Potts on Laundering by Warehousing

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Larry Rothfield discusses Lee Rosenbaum's interview with Getty's Tim Potts (' "We have to support better policing of the sites", says the new Getty Museum Director. What does he have in mind?', February 25, 2012). The interview is also discussed by David Gill ("Timothy Potts: "the problem hasn't gone away" "). Potts concedes that "there is still a huge amount of ongoing looting and this issue is not being addressed". Rosenbaum reminded him (and us) that a few years ago Potts had supported a rolling 10-year statute of limitations on the ban on buying unprovenanced antiquities. This of course is wholly within the thinking behind the US 1983 Convention on Cultural Property Implementation Act where is a dealer or importer can claim with a clear conscience (no need even to actually document it) that an object has been out of the country of origin for ten years or more, it can be regarded as "clean". As Larry Rothfield notes:

That position was rejected for the quite obvious reason that it would give thieves an easy way to loot with impunity: simply warehouse your finds for a decade. But Potts has not taken the point

But one wonders whether those that looted the sites in Iraq from the 1990s onwards did. The tenth anniversary of the 2003 invasion comes up next year, will we see the emergence of increasing numbers of Mesopotamian artefacts on the international market, all of which "left Iraq more than ten years ago and have been kept in an old [****} collection"? All that is needed now is for the US to lift emergency restrictions and replace them by a bilateral cultural property agreement (the MOU type) and there would be nothing to prevent these items being imported into the USA for private consumption in huge quantities perfectly legally under the terms of the CCPIA. If this happens, will the Getty be buying any?

Vignette: Dr Timothy Potts

Potts on Policing

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Larry Rothfield discusses Lee Rosenbaum's recent interview with Getty's Tim Potts (' "We have to support better policing of the sites", says the new Getty Museum Director. What does he have in mind?', February 25, 2012). The interview is also discussed by David Gill ("Timothy Potts: "the problem hasn't gone away" "). Potts concedes that "there is still a huge amount of ongoing looting and this issue is not being addressed". He then says that:

The only way to address it is on the ground in the source countries. We have to support better policing of the sites, better understanding by the local communities of the importance of the archaeological heritage, particularly to them. And it's only through these programs that we're really going to tackle the core problem, which is the illicit excavation that's still going on and the huge urban projects, dam building, and so on. The educational process has to happen not only with the local community but also with the government and ministers."

Now of course, whatever Dr Potts wants to believe (along with every no-questions-asking dealer and collector in Christendom) there is not one, "only", way to deal with the problem. We need a more holistic approach, and one obvious place to start is cleaning up the market making it less easy to foist looted objects off onto the market alongside material of more legitimate origins. At the moment there is absolutely no barrier whatsoever to this.

It seems Potts wishes to place the burden for the policing entirely on the shoulders of the victims of the looting, the citizens and governments of countries being looted. In usual atavistic colonialist fashion, it seems he treats all the inhabitants (and their governing elites) of the source countries of the antiquities collectors so covet as ignorant, uneducated, backward oafs who only have themselves to blame if they are ripped off by western dealers.

This is the Witschonke premise. This postulates that if - despite all the other problems it may have now - the looted "source" countries are not going to put 220% effort into protecting the sites and the cultural property they contain, the outside world (in particular the United States of America) should not lift even a little finger to help them. It is not as if the USA has anything like acceptable success protecting all of its own archaeological heritage (but that's only "injun" stuff and "stuff happens"). I really would like to see Dr Potts and his Getty going out there to the meth addicts of the Ozarks and among the pot-hunting and collecting folk of the Four Corners area (do make the effort to drop in on Judge Waddoups) and doing their please-don't-do-this,-it's-not-nice "education" there first as a pilot scheme before adopting it as a global policy.

Vignette: Dr Tim Potts, from the Chasing Aphrodite blog.

Antiquities Issues and the New Getty Appointment

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The antiquities issues in the background to the appointment of Timothy Potts as director of the Getty Museum from September are discussed by Jason Felch in the Los Angeles Times ('Antiquities issue rears head with Getty leaders Potts, Cuno in place', Feb 17th) with a summary on the Chasing Aphrodite blog ('Cheat Sheet on Timothy Potts, New Director of the Getty Museum').

Now see this: 'Kimbell Art Museum Responds To Questions About Ancient Cup Acquired Under Timothy Potts', Chasing Aphrodite blog Feb 17.

Antiquities Dealer Hecht's Italian Trial Comes to an End

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The trial of the American antiquities dealer Robert Hecht has dragged on for six years and was a watershed event which has helped to alter collecting practices at American museums. Following the indictment, many museums adopted policies that banned the purchase of ancient artefacts whose provenance was not clear. Hecht was being tried for allegedly receiving artefacts obtained by illegal excavation in Italy and conspiring to deal in them. Italian prosecutors had also charged Marion True, the former curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, along with Mr. Hecht. The 92-year old's courtroom drama however ended this week in Rome when a three-judge panel ruled that the statute of limitations on his alleged crimes - like that of True in October 2010 - had expired. The trial had began in November 2005. Another co-defendant, antiquities dealer Giacomo Medici, has been convicted for his role in the alleged conspiracy.

