UN scours corridors for lost art ahead of $2bn refit
By Harvey Morris 
March 2, 2009
The Financial Times
Original Source: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4025c9f2-06ca-11de-ab0f-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1

As the United Nations prepares to leave its New York headquarters for a four-year renovation, staff are scouring the corridors to try to find valuable works of art that have gone missing.
The lost items include a sculpture by Jose de Rivera, the 20th century American abstract expressionist, and an oil painting entitled Evening, a gift from Belarus. An internal audit said the absence of these art works, listed as gifts in the UN's files, was of extreme concern.
Other missing works, including gifts from Mexico and China, do not even show up in the UN's official art register. Investigators had to rely on art books dating back to the 1960s to identify items that had gone astray.
Since the UN moved into the Manhattan complex in 1952, governments have donated hundreds of art works to be exhibited alongside items on loan from museums and private collections. They range from ancient Roman mosaics to a tapestry of Picasso's Guernica that hangs outside the Security Council.
The missing art came to light in an investigation by the UN's independent internal auditors who discovered no single individual or department in the organisation was responsible for ensuring artifacts were catalogued and conserved.
The overall system of internal control over gifts management is weak, which resulted in the loss of works of art, according to the audit report sent to management late last year by the UN's Office of Internal Oversight Services.
The criticisms provide further ammunition to states that claim the organisation's bureaucracy is bloated and inefficient. It has no estimate of the value of the gift collection and works are not insured.
As the deadline nears for the UN's move into temporary accommodation in Oct
ober ahead of the $2bn (¬ 1.6bn, £1.4bn) renovation, the management and security departments have been trying to put things right, with some modest successes.
The architectural and engineering unit said in written responses to the Financial Times last week 
that the UN had completed a third of a new gifts database. One missing picture, a battleship scene, had been tracked down to a wall on the 22nd floor of the 38-floor secretariat building, while 48 items stored in the basement had been identified.