Art historian and Modigliani specialist Christian Parisot is facing trial in Paris, accused of faking 77 drawings by Jeanne Hébuterne, the artist’s mistress and mother of his daughter, also called Jeanne … Mr Parisot told The Art Newspaper that … they are genuine and that they came from a clear-out of André Hébuterne’s studio after his death. “The [original] payment by cheque exists, it was a legal transaction,” he says … Sending Mr Parisot to trial, the French judge Henri Pons said that “Mr Parisot wanted to give a fraudulent provenance to the drawings … so that he could increase the prices for her work…he used his reputation as a Modigliani specialist [to achieve this].”

… as one museum after another negotiates deals [to repatriate art], and prosecutors all over the world target the commercial trade in ancient objects, some prominent scholars are drawing a line in the sand, saying that objects belong where they are – that the movement is based on a false reading of history, and, if allowed to progress, could do serious damage to the world’s cultural inheritance.

“What’s at stake,” says James Cuno, the director of the Art Institute of Chicago, “is the world’s right to broad and general access to its ancient heritage.” Cuno, the former head of Harvard’s art museums and someone often mentioned as a possible successor to Philippe de Montebello, the retiring director of the Metropolitan Museum, is this spring publishing a book-length argument against returning cultural artifacts, “Who Owns Antiquity?” [blurbed, by the way, by Montebello]. Cuno, who is among the most vocal and prominent voices in the debate, argues that laws meant to keep antiquities in the countries where they’re found are wrongheaded and counterproductive. They limit the number of people who can see the objects, he says, while putting artworks at risk and driving collectors and dealers into the black market. They also present an existential threat to great “encyclopedic” museums like the MFA or Metropolitan Museum, places that provide a unique opportunity to see the full breadth and diversity of the world’s cultural history in one place.

Such arguments have triggered fierce responses, not only from source country governments, but from archeologists who see in the recent repatriations and prosecutions the best chance for protecting the fragile sites from which antiquities are too often looted. Ricardo Elia, chair of the archeology department at Boston University and an expert on the problem of looting, describes Cuno as an “aesthetic fundamentalist” willing to ignore ethical and archeological values to get his hands on pretty objects. Cuno’s argument, many of his critics charge, is simply an endorsement of plunder.

The Revue de l’art concludes: “Violence (and not just sexual violence) is everywhere today. We can lament this, but we must also keep it in mind during any evaluation we make of this or that art activity, of which the real impact appears finally to be rather limited, even if the outcry is great … Wouldn’t it be better, instead of censoring and condemning, to educate children … to decipher images, all images? We teach them to read and to write … but what about images, in which today’s world is immersed?”

From the N.Y. Times: “one of the largest donations New York University had ever received: $200 million in cash and real estate for the founding of an ancient studies institute … is stirring intense debate among archaeologists across the country, and even at N.Y.U. By accepting the money, some argue, the university is tacitly approving [donor] Ms. White’s practice of buying Greek and Roman antiquities, including some that experts believe were looted from archaeological sites. Some scholars point proudly to policies adopted by their own institutions, including the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Cincinnati and Bryn Mawr College, to discourage or even ban the acceptance of Levy-White money. To protest the donation, one professor has already resigned from N.Y.U.’s existing Center for Ancient Studies, an umbrella group that will continue to coordinate the university’s study of antiquity across various disciplines.”

Just as forgery’s lucrativeness depends on the work of art historians, so too does art theft’s. A new documentary by the nonprofit Saving Antiquities for Everyone (SAFE) examines scholarly complicity in the illicit antiquities trade, which has lately seen remarkable developments such as the indictment by an Italian court of Getty curator Marion True. The film interviews former Met director Thomas Hoving among others.

International cooperation is key to curbing the black market, but cultural barriers sometimes get in the way. The March W profiles FBI art-crime agent Robert Wittman, who reports he once had to drop “to the floor of a Madrid hotel room while clutching a $4 million Brueghel and trying to figure out how to say ‘I’m a good guy’ in Spanish to a team of machine gun-wielding cops.”