Aby Rosen reaches $7m tax settlement
3 May
The New York attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, announced a $7m tax settlement with real estate developer and art collector, Aby Rosen. Schneiderman alleged that Rosen failed to pay taxes on 200 works of art worth $80m, which he commissioned or bought between 2002 and 2015. The collector, whose holdings have included pieces by Basquiat, Hirst and Warhol, had claimed the art was exempt from tax because it was intended for resale. “The recent settlement… relates to an uncertainty as to whether some of Mr Rosen’s transactions were done as a private collector or as a dealer,” said a spokesman for Rosen.
Paintings stolen from Verona museum retrieved
12 May
Seventeen paintings stolen from the Museo di Castelvecchio in Verona last year were retrieved by Ukrainian police on an island near the Moldovan border. The trove, discovered in a forest buried beneath a pile of leaves, includes works by Tintoretto, Mantegna and Rubens and is estimated to be worth between €10m and €15m. In March, Italian police arrested the museum’s security guard, his Moldovan wife and 11 other suspects, ten of them Moldovan.
Brazil’s artists protest against ministry merger
16 May
Brazil’s interim president Michel Temer performed a quick U-turn after protests by Brazil’s artists, actors and musicians at the planned merger of the Ministry of Culture with the Ministry of Education. The cost-cutting measure was announced last month after the Senate suspended President Dilma Rousseff and Temer took temporary charge during the ongoing constitutional crisis.
Divers recover artefacts from Caesarea shipwreck
16 May
The Israel Antiquities Authority announced that two divers had discovered cargo from an ancient ship that crashed 1,600 years ago off the port of Caesarea. The wreckage includes well-preserved bronze lamps, fragments of statues, a figurine of the moon goddess Luna, animal objects and thousands of coins with images of the emperors Constantine and Licinius.
Russian artist faces charges for Lubyanka fire
19 May
The Russian performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky faces charges for setting fire to a prison door at the Federal Security Service in Lubyanka Square in Moscow. The prison was used for interrogation and torture during Stalin’s reign in the 1930s. The prosecutor claims that the building is a cultural heritage site because “leading figures of science and culture were imprisoned here”. If convicted, the artist faces up to six years in prison.
