Art Loss Register

According to Interpol, art theft is the fourth largest transnational criminal activity after drugs, money laundering, and illegal arms trading. One of the tools that assists law enforcement agencies in recovery, theft deterrence, and reduction of traffic in stolen art is the Art Loss Register (ALR). The ALR is the largest private computerized database of stolen and missing objects of art from around the world.

Founded in 1990 by Julian Radcliffe, a former British counterintelligence and private security specialist, the ALR has offices in London, New York, [Page 546]Cologne (Germany), and St. Petersburg (Russia). The company is financed by the insurance industry, art trade associations, and leading auction houses. The ALR's core information comes from data acquired from the International Foundation for Art Research that began to keep track of stolen art in the mid-1970s. When the electronic registry was open for consultation for both the public and law enforcement in 1991, it included about 25,000 items. In 10 years, the number of items multiplied by five. The description and, if possible, images of 1,000–1,200 new items are added to the ALR each month. The spectrum of stolen objects covers everything from paintings, antiques, and jewelry to garden sculpture, classic cars, and toys.

The company employs 20 art historians who are experts in fine art, speak many foreign languages (English, French, German, Czech, Italian, Hebrew, Hungarian, Spanish), and have experience in advising owners, sellers, insurers, lawyers, and law enforcement agencies on questionable deals concerning art. As of 2001, the ALR was responsible for the recovery of more than $100 million in stolen art.

The fee for a search in the ALR is $20, although it is waived for law enforcement agencies. If the work is recovered, the register receives a contingency fee of 15% of the value of the work, up to $75,000, and 10% of the value in excess of $75,000.

The major objective of the ALR is to discourage art theft by making stolen art harder to sell. In 2000, a group of paintings stolen from the Museum of Fine Arts in San Francisco in the early 1980s was left on the doorstep of an auction house in New York. The specialists explained the fact that the listing on the ALR made these paintings quickly traceable and impossible to sell into a legitimate market.

Museums, private art dealers, and auction and insurance companies check the ALR to verify the legitimacy, or good title, for the works and objects of art they try to acquire or sell. It has become a standard for such international art fairs as the European Fine Art Fair in Maastricht (the Netherlands) or London's Grosvenor House fair to screen every lot for provenance against the ALR. Annually, the employees of the ALR check nearly 400,000 auction catalog lots prior to sale. As a result, fewer stolen works are showing up in auction catalogs, and previously stolen artworks are more likely to be returned.

The ALR circulates data about stolen and missing items in the leading international fine art publications as well as through an electronic newsletter addressed to law enforcement agencies, the art trade, and collectors. When a stolen item surfaces on the market, the ALR puts an advertisement in London's Daily Telegraph. The ALR's Web site lists statistics of thefts that can be sorted by the type of objects most stolen, types of theft locations, categories of theft victims, country and value of recovery, and so on. Data and images of the most famous art thefts, such as the only known seascape by Rembrandt that disappeared from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990 along with 11 other items, are available to everyone who visits the registry's site. In 2000, high-profile missing items included 260 works by Marc Chagall, 205 by Salvador Dali, 291 by Joan Miró, 152 by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 142 by Rembrandt von Rijn, 135 by Andy Warhol, and 39 by Paul Cézanne.

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