway has a tall central arch flanked by two smaller side arches. Its faces are carved with bands of ornate decoration. Rows of Roman columns from the city's Great Colonnade stretch away on either side, under a clear desert sky.

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Derek Fincham 🌵🗿🏛️🖼️🏴‍☠️ @dfincham.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Bonus: the Brooklyn Museum's fun movie connection. In The Hot Rock (1972), Robert Redford plays a thief hired to steal a diamond from the museum, one taken from an African nation in colonial times. A repatriation plot, two years after the 1970 UNESCO Convention. end/x

Cover of the Coronet movie tie-in paperback of Donald Westlake's novel The Hot Rock. Below the title in chunky 3D block letters, four men in early-'70s clothes lean against a New York street pole under a "Don't Walk" signal. One holds a bottle with a fuse, another a power tool. Red text reads: "One elusive emerald, four elusive thieves, one hilariously exciting story." Bottom: "Now a great film starring Robert Redford, George Segal and Zero Mostel."

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Derek Fincham 🌵🗿🏛️🖼️🏴‍☠️ @dfincham.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Where is it now? It sold at Christie's in 2015 for £2.9m ($4.6m), still Ofili's auction record, and in 2018 collector Steve Cohen donated it to MoMA. In 1999 a city tried to punish a museum for showing it; 19 years later another museum accepted it as a gift. 4/x

Chris Ofili's painting The Holy Virgin Mary (1996). A stylized Black Madonna in a flowing blue robe stands against a glowing yellow-orange background. Around her float small collaged cutouts from pornographic magazines, arranged like cherubs or butterflies. One of her breasts is a lump of varnished elephant dung, and the canvas leans on two more balls of dung on the floor.

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Derek Fincham 🌵🗿🏛️🖼️🏴‍☠️ @dfincham.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

On this day in the Art Law Almanac: Oct 1, 1946, the Nuremberg tribunal convicted Alfred Rosenberg, whose task force "plundered museums and libraries, confiscated art treasures and collections" across occupied Europe. Art looting sat at the heart of a war crimes judgment. #ArtLaw #NaziLootedArt

Former Nazi Party ideologist Alfred Rosenberg on trial at the International Military Tribunal war crimes trial. Nuremberg, Germany, April 15, 1946.

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Derek Fincham 🌵🗿🏛️🖼️🏴‍☠️ @dfincham.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

A NY appeals court just handed the Art Institute of Chicago a win in the Schiele "Russian War Prisoner" fight. But it didn't decide who owns the drawing. It held the Manhattan DA used the wrong tool to try. My take on what it means for object-first enforcement 🧵 1/3

Egon Schiele, "Russian War Prisoner" (1916), watercolor over graphite on cream paper. It shows the head and hand of a uniformed Russian prisoner of war, with the artist's signature at lower right.

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Derek Fincham 🌵🗿🏛️🖼️🏴‍☠️ @dfincham.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

"We are bound to respect those monuments so far as war allows." Before D day, Eisenhower ordered troops to spare historic sites whenever possible. He warned them not to use "military necessity" to hide destruction or indifference. #DDay

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Derek Fincham 🌵🗿🏛️🖼️🏴‍☠️ @dfincham.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

With the news that Hegseth's navy has lost a third $60 million F18 hornet in the sea, may I suggest the Pentagon try playing navy on the terrific simulator Harpoon instead of losing stuff www.businessinsider.com/us-navy-airc...

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