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300-Year-Old Painting Stolen by US Soldier During WWII Returned to German Museum 

This photo shows the 18th century painting titled "Landscape of Italian Character" by Vienna-born artist Johann Franz Nepomuk Lauterer, Thursday, Oct. 19, 2023 in Chicago. (AP)
This photo shows the 18th century painting titled "Landscape of Italian Character" by Vienna-born artist Johann Franz Nepomuk Lauterer, Thursday, Oct. 19, 2023 in Chicago. (AP)
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300-Year-Old Painting Stolen by US Soldier During WWII Returned to German Museum 

This photo shows the 18th century painting titled "Landscape of Italian Character" by Vienna-born artist Johann Franz Nepomuk Lauterer, Thursday, Oct. 19, 2023 in Chicago. (AP)
This photo shows the 18th century painting titled "Landscape of Italian Character" by Vienna-born artist Johann Franz Nepomuk Lauterer, Thursday, Oct. 19, 2023 in Chicago. (AP)

After a stopover in the US that lasted the better part of a century, a baroque landscape painting that went missing during World War II was returned to Germany on Thursday.

The FBI handed over the artwork by 18th century Austrian artist Johann Franz Nepomuk Lauterer to a German museum representative in a brief ceremony at the German Consulate in Chicago, where the pastoral piece showing an Italian countryside was on display.

Art Recovery International, a company focused on locating and recovering stolen and looted art, tracked down the elusive painting after a person in Chicago reached out last year claiming to possess a “stolen or looted painting” that their uncle brought back to the US after serving in World War II.

The painting has been missing since 1945 and was first reported stolen from the Bavarian State Painting Collections in Munich, Germany. It was added to the database of the German Lost Art Foundation in 2012, according to a statement from the art recovery company.

“The crux of our work at Art Recovery International is the research and restitution of artworks looted by Nazis and discovered in public or private collections. On occasion, we come across cases, such as this, where allied soldiers may have taken objects home as souvenirs or as trophies of wars," said Christopher Marinello, founder of Art Recovery International.

"Being on the winning side doesn’t make it right,” he added.

The identity of the Chicago resident who had the painting was not shared. The person initially asked Marinello to be paid for the artwork.

“I explained our policy of not paying for stolen artwork and that the request was inappropriate,” Marinello said.

“We also know that someone tried to sell the painting in the Chicago art market in 2011 and disappeared when the museum put forth their claim.”

But with the help of the FBI Art Crime Team, attorneys, and the museum, Marinello negotiated an unconditional surrender of the artwork.

The painting, titled “Landscape of Italian Character,” will now reunite with its counterpart, which shares similar motifs and imagery, according to the museum.

The two paintings together form a panoramic scene featuring shepherds and travelers with their goats, cows, donkeys and sheep at a ford in a river.

The pair will soon be displayed together for the first time since World War II at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, according to Bernd Ebert, the museum's chief curator of Dutch and German baroque paintings.

Retrieving a long-lost painting “is actually a very rare moment for us,” Ebert said. “It’s exciting.”

The Vienna-born artist, Lauterer, lived from 1700 to 1733.

When war broke out in 1939, many Bavarian museum collections were evacuated to safe locations in the region, but the Lauterer painting has been missing since the beginning of the war, suggesting the possibility that it had been looted, according to the museum.

The Bavarian State Painting Collections first started searching for the painting between 1965 and 1973, but no clues about its location emerged until decades later.

Ebert, who flew from Munich to Chicago to retrieve the painting, will carefully bubble-wrap the centuries-old landscape to take it back home, where it will be touched up and restored after an eventful several decades.

Luckily, Ebert said, it should fit in his suitcase.

