Police drop probe into Holocaust artist
2012-12-11 21:16
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Sweden.
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Stockholm - Swedish police said on Tuesday they have
dropped an investigation into an artist who said he used paint mixed from the
ashes of Holocaust victims in a watercolour, for lack of evidence.
"The enquiry was closed on Monday. The offence was
committed abroad and we have no evidence here," police spokesperson Stefan
Soederholm told AFP.
Swedish painter Carl Michael von Hausswolff has said that
he travelled to Poland in 1989 for an exhibit and while there visited the
Majdanek concentration camp.
The black-and-white work, featuring vertical brushstrokes
in a rectangle representing the suffering of the victims, was displayed at a
gallery in the southern Swedish town of Lund.
But the manager of the gallery, Martin Bryder, decided to
pull the exhibition after the Jewish community in the area, and US-based Jewish
rights group the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, slammed the artwork.
"Christmas is supposed to be a time of peace and
harmony. So I decided to close the exhibition," he told daily newspaper
Sydsvenskan.
A member of the public filed a police complaint against
Von Hausswolff on 5 December for "disturbing the peace of the dead",
a crime in Sweden punishable by up to two years in prison.
Swedish police said it had no information on whether an
inquiry would be launched in Poland.
On Thursday, a spokesperson for the Majdanek camp museum,
Agnieszka Kowalczyk, told Swedish daily Aftonbladet that collecting the ashes
amounted to theft, and that the museum would ensure "the judicial
authorities find out how this actually happened".
