Clemens Toussaint profile

From the Sunday Times, an article on the man behind the Goudstikker collection recovery effort:

This £22m old master is stolen property. So why is it on display in an American museum? And why won’t they give it back to its rightful owner? It is one of thousands of priceless works of art that were looted by the Nazis and ended up scattered across the world in respectable institutions. Clemens Toussaint has vowed to track them down and get them back. And they call him a merciless plunderer.

A business I wish I had gotten into, and not just for the money.

Toussaint stumbled on his career by chance. . .

. . . research took him to the archives of one German museum, where he found a boxful of appeals from Jewish families asking about works of art that used to belong to them, had been looted by the Nazis and were now hanging in its galleries. They had all fallen on deaf ears. . .

Toussaint learnt that a victorious America had returned a mere fraction of the looted art it had seized from the Nazis, and that had gone to state authorities in Germany, Austria, France and the Netherlands. No effort had been made to find the rightful owners.

And when rightful owners made an unwelcome appearance, they were uniformly rebuffed. Now it's payback time.

ADDENDUM: Much more detail and commentary over at Barista.

1918 influenza findings

From the BBC:

An experiment to reconstruct the deadly 1918 flu virus has given a new insight into how the infection took hold.

Scientists discovered a severe immune system reaction was triggered when mice were infected with the recreated virus.

The US team believes the extreme immune response could have provoked the body to begin killing its own cells, making the flu even deadlier.

This is in line with what I recall reading years ago about the course of the epidemic (sorry, no references, so quote at your own risk), in that mortality was apparently higher among those who had had the previous wave of flu -- before it mutated into its infamously deadly form. One would normally expect previous exposure to have offered a degree of protection, but in this case, priming the immune system would have hurt, not helped.

ADDENDUM: Further commentary and links at FuturePundit.

. . . and a scoop of whale, please

More bizarre Japanese ice cream flavors profiled here; highlights include soy sauce, squid gut, and garlic mint. Another group includes such standouts as raw horseflesh, whale, and oyster.

Previous rundown on odd ice creams here.

"Tokyo Rose dies"

. . . at least that's what some of the headlines rather misleadingly read. For a more measured obituary of Iva Toguri D’Aquino, see today's New York Times:

Iva Toguri D’Aquino, the Japanese-American convicted of treason in 1949 for broadcasting propaganda from Japan to United States servicemen in World War II as the seductive but sinister Tokyo Rose, died Tuesday in Chicago. Mrs. D’Aquino, who served more than six years in prison but steadfastly denied disloyalty and received a presidential pardon in 1977, was 90. . .

Tokyo Rose was a mythical figure. The persona, its origin murky, had been bestowed by American servicemen collectively on a dozen or so women who, seductive but sinister, broadcast for Radio Tokyo, telling soldiers, sailors and marines in the Pacific that their cause was lost and that their sweethearts back home were betraying them. . .

But the identity of Tokyo Rose became attached to Mrs. D’Aquino, a native of Southern California and the only woman broadcasting for Radio Tokyo known to be an American citizen.

For a much stronger defense of D'Aquino, see the Times of London:

SHE was, they said, the Lord Haw-Haw of the Pacific. Born in Los Angeles of Japanese parents, she renounced America and spent the war years taunting American servicemen on the radio, assuring them that their cause was lost and that their country’s defeat was inevitable.

She became the most notorious traitor produced by America during the Second World War. In the eyes of the world she was the despicable “Tokyo Rose”.

When she was finally tracked down in occupied Japan and brought home to the US to stand trial, the furore was immense. The tabloids and the airwaves were filled with hatred for a young woman who had committed the worst of crimes — that of being publicly and flagrantly anti-American in time of war. . .

That was the legend. The truth, when it emerged, was very different. Indeed, it was so different that if a new trial were to be held today, those in the dock would mostly be journalists, agents and officials of the US Government.

For it was a combination of these three that whipped up the story of Tokyo Rose and then pinned the blame on Iva Toguri. Her story and the one concocted by them were separated by more than culture and language and the need, in the immediate postwar period, for traitors to be seen to pay for their crimes. They were separated by politics and cynicism and, most of all, by the intense desire of an unprincipled group of American reporters to secure the scoop of a lifetime.

Theatre Museum to close

London's Theatre Museum is to close in January after 20 years because of a lack of funds. . .

Its owners, the Victoria and Albert Museum, had been trying to formulate a rescue plan with the Royal Opera House. . .

The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) said it would re-house the theatrical collection in a new gallery on its main site.

It sounds as if the collection is not in danger of being sold off, though much of it may end up spending most of its time buried in deep storage. From the BBC.

V & A and Bill Gates: no show for the Codex Leicester

Organisers of the V&A's Leonardo da Vinci exhibition were keen to include a series of pages from the Codex Leicester, a collection of [Leonardo] Da Vinci's notes and drawings. However, Gates's representatives insisted on a series of restrictions governing how, when, and under what conditions the pages could be shown.

"The terms for the showing of [the codex] included having people being searched going in, having to leave all their metallic objects behind and so on," the exhibition's curator, Martin Kemp, told the Guardian."The security people said that if you had these two airport-style walkthroughs, the corridors would be jammed up."

Professor Kemp attempted to work around the restrictions, but eventually balked at a set of conditions that would have forced the museum to show the Codex Leicester's pages either for shorter periods or at lower lighting levels than the rest of its collection.

Full story here.

Major museum theft in India

India has alerted Interpol after 18 priceless antique Buddha statues were stolen from a Bihar museum, police say.

Police say robbers broke in through a first-floor window and stole the 9th and 10th century works at the weekend. . .

The museum in the Bihar state capital, Patna, is next to a police station and correspondents say the incident is a major embarrassment for police.

From the BBC.

Lawrence of Arabia relics at auction

The compass which helped to create the legend of Lawrence of Arabia, steering him across the desert on a camel during the Arab revolt against the Turks in 1916-18, was sold yesterday for £264,000, together with a cheap watch and an inscribed cigarette case.

The startling price at the Christie's auction - paid by an anonymous telephone bidder, vastly over a top pre-sale estimate of £16,000 - was testament to the world's enduring fascination with a slight, awkward man, who died in a motorcycle crash in 1935, aged 46.

Read the rest here.

Mona Incinta?

Not a new proposal, but this time based upon more than idle supposition:

The famous smile on Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa could be because she is pregnant or had just had a baby, research suggests.

Canadian scientists used laser and infrared scans to produce a 3D image of the painting.

This allowed details beneath layers of paint to be seen - including a gauzy dress then associated with pregnant or new mothers.

It also showed the 500-year-old picture was in good condition.

The scans, using a resolution 10 times finer than a human hair, did reveal some warping to the wooden back of the painting.

The warpage one doesn't need a scan to detect, however. From the BBC.