Picasso Recovery in Newark Shines Light on Art Theft

Stolen pieces can vanish for decades and losses are difficult to estimate.

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Sculpture specialist Alice Levi Duncan was cataloging two early 20th-century bronze statuettes this winter when she realized something unusual.

Both of the pieces were unique casts, meaning no subsequent editions had been made from that mold—“very rare in the bronze world,” said Ms. Duncan, a director at Gerald Peters Gallery. “It’s like winning the lottery twice.”

As it turned out, the sculptures, consigned for sale at Gerald Peters, had been swiped in 1983 from another Manhattan gallery, Hirschl & Adler.

The fact was only uncovered when Ms. Duncan, who remembered selling one to Hirschl & Adler years earlier when she worked at Christie’s, called to confirm that the work—a sculpture of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney by Prince Paul Troubetzkoy—was unique.

Such recoveries offer a window into the shadowy world of art crime.

The extent of the problem is hard to pin down. At one point the Federal Bureau of Investigation estimated that art and cultural crimes, which include fraud, theft and looting, resulted in billions of dollars of losses each year, though the agency now says those figures are too hard to verify.

Complicating matters: While law-enforcement agencies track such crimes, there is no central governmental repository that lists missing objects, which may, in the case of a Picasso recovered in December, vanish in Paris and reappear in Newark, N.J.

The 1911 cubist painting, estimated to be worth millions, went missing from a storeroom at Paris’s Centre Pompidou. It resurfaced in a shipment from Belgium, labeled as an “Art Craft Toy” with a declared value of $37.

The theft was reported in 2001. But the painting could have theoretically gone missing two years earlier: It was placed in storage in 1999 after being lent to a German museum. The loss was only detected after a subsequent loan request from India, according to court papers.

It isn’t clear how customs officials at Newark, among the busier ports in the U.S., unearthed a stolen artwork the size of a place mat. A spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations declined to comment, citing a continuing investigation.

Centre Pompidou spokesman Benoît Parayre said the museum has beefed up its security and collection-management system since the theft of the painting, titled “La Coiffeuse.”

Tracking down stolen art can take decades and may turn on lucky breaks like anonymous tips or calls to police by suspicious potential buyers.

During his time with the New York Police Department, Mark Fishstein, a detective who specialized in art crime and retired in October, handled cases ranging from break-ins to the disappearance of a Norman Rockwell painting worth more than $1 million from a Queens storage facility in 2013.

“You can never give up hope because if they are stolen, some people hold them for a predetermined amount of time and then think it’s safe to sell,” said Mr. Fishstein, who now works as an investigator for the art-risk advisory practice at the consulting firm K2 Intelligence LLC.

When objects do resurface, it is often through the combined efforts of law-enforcement agencies working with insurance companies and a small field of private businesses that specialize in detecting art fraud, tracking down purloined works and conducting the sometimes delicate negotiations surrounding their return.

Once an art object is reported stolen, police typically contact sister agencies, such as the FBI and Interpol, said NYPD Detective Michael Dorto. Police also register the theft with one of the private groups that compile stolen-art data.

The point, he said, is to “render this art useless” by indicating it is stolen.

For years, the biggest such operator has been the Art Loss Register, a London company that maintains what it says is the largest international database of stolen art objects and antiques. Last year, it conducted more than 400,000 paid searches, with more than 5,000 queries raising a red flag about an item’s provenance. About 150 or so objects are recovered each year.

The group also retrieves lost art and is building up a new business line: a database of forged items and likely fakes, according to Chairman Julian Radcliffe.

Some of his company’s methods, including payments to informants, have been questioned by others in the art world, though Mr. Radcliffe dismisses the criticism.

“The whole question of payments, police persuasion—we wouldn’t be in the business if we were operating illegally,” he said.

Two years ago, a group of former employees started a rival business, Art Recovery Group, led by lawyer Christopher Marinello. It uses a database of disputed art, launched earlier this year, that uses image-recognition software to search for matches in auction catalogs and other materials. A separate division of the firm specializes in art recovery and dispute resolution.

When the long-lost bronze statuettes came to light at Gerald Peters, the other gallery, Hirschl & Adler, called on Mr. Marinello to help arrange their return. While the Troubetzkoy work had no distinguishing characteristics, the other piece—a compact statuette of a woman holding a flower by New York sculptorPaul Manship, known for his gilded “ Prometheus” at Rockefeller Center—was mounted on a marble base with distinctive veining.

The two works are now worth an estimated $250,000.

The private stolen-art databases can make it “relatively easy to investigate something if you know where to look and find a tainted record,” said Eric Baumgartner, a senior vice president at Hirschl & Adler.

But these same tools can also help the thieves, he said. For example, paintings that have passed through several galleries often have exhibition tags on the back. His gallery recently examined a work where it took a magnifying glass to detect that the tags were fake.

“With digital technology, it’s so easy to reproduce,” Mr. Baumgartner said. “You cut it out and tape it on the back—instant provenance.”