Getty Returns Bronze to Turkey, Man Claims Ownership of Buzzy Klimt Portrait, ‘Britain’s Pompeii’ Exhibit to Open, and More: Morning Links for April 26, 2024

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THE HEADLINES

NEW KLIMT CLAIM. A potential heir to the legal successor of Adolf Lieser came forward with a claim they own the Gustav Klimt portrait of Fraulein Lieser, right before it sold at auction for a low estimate of $32 million, according to Der Standard. The potential heir, a Munich-based architect who is not a relative of the Lieser family, learned last week about the sale of the 1917 painting that had gone missing for a century, and lodged his claim the day before it was sold to an anonymous Hong Kong collector, on behalf of the Lieser family that commissioned the painting and its owner at the time. What does this mean for the painting’s fate, which fetched a low price (relative to Klimt’s market) at least in part out of fear something like this might happen? Patti Wong, owner of the Hong Kong–based art advisory that bid for the anonymous buyer said, “We have been assured that the seller and all Lieser heirs are covered [by the contract between the auction house and the consignor],” reports the South China Morning Post.

BRONZE RETURN. The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles announced it is returning a bronze head of a young man to Turkey, more than a decade after the country requested it. The news came following an investigation indicating the illegal 1960s excavation of the head, dated 100 BCE–100 CE, that had been detached from an unidentified life-size figure. “In light of new information recently provided by Matthew Bogdanos and the Antiquities Trafficking Unit of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office … we agreed that the object needed to be returned to Türkiye,” said museum leadership in a press release.

THE DIGEST

In more restitution news, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston is returning to the Gustavianum, Uppsala University Museum an Egyptian sarcophagus more than 3,000 years old that was made for an Egyptian boy. The Boston museum’s researchers discovered that the provenance documentation it had for the object was fake, and that the coffin had gone missing from the Swedish museum. [The Art Newspaper]

Bronze Age findings from “Britain’s Pompeii” go on view at the Peterborough Museum on Saturday, featuring artifacts uncovered in a burnt village at Must Farm quarry in Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire. The village was burned soon after it was built 3,000 years ago, and a trove of artifacts were particularly well preserved, as household goods and other items fell into silt, creating “an amazing time capsule,” according to archaeologists. [BBC]

Contemporary art collector Dani Levinas has died at 75. The Argentine-born businessman was particularly interested in Latin American contemporary artists, and he helped shape cultural life in Washington, as board chairman of the Phillips Collection. [The Washington Post]

Balenciaga’s new Raw Architecture–designed Tokyo flagship boutique opens Saturday with a temporary exhibition of 13 rare couture dresses by founder Cristóbal Balenciaga, titled “Dresses Beyond Time.” The 6,700-square-foot store will also sell limited, handcrafted ceramic tea bowls and vases realized by the Japanese art gallery Ginza Kuroda Touen. [WWD]

Air Canada has apologized after its staff tried to stow away the headdress of the Assembly of First Nations’ National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak, as a flight was about to depart. Nepinak said on social media she was forced to hand over her headdress, a “sacred” item that she had with her in the plane cabin, so that it would be placed in cargo due to an apparent lack of space. The plane’s pilot eventually returned it to her. [The Globe and Mail]

THE KICKER

TAPESTRY TALES. Eight years ago, Mia Hansson made the bold decision to embroider a copy of the 230-foot-long, 20-inch-tall Bayeux Tapestry made in the 11th century, which portrays events leading to the Norman conquest of England in 1066. In a piece for the Guardian, Hansson reflects on her labor of love and the art of embroidery her grandmother taught her, now that she’s about 145 feet into the mammoth project. As she embroiders, Hansson says she thinks about the group of women she believes probably made the original, which she has studied down to the finest detail, including the small mistakes few others are likely to have noticed. “Lots of the scenes in the tapestry’s border show people missing various items of clothing. Maybe they were trying to amuse each other, or see what they could get away with,” she wonders. Hansson is careful to include all these “errors” in her replica, which she had hoped to complete within a decade, though that is proving unrealistic. “I am desperate to finish,” she says, “but at the same time I don’t want it to end. It’s bittersweet, like getting to the end of a favorite book – I want to have that joy ahead of me.”