DUTCH ARTIST’S WORKS FOUND IN BRITISH WAREHOUSE
Karel Appel, who died in 2006, with his 1984 painting Orage Annociateur. Over 400 artworks, stolen in 2002, have been found in a British warehouse. Photograph: Nico Delaive/AP
More than 400 works of art by a celebrated 20th-century Dutch artist have been found in a British warehouse a decade after they disappeared, leaving the artist distraught.
Karel Appel, a leading expressionist, died at 85 in 2006. He never recovered from the loss of a lifetime’s worth of drawings, sketches, notebooks and other works believed to be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.
The warehouse was bought by a UK storage and logistics company before Christmas and, in clearing out the contents, staff came across eight boxes filled with artworks. There was no documentation and it was not until a warehouse employee researched the name Karel Appel, whose notes and signatures appear on most of the works, that the company realised the boxes were worth more than mere salvage.
Unaware of their real significance, but intrigued, a manager took some 30 drawings to Bonhams, the auctioneers, to be valued. To their astonishment, they were told that these were on the Art Loss Register’s (ALR) computerised database of “most wanted” stolen art.
Christopher Marinello, ALR’s lawyer and chief negotiator, said: “After five weeks of intense negotiation with the logistics company … a settlement was finally reached with the company agreeing to release their claim to the artwork.”_Guardian
