A work by Kazimir Malevich
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Malevich Descendants Regain Canvasses
It was announced yesterday at a press conference at the new building of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam that city authorities would return five works by Kazimir Malevich that the museum had held since 1958 to descendants of the artist. The decision comes after an out-of-court agreement was reached with the artist's relatives, ending a case that began in 2004. A similar case in New York ended with the Museum of Modern Art giving Malevich's descendants six works from its collection in 2000.
The artist's descendants demanded from the Stedelijk Musuem, as they had from MoMA, all the artist's works in the museum's collection and monetary compensation for their illegal possession for 50 years. The works from both museums are from among about 70 of the artist's works that he left Berlin in 1927, when he returned to Leningrad under unclear circumstances. He left the works in the keeping of friends, planning to return to Berlin. He died in the USSR in 1935 without leaving it again, however.
In 1991, German art historian Clemens Toussaint rounded up Malevich descendents from ten countries in order for them to file a collective suit. The Dutch museum obtained its Malevich works in 1958 for 120,000 guilders. In 2000, another Malevich work from the same series, Suprematist Composition, was sold by Phillips for $15.5 million. When asked by Kommersant what the relatives plan to do with the canvasses they recover, Malevich's great grandson Evgeny Bykov said that that decision would be made jointly by all 37 of the artist's descendants.
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of Apr. 25, 2008
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