The Philippine government is starting a crowdsourcing website to try to find some 200 prized pieces of art – by Picasso, Van Gogh, Michelangelo, Rembrandt and others – last believed to have been in the collection of Imelda R. Marcos, the country’s profligate former first lady known for owning 3,000 pairs of shoes and inspiring an Off Broadway musical.
According to The Associated Press, the announcement of the site came as the auction houses Christie’s and Sotheby’s were finishing a weeklong assessment of jewelry seized after Mrs. Marcos and her husband, the former dictator Ferdinand Marcos, fled to Hawaii in 1986 after two decades of rule.
For three decades those jewels, which include a rare pink diamond valued at $5 million, were stored in a vault in Manila. A government official last year said the list of the missing artwork had been drawn from documents the Marcoses had left behind three decades ago. Mrs. Marcos, 86, who returned to the Philippines after her husband’s death in 1989 and is now member of congress there, has said the artworks were not obtained illicitly with state money but rather were gifts, The Associated Press reported.
In 2013, Mrs. Marcos’s former secretary was found guilty in New York of conspiracy and tax fraud after selling a Monet painting for $32 million. The Philippine government is still trying to recover the proceeds.