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van Gogh is Back

frickin thieves… stealin shit… IT AINT RIGHT…

 

It seems Italy’s police force has done something good for the world!

 

Police investigating suspected Italian mobsters for cocaine trafficking discovered two Van Gogh paintings hidden in a farmhouse near Naples, masterpieces that had vanished in 2002 during a nighttime heist at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum, authorities said Friday.
The two paintings were “considered among the artworks most searched for in the world, on the FBI’s list of the Top 10 art crimes,” Interior Minister Angelino Alfano said.

One of the paintings, the 1882 “Seascape at Scheveningen,” is one of Vincent Van Gogh’s first major works. It depicts a boat setting off into a stormy sea, and the thick paint trapped grains of sand that blew up from the Dutch beach as Van Gogh worked on it over two days.
The other is a 1884-85 work, “Congregation leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen,” which depicts a church in the southern Netherlands where the artist’s father was the pastor. Experts believe it was done for Van Gogh’s mother.

Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-30/urgent-2-van-gogh-paintings-recovered-by-italian-anti-mafia-police

Yay!

Now let’s all hope that the van Gogh paintings make it out of the investigation / court process without any more damage…

And let’s hope the museum that ends up with van Gogh’s paintings will have a quick turnaround on their clean up process… so that people can actually see them instead of the paintings just being relegated to the archive in the basement of the museum.

That’s a lot of hoping… but that’s all we have.

I imagine it’ll be years before the paintings are physically returned to the museum…

 

Facts facts and more facts…

  • See the painting Congregation leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen here: https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/collection/s0003V1962
  • See the painting Seascape at Scheveningen here: https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/collection/s0416M1990
  • Scheveningen is a beach district in The Hague, Holland.
  • Scheveningen also serves as the name of some of Old Holland‘s finest and most expensive paint colors. Colors like Scheveningen Rose Deep retail for $200+ per 225ml tube.
  • Most large museums display less than 20% of the artwork they have to the public. The Louvre shows about 8% and the Guggenheim museum about 3%. Space and conservation concerns are generally the reasons why the public doesn’t get to see a good deal of the artwork held by museums.