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Culture

Iran's Vast Collection of Western Art, Much Long Hidden, Re-Emerges Despite High Tensions With US

A woman walks past a portrait of the leader of the American Indian Movement Russell Means, right, by American artist Andy Warhol, as she visits an exhibition titled Eye to Eye which showcases over 120 works by modern world artists as well as Iranian painters at Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, in Tehran, Thursday, Nov. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)
A woman walks past a portrait of the leader of the American Indian Movement Russell Means, right, by American artist Andy Warhol, as she visits an exhibition titled Eye to Eye which showcases over 120 works by modern world artists as well as Iranian painters at Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, in Tehran, Thursday, Nov. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)
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Iran's Vast Collection of Western Art, Much Long Hidden, Re-Emerges Despite High Tensions With US

A woman walks past a portrait of the leader of the American Indian Movement Russell Means, right, by American artist Andy Warhol, as she visits an exhibition titled Eye to Eye which showcases over 120 works by modern world artists as well as Iranian painters at Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, in Tehran, Thursday, Nov. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)
A woman walks past a portrait of the leader of the American Indian Movement Russell Means, right, by American artist Andy Warhol, as she visits an exhibition titled Eye to Eye which showcases over 120 works by modern world artists as well as Iranian painters at Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, in Tehran, Thursday, Nov. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)

As Iran faces increasing tensions with the West and turmoil at home, a new exhibition at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art is displaying Western artwork including pieces not seen by the public in at least a decade.
The unveiling of the exhibition “Eye to Eye” has drawn numerous women, their hair uncovered, to the underground galleries of the museum in Tehran's Laleh Park. Their presence, while unacknowledged by authorities, shows the way life has changed inside Iran just in the last few years even as the country's theocracy presses forward with enriching uranium to near-weapons grade levels and launching attacks on Israel during the ongoing Mideast wars, The Associated Press said.
“The first feeling that came to me, and I told my parents, was that I can’t believe I’m seeing these works, which have always been kept far from our eyes,” said Aida Zarrin, a young woman at the museum.
“If such events are held here and we can see artworks like the rest of the world, it’s enough. They are really precious.”
The government of Iran’s Western-backed shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and his wife, the former Empress Farah Pahlavi, built the museum and acquired the vast collection in the late 1970s, when oil boomed and Western economies stagnated. Upon opening, it showed sensational works by Pablo Picasso, Mark Rothko, Claude Monet, Jackson Pollock and other heavyweights, enhancing Iran’s cultural standing on the world stage.
But just two years later, in 1979, Shiite clerics ousted the shah and packed away the art in the museum’s vault. Some paintings — cubist, surrealist, impressionist and even pop art — sat untouched for decades to avoid offending Islamic values and the appearance of catering to Western sensibilities. Nearly everything is believed still to be there, though an Andy Warhol print of the empress was slashed during the revolution.
Today, the collection is likely worth billions of dollars. Even with Iran now cash-strapped under Western sanctions, officials with the museum have been able to advocate for keeping the collection, though there have been occasional trades in the past for items from Persian history. Those sanctions may increase under the next administration of US President-elect Donald Trump.
As Iranian politics have thawed, re-frozen and thawed again, the collection resurfaces along with those changes.
Among the over 120 works being shown are ones from Picasso, Andy Warhol and Francis Bacon, along with celebrated Iranian artists. One of the Warhols, “Jacqueline Kennedy II,” is a silkscreen double image of the former US first lady in mourning after the 1963 assassination of her husband, President John Kennedy. Another Warhol portrait of Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger also garnered attention from the cellphone photo snappers.
“A lot of these works are important works in the history of art, and that’s why this show distinguishes itself from others,” said Jamal Arabzadeh, the exhibition's curator. ”A lot of people with less exposure to art have discovered the museum for the first time. ... We are seeing a part of the community that are discovering art and the museum and see the potential of this place, and this is something to be proud of.”
The presence of Western art comes as Iran's government has long fought against items like Barbie dolls and depictions of cartoon characters from “The Simpsons.” Such Western influences have been deemed un-Islamic in the past and have been seen as part of a “soft” cultural war against Iran.
With a ticket costing the equivalent of 14 US cents, the exhibition offers a rare government-sanctioned event not involving the country's politics or Shiite religion.
Among the visitors were many women defying the country's mandatory headscarf, or hijab, law. Crackdowns over the hijab have slowed down after Iran's presidential election in July that elected reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian, though individual cases of arrest continue to draw anger.
And for many, the cost of tickets to travel abroad given Iran's collapsing rial currency keep foreign museums out of reach.
“This is very attractive for art enthusiasts because not everyone can go and see museums abroad. It’s extremely exciting to see the works here,” said a woman who only gave her last name, Dolatshahi. “I had no idea I could see works by van Gogh and Picasso here.”