HEAR, HEAR. As Gideon Taylor, the president of the World Jewish Restitution Organization (WJRO), writes in The Art Newspaper<\/a>, Jewish couple Paul and Alice Leffmann fled Nazi Germany\u00a0in 1938, entrusting their cherished Picasso painting, The Actor (1904), to a non-Jewish acquaintance in hopes it would survive the war. Forced to sell the work under duress to finance their escape to Brazil, the Leffmanns lost a priceless part of their lives. The painting has hung in New York\u2019s Metropolitan Museum of Art since 1952. In 2016, the couple\u2019s heir, Laurel Zuckerman, sought its return, but US courts dismissed the case on procedural grounds, exemplifying how legal technicalities still block restitution for Holocaust-era losses. A 2024 report from the WJRO\u00a0found that American museums hold over 100,000 objects once in Europe during the Nazi era, yet less than 10 percent have transparent provenance records. The closure of the Nazi Era Provenance Internet Portal has further hindered heirs\u2019 searches. Renewed legislation, the 2025 Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery (HEAR) Act, aims to extend the 2016 law, remove barriers like time-based defenses, and ensure claimants can act once property is located. \u201cNow is the time for Congress to pass the new HEAR Act, for museums to greatly enhance provenance research efforts and to make the results accessible, and for US officials and the US museum community to establish a commission. We owe it to aging Holocaust survivors and their families. Justice delayed is justice denied\u2014but it is not yet too late,\u201d Taylor argues. \u00a0<\/p>\n The Digest<\/p>\n British aristocrat Charles March, aka the 11th Duke of Kent, opened his new show of minimalist, abstract photographs at London\u2019s Hamiltons Gallery on Tuesday, November 4. Titled \u201cSandscript,\u201d the exhibition runs through January 16 and \u201crecalls the fluid brushwork of Chinese ink painting,\u201d he said. [ARTnews<\/a>]<\/p>\n \t\tRelated Articles<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \n\tThe multiarmed Vaillancourt Fountain, a polarizing San Francisco<\/a> landmark, will be dismantled after the city\u2019s Arts Commission voted on Monday, November 3 to remove it because of safety concerns. [CBS News<\/a>]<\/p>\n \n\tSara Terry, the photographer who captured the effects of war on people and landscapes, documenting the traumatic aftermath of conflicts in places like Bosnia and Sierra Leone, died in October. She was 70. [New York Times<\/a>]<\/p>\n \n\tA 2,200-year-old gold coin has been discovered by a metal detectorist in eastern Germany. Known as \u201crainbow cups\u201d for their curved shape and the folklore that treasure can be found where a rainbow touches the ground, such coins were minted by the Celts, who did not inhabit this region. [Live Science<\/a>]<\/p>\n \n\tThe Kicker <\/p>\n SOTHEBY\u2019S TOUR IN PARIS. ARTnews was given an impromptu tour<\/a>\u00a0of Manny Davidson\u2019s collection on Monday, November 3 at Sotheby\u2019s Paris HQ by Chloe Stead, the house\u2019s global head of private sale, Old Masters<\/a>. Spanning three sales and almost 500 lots, the trove includes rediscovered Old Masters, 19th century British paintings, 18th-century gold enamel, an automaton clock by the celebrated James Cox, and other bits and bobs will hit the auction block. Sotheby\u2019s will hope that Michael Sweerts\u2019 A young man wearing a turban holding an upturned roemer: the fingernail test (1648\u201352) carries the momentum of his rediscovered still-life that sold for over $16 million at Christie\u2019s in 2023. The bartender is squeezed into the gilt frame. \u201cI love this painting because the size is so surprising, and the crop\u2014he really takes up the whole picture,\u201d Stead said. \u201cIt feels like you\u2019re glimpsing through a window.\u201d The estimate on the label read \u20ac800,000 to \u20ac1.2 million ($919,000 to $1.38 million). Stead told me that in the catalog, the estimate of the guaranteed lot is actually lower because \u201cFrench law dictates that, unlike in the UK, you can\u2019t have a guarantee above the low estimate, so you have to change the estimate accordingly.\u201d Portrait of a silversmith, probably Christiaen van Vianen (1600\u20131667) by Thomas de Keyser was hung next to it. \u201cIt\u2019s a very chic picture,\u201d Stead said. Its estimate: \u20ac400,000 to \u20ac600,000 ($459,000 to $689,000). In the work, Van Vianen is holding a silver salt cellar in his right hand. Displayed in a cabinet to the right of the painting was an almost identical silver salt cellar from the year 1600, probably made by Gabriel van den Velden. A nice touch, and yours for \u20ac30,000 to \u20ac50,000 ($34,000 to $57,000).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Headlines A MUSEUM FOR GEN Z. Gus Casely-Hayford, director of the new V&A East, wants London\u2019s long-awaited…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":120107,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,499,500,501,156,111,139,69,84650,9743,7928],"class_list":{"0":"post-120106","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-new-zealand","15":"tag-newzealand","16":"tag-nz","17":"tag-old-masters","18":"tag-san-francisco","19":"tag-sothebys"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120106"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120106\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/120107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/themes\/vip\/pmc-artnews-2019\/assets\/public\/lazyload-fallback.gif\")
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