Results for “family”
The Van Gogh Museum Robbery
Thieves used a ladder to enter the Van Gogh Museum in 2002 and made off with two paintings. They resurfaced fourteen years later in the hands of a Naples crime family.
Ulay: 'There Is a Criminal Touch to Art'
In 1976 the artist Ulay walked into a Berlin museum, took Carl Spitzweg's 'The Poor Poet' — reputedly Hitler's favourite painting — and hung it in the home of a Turkish immigrant family, then phoned the museum to confess. The act was the artwork.
The Knoedler Gallery Forgery Scandal
For over 15 years, the venerable Knoedler gallery sold some 40 forged Abstract Expressionist paintings — fake Rothkos, Pollocks, and de Koonings painted in a Queens garage — for around $80 million, before the fraud collapsed the 165-year-old institution.
The Greenhalgh 'Garden Shed' Forgeries
From a garden shed behind a Bolton council house, Shaun Greenhalgh and his elderly parents forged artworks spanning 5,000 years — most famously the 'Amarna Princess', which Bolton Museum bought for £440,000 as a 3,300-year-old Egyptian masterpiece.
The Stephen Shih Rodin Theft
On Thanksgiving Day 1988, Stephen Shih walked into Philadelphia's Rodin Museum with a handgun, handcuffed three guards, fired a warning shot, and strolled out with Rodin's 'Mask of the Man with the Broken Nose'. It was recovered four months later near a basement furnace.
David Wojnarowicz
David Wojnarowicz (1954–1992) was an American artist, writer, filmmaker, photographer, and AIDS activist whose work became one of the most powerful artistic indictments of censorship, government neglect, and social injustice in the late twentieth century. Raised amid poverty and abuse before spending time homeless and hustling on the streets of New York, Wojnarowicz transformed his experiences on society's margins into a fiercely original body of work that blended painting, photography, collage, film, performance, and autobiographical writing. A central figure of New York's East Village art scene in the 1980s, he believed art should confront power rather than comfort it. For followers of Crimes of Art, Wojnarowicz occupies a unique place where art, censorship, and the law collide. His work challenged institutions ranging from the National Endowment for the Arts to conservative political organizations during the height of America's culture wars. In 1990, he successfully sued the American Family Association after it distributed altered excerpts of his work to portray him as obscene, winning a landmark case that affirmed artists could fight back against the deliberate misrepresentation of their work. His art was inseparable from activism. Following his HIV diagnosis in 1988 and the death of his mentor and partner, photographer Peter Hujar, Wojnarowicz produced emotionally charged works condemning the U.S. government's indifference to the AIDS epidemic. Images of burning maps, falling buffalo, houses in flames, stitched mouths, and fragmented bodies became symbols of a society abandoning its most vulnerable citizens. His memoir 'Close to the Knives' remains one of the defining literary accounts of the AIDS crisis and artistic resistance. Even after his death from AIDS-related illness in 1992 at the age of thirty-seven, controversy continued to follow his work. In 2010, the Smithsonian Institution removed his short film 'A Fire in My Belly' from an exhibition after political pressure from conservative groups over a brief scene depicting ants crawling across a crucifix. The incident reignited a national debate over artistic freedom, censorship, religion, and public funding for the arts, cementing Wojnarowicz's legacy as an artist whose work continued to challenge authority long after his death. Today, David Wojnarowicz is recognized as one of the most influential American artists of his generation. His work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and major institutions worldwide. More than three decades after his death, his uncompromising vision continues to inspire artists, activists, and anyone interested in the uneasy relationship between creativity, power, and the law.
Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen)
A pioneering German performance artist, best known for his long collaboration and relationship with Marina Abramović. Before that partnership, Ulay staged one of the most audacious works in the history of art crime: in 1976 he walked into a Berlin museum, stole a beloved painting, and rehung it in the home of a working-class immigrant family as a live artwork about ownership, value, and belonging.
Shaun Greenhalgh
British forger at the centre of the 'Garden Shed' or Greenhalgh family fraud, who from a council house in Bolton produced fakes spanning 5,000 years — most famously the 'Amarna Princess' bought by Bolton Museum. Working with his elderly parents George and Olive, who handled sales and provenance, he was jailed in 2007.
View of the Sea at Scheveningen
An early Van Gogh seascape stolen from the Van Gogh Museum in 2002 and recovered from a Naples crime family in 2016.
Father Daughter Forger Family's 2mil hobby
From Condos to Condos
"Kansas City Reach Around" now costs $132,000!
During a wedding reception, a five-year-old boy wrapped his arms around Bill Lyons' six-foot glass sculpture 'Aphrodite di Kansas City'. Seconds later it tipped forward and shattered beyond repair.