News

Good morning.

• Birmingham, Michigan art dealer Wendy Halsted Beard was sentenced to over five years in prison for elaborate fraud scheme.

• A street painting by Harald Naegeli was almost entirely washed off by city cleaners in Cologne in a 'tragic' mistake.

• A man has fallen and died from a balcony on Glasgow's Gallery of Modern Art.

As always, please visit ARTnews.com for the latest news. 

TOO CLOSE A SHAVE WITH THE LAW . Art dealer Wendy Halsted Beard , 59, was sentenced last week to over five years in federal prison and ordered to pay over $2 million in restitution for swindling collectors out of some $3.5 million worth of rare photographs, the US Department of Justice announced in a press release. Court documents showed Beard, who inherited her father’s gallery, created email addresses for fake employees and invented medical emergencies including comas to avoid clients. In their investigation, the FBI recovered some 700 photos, including prints by the likes of Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, and Robert Capa . Prosecutors accused Beard of mail and wire fraud, pocketing cash from consigned artworks, and failing to return unsold ones. She pleaded guilty to wire fraud and admitted to inventing lies to avoid returning artworks to clients, many of whom were elderly. Meanwhile, some seized works will be returned to their owners, while others are set to be auctioned by the government. “Beard’s ongoing deception was of a level that we rarely see, even in fraud cases,” US Attorney Dawn Ison said in a statement.

ART WASHING. In Cologne, a monument-classified street artwork by Harald Naegeli,aka “The Sprayer of Zurich,” was accidentally almost washed away by city cleaners, according to report-K . The well-known spray-painted artwork depicting a skeleton with outstretched limbs, called Dance of Death has loomed over the western wall of the Sainte-Cecile church and museum in central Cologne since 1980. But the memo about the artwork’s monument status did not make it to the waste management company that was called in to remove another, new piece of graffiti (not Naegeli’s work). The city has called the whole incident a “tragic oversight.”

The Digest

A 55-year-old man died after falling from a high balcony in Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art on Wednesday. The museum closed for the day and reopened on September 12. The police stated they did not believe “any suspicious circumstances” had caused the fall. [The Herald]

London’s Barbican Centre hosted a Palestinian literary event on September 14, which had been canceled earlier this year by another venue, the arts center Home, in Manchester, amid a censorship scandal. Following pushback, Home reinstated the program by Voices of Resilience, including readings from the diaries of Palestinian authors. The Barbican was also the subject of a similar censorship debacle that saw artists remove their works from a temporary exhibition at the center in protest, following its decision to pull a talk by Pankaj Mishra titled, “The Shoah after Gaza.” [The Art Newspaper]

A teacher of dentistry has stepped down as interim president of the MAXXI contemporary art museum in Rome, following criticism she was unqualified. Raffaella Docimo was appointed to lead the museum a week ago after its former president, Alessandro Giuli, was roped into becoming Italy’s culture minister, following the dramatic resignation of his predecessor, Giuliano Sangiuliano. Docimo has since been replaced by Emanuela Bruni, an art historian and journalist. [La Repubblica]

Egyptian archaeological expert and former Egyptian minister of antiquities, Zahi Hawass, has written a petition demanding the return to Egypt of the 3400-year-old iconic bust of Nefertiti from Germany’s Neues Museum. The bust is widely considered “Berlin’s Mona Lisa.” [Le Figaro]

Overlooked Bay Area Abstract Expressionist Bernice Bing is featured in her first solo New York exhibit, at Berry Campbell gallery until Oct. 12. Works on view are from 1961 until her death in 1996 and the show comes as her market has heated up in recent years, following relative obscurity during her lifetime, beyond a cult following concentrated in the West Coast. [The Art Newspaper]

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg has announced the return of 14 antiquities to Turkey, valued at over $8.3 million. The artifacts were recovered in an ongoing investigation into the looting and trafficking of ancient artworks from the city of Bubon. [Press release]

The St. Moritz Art Film Festival in Switzerland announced the three winners of its 2024 edition over the weekend: Aura Satz, Eduardo Williams, and Young-jun Tak. [Press release]

The Kicker

ITALIAN SOFT POWER. The Uffizi’s new director, Simone Verde, has outlined his far-reaching plans for the Florentine museum to become a leading “global icon” for Italy’s national museums. “Our ambition is to become the flagship of Italian museums worldwide,” he told Monopol. Influenced by his time working on the Louvre Abu Dhabiproject, he said that experience was a lesson in how “museums are very strategic institutions,” while noting the Abu Dhabi example, “is entirely built on the principles of global history.” To that end, he hopes to open a research center for museum studies at the Uffizi, and “to familiarize the public with the diverse history of our institution,” including its “many identities.”

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