Mary Brogan Museum of Art and Science: obligé de conserver un tableau!

Un musée de la Floride est dans l'obligation de continuer à héberger un tableau de Girolamo Romano (1538) en attendant qu'on retrouve le véritable propriétaire de l'oeuvre. Il est probable que le tableau ait été volé pendant la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale... Le Brogan museum accueille avec joie cette attention médiatique puisqu'on cherche actuellement du financement!

"The museum was in the middle of a do-or-die campaign to raise $500,000 in July when Pamela Marsh, the United States attorney for the Northern District of Florida, ordered the Brogan to hold onto a 16th-century painting on loan from an Italian gallery because it might have been stolen from a Jewish family during World War II.

Recognizing a chance to raise its profile and attract donors, the Florida museum trumpeted the news on its Web site with the headline “The Brogan Museum at the Center of International Intrigue.”

The rest of the works from a 50-piece exhibition of Baroque painting in Lombardy went back in September to the museum that lent them, the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, while the work in dispute, Girolamo Romano’s “Christ Carrying the Cross Dragged by a Rogue,” from 1538, remains on the Brogan’s third floor until its ownership is settled.

“The Barbie’s Dream World for me would have been that the case unfolded while I had the whole exhibition on the third floor,” said Chucha Barber, the Brogan’s chief executive. Still, she said she hoped the flush of publicity might attract desperately needed donors.

“I only have to strike a chord in one person,” she said.

Italian officials in Rome are now negotiating with the family of Giuseppe Gentili, which says the collaborationist Vichy government in France seized the painting and sold it at auction in 1941. The Baroque exhibition, which closed last month, was the first time the Milan gallery, which is run by the Italian government, had agreed to lend an entire collection to an American institution."


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/12/arts/design/for-florida-museum-dispute-over-romano-painting-is-a-boon.html?_r=1