Art Law, Briefly

A couple of items from The New York Times today:

• "A 26-pound gold bar valued at $270,000 has been stolen from an installation by the American artist Gary Hill at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, Reuters reported. ... The ingot, hefted from a basin filled with black oil, was part of a work featuring a video projection of a giant eagle locked inside a pylon.”
• "After winning the return of more than 200 artworks looted by Nazis, the American heir of a Jewish art collector is seeking an injunction against her lawyer, Agence France-Presse reported. In The Hague on Wednesday the heir, Marei von Saher, is to seek an injunction to prevent the lawyer, Roelof van Holthe tot Echten, from seizing the paintings in lieu of the $16 million he says he is owed in fees. Mrs. von Saher has offered him $1.7 million. She is the heir of Jacques Goudstikker, a leading Amsterdam collector before World War II whose works were taken by the Nazis and later retrieved in part by the Netherlands, which agreed last year after eight years of legal wrangling to return 202 of the paintings. They had been hanging in Dutch museums since the 1950s." An earlier story on the Goudstikker matter by Alan Riding of the Times is here.