Elysee Palace Art -- by Adam Sage

The tale of what may well be art’s greatest mystery has been published in France amid claims of greed, negligence and dishonesty at the heart of the State. Take, for example, the tapestry by Joan Miró that has gone missing from the French Embassy in Washington. Or the drawing by the 20th-century French painter Raoul Dufy, which vanished from a museum in Marseilles; or the oil painting by the Slovene artist Zoran Music, lost by the French Finance Ministry. Where they have gone, nobody knows – or, at least, nobody is saying. They have just “slipped on to picture rails inaccessible to the public”, in the discreet but damning words of Jean-Pierre Bady, a civil servant who has recounted in arid bureaucratic language the ten-year hunt to find thousands of artworks that have disappeared. In all, 306,993 paintings, sculptures, antiques, porcelain and other works are supposed to adorn ministries, embassies, local government offices and official residences, including the Elysée Palace, he said. In fact, Mr Bady discovered that 37,658 French state artworks were missing, of which 3,444 are known to have been destroyed and 145 reported stolen – with the rest simply mislaid. Incompetence is the primary cause, with paintings left in cupboards or handed to scrap merchants. More sinister motives are also suggested, however: ambassadors have walked away with valuable office antiques on their retirement, curators have been caught selling museum pieces and French government paintings have been spotted in the Naschmarkt in Vienna. The controversy taints even the office of the Prime Minister, which has misplaced 392 works of art, of which three have been reported as stolen. Mr Bady, however, was allowed to see only 14 of the 8,812 works at Mr Sarkozy’s disposal. “Although this was a taboo subject for a long time, it was the object of numerous whispered anecdotes in high places,” wrote Emmanuel Pierrat, an art collector, in Museum Connection, a book about the missing artwork. Some of the anecdotes in the report by Mr Bady have been made public for the first time as the commission related how it had laid its hands on almost 900 of the lost pieces. One example is the Roman statue known as the Athena of Palermo, which disappeared after it was placed in the National Centre for Educational Documentation in Paris in 1958. Mr Bady found it behind a wall erected in the 1970s by workmen who could not be bothered to move the statue. The case of the 18th-century Louis XV commode at the French Embassy in Copenhagen is more embarrassing. Experts found that it was a modern-day copy and that an ambassador had taken the original back to his home. Massacre of the Innocents by Rubens set a record in 2002 as the most expensive painting sold, after having been presumed missing for more than 300 years. It had been misfiled as the work of minor artist Jan van den Hoecke and was discovered only after a relative of the owner showed a photograph of the work to Sotheby's in Amsterdam. It was bought at auction by Lord Thomson of Fleet for £49 million. http://www.elysee.fr/elysee/elysee.fr/anglais/the_elysee_palace/virtual_visit_of_the_park_and_the_lounges/hall_of_honour/hall_of_honour.20268.html