Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh has stated his fears that more art is missing from the Boston Public Library collection following the disappearance of two prints valued at $600,000.  “I think the lack of security with these two prints and (more) … really, really concerns me greatly that there’s other things missing,” Walsh said in an appearance on Boston Herald Radio. (more…)

Writer Louis Menand is in this week’s issue of The New Yorker, reviewing the recent restoration of Mark Rothko’s Harvard Murals using a specially designed lighting system, and the small crowd that gathers each day to watch as the murals’ lights are turned off.  “You can still see the bones of the murals, the formal architecture—Rothko’s floating blocks, made to resemble portals in these pieces—but the glow is gone,” he writes.  “As one observer put it, when the lights go off, comedy turns into tragedy.” (more…)

An article in The Atlantic this past week acknowledges the 25th anniversary of the notorious Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft in Boston, and examines the public fascination with art heists, examining this phenomenon against the difficulty in unloading stolen works of such cultural prestige.  “The true art isn’t the stealing, it’s the selling,” says Robert Wittman, founder of the FBI’s Art Crimes division. (more…)

Rothschild heiress Bettina Burr and her family, holders of a sizable collection of artworks once looted by the Nazi’s during WWII,  have donated a sizable portion of her works to the MFA Boston.  “I always felt in the back of mind that the thing I would love the most would be if these pieces came here,” says Burr, currently vice president of the museum board of trustees. “I think my mother felt that it would be a homecoming for these pieces.” (more…)

The Atlantic documents a conservation approach pioneered in the 1980’s by Raymond Lafontaine, using color and lighting theory to hide fading and prevent having to tamper with the surface of the work.  “In human color perception you have a light source, a surface, and a viewer, and the three interact,” says Jens Stenger, a conservation scientist who is using the technique to work on six murals by Mark Rothko at Harvard.  “If you can’t change the surface, you can change the light source to change the color.” (more…)

Since 1990, the FBI has pursued the perpetrators of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft of over $500 million in art, including works by Rembrandt, Manet, Degas and Vermeer.  Twenty three years later, the bureau has announced that it knows who committed the thefts, but is witholding the information in hope of getting the works back.   The theft holds the disctinction of the largest property theft in U.S. history. (more…)