Spanish police remove artworks from Catalan museum
December 13 2017
Picture: via Josep Goded
There's some alarming cultural fallout from the recent suspension of Catalonia's autonomy by Spain's central government. Spanish police have removed 44 artworks from the museum of Lleida, after the neighbouring state of Aragon said they had been unlawfully sold to the Catalan government. Until now, Catalonian autonomy had meant that Aragon's demands could not be acted on. Sam Jones has more in The Guardian:
The pieces, which include paintings, alabaster reliefs and polychromatic wooden coffins, were sold to the Catalan government by the nuns of the Sijena convent, in Aragón, in the 1980s.
The Aragonese authorities have been trying to recover the works through the courts, arguing they were unlawfully sold.
At the end of November, Spain’s culture minister, Íñigo Méndez de Vigo, received a judicial order for the return of the works.
