Los Angeles Police Have Recovered $800,000 Worth of Missing Scottish Spiritual Art From a Private Home, Ending a Seven-Year Mystery

Police in Los Angeles have recovered a stolen trove of signed
prints by the late Scottish abstract artist and spiritualist
Benjamin Creme.

An unnamed person alerted authorities in late September after
discovering nearly 1,300 prints in a deceased relative’s storage
unit in the LA suburb of San Fernando.

“Upon looking through the items from the deceased relative, the
reporting person discovered the artwork was stolen after visiting a
law enforcement website and immediately notified authorities,” the
Los Angeles Police Department said in a statement. The LAPD
estimates the objects are altogether worth $800,000.

Earlier this week, the prints were returned to their original
owner, lithographer Michael Flaum. Flaum worked directly with Creme
to make the prints in the 1960s and ’70s.

“He was extremely shocked when we called,” Steven Franssen, the
LAPD detective on the case, told the Associated
Press. “He didn’t even believe it was the police department at
first.”

“I was just thrilled to get them back,” Flaum said. “I’m so
happy for the family.”

The works were part of a cache of roughly 2,200 prints reported
stolen from a storage facility owned by Flaum in West Los Angeles
in 2012. How they came to the deceased person in San Fernando is
not currently known, although Franssen said he did not believe any
of the person’s family members were involved. Another 974 prints,
also taken in the heist, remain missing.

Born in Glasgow in 1922, Creme devoted himself to art as a
teenager. He gained notoriety in the 1940s when he switched from
painting landscapes to colorful abstractions. By the 1960s, he had
become deeply spiritual, amassing legions of followers while
prophesying the second coming of Jesus Christ, whom he believed to
be a deity called Maitreya the World Teacher.

Creme died in London in 2016 at age 93. Late in Creme’s life,
Flaum would occasionally sell one of the prints in storage to fund
the artist’s research into metaphysics.

The post Los Angeles Police Have Recovered $800,000 Worth of
Missing Scottish Spiritual Art From a Private Home, Ending a
Seven-Year Mystery appeared first on artnet News.