A photograph of Richard Kastner taken from an online obituary.Paperman & Sons Inc./Supplied
As many as 60 artworks are believed to be missing from the Montreal home of a man who died over the holidays, with members of the country’s art market wondering about the fate of works by coveted artists including Lawren Harris, Emily Carr and Marc Chagall.
Westmount resident Richard Kastner was in his late seventies when he died on Dec. 24, an obituary on the Paperman & Sons funeral home website says. Though little about his life was public, he amassed an immense collection of visual art in his lifetime, according to Montreal art dealer Robin Rosenberg and two other people in the art-collecting world who worked with him. The Globe and Mail is not identifying those sources because of sensitivities around the recency of his death.
Montreal police confirmed to The Globe that a burglary took place on Dec. 30 at Kastner’s home address, and they have opened an investigation into items that were missing.
Canadian collectors and dealers have in recent days been circulating a list of about 60 works he had acquired but that could not be found, trying to raise awareness of their provenance in case they show up for sale. It is not immediately clear if the artworks were given away toward the end of Kastner’s life or were taken from his home in the days surrounding his death, possibly in a burglary.
The list being circulated in the art-collection community includes numerous works by Group of Seven members, including Harris’s 1926 oil painting Above Moraine Lake, four works by Arthur Lismer and two apiece by A.J. Casson and A.Y. Jackson. It also includes an oil-on-paper work by Emily Carr titled Nirvana, a work credited to Norval Morrisseau called Spirit Figure Suckling, and two pieces by Chagall.
Rosenberg, a longtime private art adviser and dealer, said Kastner had a “deep and genuine passion for collecting art.” She said that if the artworks were in fact stolen, the potential thieves would face a complex and risky process, with databases such as Art Loss Register being commonly used by collectors and dealers to help verify provenance and legal ownership transfers.
“Without these, buyers may inadvertently support these illegal activities and contribute to the circulation of stolen art,” she said.
Rob Cowley, the president and managing director of Toronto-based art auctioneer Cowley Abbott, said the market for Canadian art is limited outside of the country, which reduces the opportunities for art thieves to offload stolen work. “Our community is typically well-informed of the thefts and we cooperate actively with law enforcement when stolen works might be encountered,” he said by e-mail.