–K

@MFG, I have never met Petropoulos and know nothing of him except what I’ve recently read.

@meg, I *do* apologize! Circumspect Meg knew. I was looking for the widespread, general awareness that the story deserves.

True and good journalism like Elise Viebeck’s reporting is not based on biased and a thorn in the side type journalism.
This writer, although some of the questions are still unanswered and perhaps worth knowing answers to, goes about it with a vengenance – which is not good.

More interesting, more reader worthy would be to delve deeper, to find new points, new facts and there are quite some interesting ones.

It is not true that Viebeck was never honored. Her brave reporting — which has never been refuted by Petropoulos or the Art Loss Register — won the $10,000 Breindel Prize, a prestigious college journalism award which also includes media internships. Viebeck’s photograph even appeared in the New York Post with a short article. Sadly, it is true that CMC and its PR team assiduously avoided Viebeck’s Breindel honor, even though a (male) CMC recipient one year before her earned lavish praise in CMC publications.

The world is not fair, but you knew that.

The 1903 Pissarro, restituted to the Fischer family after decades in Bruno Lohse’s secret safe, was rechristened “Quai Malaquais et l’Institut” for the purpose of its recent sale at Christie’s. The painting’s new title may have been a subtle nod to the institutional aspect of the scandal that surrounds it. Although the first auction at Christie’s, London last May was halted by a last-minute inheritance dispute, after resolution, the painting sold for $2.1 million (and some change) at Christie’s, New York on Nov. 3rd, 2009.

There’s a rumor that Peter Griebert — recipient of Petropoulos’ email — made a modest donation to CMC’s Holocaust Institute a few years ago, and that Griebert even visited the campus and met President Gann at a special college reception. CMC quietly returned Griebert’s donation at the end of the 2007-2008 academic year, but to date has taken no further action related to the scandal. Griebert’s father knew Bruno Lohse very well since their student days together, and some say he fenced hundreds of paintings for Lohse after the war. Did his son continued the practice? And did Jonathan Petropoulos really not know that the Gestapo-looted Pissarro he photographed in a Zurich bank in January 2007 was connected to Lohse? And what about the long list of paintings which left Lohse’s safe in recent years? It’s all part of an ongoing investigation in Europe, they say, and we may wait years before we hear more. If we hear any more at all.