Links in the Pink: Alleged Goya Thief Arrested, Hispanic Society’s Koran Deaccessions

—They finally made an arrest in the theft of the Goya (subsequently recovered) en route from the Toledo Museum to the Guggenheim Museum. The thief who broke into the unattended transport truck was allegedly Steven Lee Olson, a self-employed truck driver, who had contacted authorities only days after the incident to say he had found it in his basement. Still no publication of the name of the trucking company under whose watch (or lack thereof) this happened. Chris Newmarker of the Associated Press has the story.
—The 800-year-old manuscript, said to be “the earliest complete, dated Koran,” which set a world auction record for a Koran and an Islamic manuscript when it fetched $2.32 million Christie’s, London, on Tuesday had been deaccessioned by the Hispanic Society of America, New York. At the same sale, the society also disposed of a nearly complete 10th-century Kufic Koran from North Africa or the Near East. Both were bequeathed to the society by its founder, Archer Milton Huntington, who had kept them in his private library until his death. I suppose they must have been deemed inconsistent with the society’s mission, illustrious donor notwithstanding. The society describes its collections as “addressing nearly every aspect of culture in Spain, as well as a large part of Portugal and Latin America.” The buyer, in both cases, was listed as “U.K. trade”—a British dealer.
You can ready the auction house’s description of the importance of these manuscripts here and here.