The Manhattan District Attorney’s office has returned 36 antiquities to Syria. Among the objects repatriated at a ceremony in New York on 23 September is a stone funerary relief from Palmyra and 14 Roman-era mosaics. Both were brought into the United States by the alleged antiquities trafficker Georges Lotfi, who is wanted by Interpol and authorities in New York. Altogether the returned items are valued at some $5m. Mohamad Naser Kanatri, chargé d’affaires of the Syrian embassy in Washington, D.C., said that ‘a part of Syria’s history is finally returning home’. On the same day, the D.A.’s office seized 13 objects from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, bringing the total number of artefacts it has taken from the museum since 2017 to 402.
Staff at the Victoria and Albert Museum have gone on strike. On 25 September, workers at the South Kensington site who are represented by Prospect and the Public and Commercial Services union (PCS) walked out over concerns including working conditions and pay, forcing many of the museum’s galleries to close. Mike Clancy, general secretary of Prospect, told the BBC that members had been left with ‘no choice’ as negotiations – ongoing since February – stalled, adding that the museum’s directors had shown a ‘lack of respect for the very people who make the museum what it is’. In a statement, the museum said that it ‘deeply regret[s] that the Trade Unions have voted for strike action’ and that it ‘remain[s] available for negotiations’. The two-day strike follows industrial action earlier this month at other V&A sites, with staff at the V&A East Museum, V&A East Storehouse and Young V&A walking out on 4 and 5 September.
The Mauritshuis in The Hague will return a painting by Jan van Goyen to the heirs of the Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker, the Art Newspaper reports. New research revealed that Fishermen by the Lakeshore (1651), which the museum purchased in 1967, was one of the works forcibly acquired by Hermann Göring after Goudstikker fled Germany in 1940. Judith Niessen, head of collections and research at the Mauritshuis, said the museum was ‘sad [to] say goodbye’ to the work but added that ‘it doesn’t belong to us’. The painting will be returned to Marei von Saher, the widow of Goudstikker’s son Eduard. In other restitution news, the Art Institute of Chicago has agreed to return the Nazi-looted painting Woman with a Fan (1913) by Jean Metzinger to the heirs of Emanuel Lewenstein, a Jewish collector who died in 1930 and whose children fled the Netherlands shortly before Nazi occupation, and the Bavarian State Paintings Collection in Munich has returned a 19th-century painting to Paul Laporte, the great-grandson of Jewish collector Sofie Heilbronner. Laporte has been pursuing the return of Albert Lang’s Music (Arcadian Scene) (1892) – believed to be one of the paintings seized by the Nazis after Heilbronner fled Germany in 1938 – for eight years. Its return, Laporte said, ‘corrects a longstanding historical wrong’.
The British Library has appointed Paul Bate as its new chief executive. Bate, who began his career as a particle physicist, joins the Library from the UK Space Agency, where he has been CEO since 2021. Before that, he held leadership roles in healthcare and government, working as the prime minister’s senior policy adviser for health and adult care from 2011–13. Carol Black, chair of the Library’s board, said that Bate’s ‘experience leading complex, research-intensive organisations’ will be ‘invaluable’. In other appointments, Jonathan Abbott has been named director and chief executive of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Abbott worked for 15 years as president and CEO of GBH, one of America’s largest public media broadcasters. In a statement announcing his appointment, Carolyn Clark Powers, chair of the museum’s board of trustees, called Abbott ‘a builder of mission-driven institutions and a deeply collaborative leader’.
