Art Theft

We've all heard about priceless paintings being stolen from major museums. You may not know that there is a register for lost or stolen art and that museums have their own network to help retrieve missing art. If interested, see http://www.museum-security.org
One use for this register is to record the more than 20,000 art objects stolen by the Nazis during WWII from the Jews in Belgium and France. Over half of the objects have not been returned to their original owners. There is a new listing--searching by item, artist, owner, and whether the art has been returned to families who owned them pre-WWII. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is providing technical support to the project of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.

Opinions of value

Museum Shop, Ltd. will give you an opinion as to the value of your art, assuming it has a legible signature. We use proprietary web sites to look up information about the artist and on recent sales of his work. We have contacts at the world's major auction houses who can refer us to the leading authority on an artist, who can authenticate an art piece, most often for a fee of several hundred dollars or more. Without this authentication, the art will not be considered genuine and would be difficult to sell.
Our process and information sources are the same that a Certified Apraiser uses. Appraisers, however, often charge between $150-200 an hour. Museum Shop, Ltd. charges $100 an hour for the first hour and $80 for each hour thereafter.