Eighty artworks confiscated from mafia outfits went up for auction in Milan, Italy this week.
At the Palazzo Reale in Milan, the exhibition “Save Arts: From Confiscations To Public Collections” was organized. It featured paintings, sculptures and other graphic arts from artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Christo. Perhaps the most popular pieces were a lithograph of Romeo and Juliet by Salvador Dali, and a work from “Summer Arts in the Parks” series by Andy Warhol.
20 of the displayed works were seized in 2016 from a single person: the leader of the ‘Ndrangheta mafia. Many others were confiscated when an international money laundering network was broken by the Italian authorities in 2011. Two Van Gogh paintings, estimated to be worth $55 million, were recovered in 2016 in Naples, 14 years after they were stolen in Amsterdam.
Maria Rosaria Lagana, an Italian investigator, said: “Works destined to remain buried in the networks of organised crime are finally returned to the community, taking on a symbolic role as resistance to crime. It’s a rebirth for these works. It is a bit like digging them out of the earth, like archaeologists, and putting them on display where everyone can see them.”
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The exhibition was previewed in Rome in November. It opened in Milan on December 3rd and will remain open till the end of January. It will then move to Reggio Calabria and end in June next year. After the closure, most of the artworks would be donated to various museums across the country.