The judges did not express an opinion on [Hecht's] culpability or innocence. But they ruled that a series of objects that had been confiscated from Mr. Hecht’s homes should return to their “rightful owner,” which was identified as the Italian state.

Elisabetta Povoledo, 'Italian Trial of American Antiquities Dealer Comes to an End', New York Times 18th jan 2012.

Getty Returns More Greek Pieces

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At first sight this looks a bit like a publicity stunt in order to assuage public comment on the appointment of James Cuno as president of the Getty Trust. It appears that the situation is more complex, with the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Greek Ministry of Culture planning cultural exchanges of scientists and scholars in the fields of archaeology, conservation, art history and other fields which will no doubt greatly benefit the cultural heritage of currently cash-strapped Greece. As an initial gesture of goodwill, the Museum is returning two ancient artefacts from its collections to Greece.

The objects in question are fragments of a grave marker and a Greek language inscription, both acquired in the 1970s, according to the Getty. The museum said the grave-marker fragments have never gone on display in L.A. and that they are part of a larger work depicting female forms that dates from the 5th century BC. [...] the Greek-language inscription features 65 lines describing sacrifices and festivals celebrated in Thorikos, in southeast Attica. The work dates from 430 to 420 BC and is currently on view at the Getty Villa.

David Ng, 'Getty Museum to return additional ancient pieces to Greece', LA Times, September 22, 2011

See also Meg Lambert on the returns: 'The Getty returns two objects to Greece' (referring in turn to the Chasing Aphrodite blog)

David Gill also comments Getty returns antiquities to Greece

Vignette: Best of friends, James Cuno shakes hands heartily with the Greek Minister of Culture Pavlos Yeroulanos.

True to Be Awarded by Association for Research into Crimes against Art? Why?

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In a rather odd post on his Illicit Cultural Property Blog Derek Fincham disseminates an unpublished letter he wrote together with Noah Charney of ARCA to the editors of The New York Review of Books about Hugh Eakin's review (“What Went Wrong at the Getty” July 13, 2011) of Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World’s Richest Museums. It's rather a long letter which seems rather to be mostly a vehicle to get a mention ARCA into the papers, but the central point is a defence of curator Marion True.

When one compares the number of returned objects acquired under the direction of Philippe de Montebello at the Met, one should perhaps wonder why he received accolades and a grand retirement while Dr. True was made an example of.

They point out that "an array of prominent officials at the Getty were lured into buying looted art by three renowned leaders of large-scale organized looting rings, Robert Hecht, Giacomo Medici and Gianfranco Becchina, who are truly to blame [...] while Dr. True is no saint, she does not represent the core of the problem". So a collector who knowingly buys the stolen Van Gogh painting from Cairo's Mahmoud Khalil Museum because they were lured into it by an attractive offer is not the core of the problem? It is because there ARE people who can't say 'no' and will buy without bothering whether the transaction is legitimate or not that these things get stolen. The collector who buys dodgy stuff is as guilty as the seller to whom he gives money for selling dodgy stuff. Fincham and Charney argue further on True's behalf:

Dr. True has tried to preach against other curators and museums making the mistake of violating heritage laws. The cynic would say that her only regret was having been caught, but there seems to be a genuine passion in her call for resisting the temptation of a beautiful but looted object, and working to end the purchase by museums of illicit antiquities. Indeed, few have spoken out against the perpetuation of the illicit trade in antiquities with greater fervor.

That's a bit like those US public figures who speak out vehemently against other people's homosexuality and then are caught out taking male escorts on holiday with them etc. They then make an even more controversial suggestion, for "playing a part in setting in motion a sea-change in the way in which museums acquire antiquities" they say Marion True should be applauded:

and perhaps even put before the ARCA Trustees and Board of Editors of the Journal of Art Crime for an annual award to recognize the good work she did, even while she found herself unable to resist the pressure to acquire some beautiful but looted objects.

Well, it's worse than that, she has actually been advanced for an ARCA award (Journal of Art Crime 5 (2011) p. 97), but Renfrew got it instead. I am left wondering whether anything done by Marion True herself actually led to the capture and conviction of a single looter of archaeological sites, or advanced any "Research into Crimes against Art" (of course in looting archaeological sites, its not the "art" that is damaged, just the rest). The Ancient Coin Collectors Guild also speaks out very strongly against looting and bad practice. Maybe Fincham and Charney consider they should get an ARCA award too? Or perhaps Hicham Aboutaam and his brother in recognition of their role in getting the Entemena statue back to Iraq, they too are frequently quoted in papers speaking out against the illicit trade and stressing the need for well-documented transactions. After all they have other awards, so why not an ARCA one? The following year no doubt they will be presenting one to Frederick Schultz and Jonathan Tokeley-Parry for highlighting the importance of provenance...

I've got a better idea, let the "Association for Research into Crimes against Art" stick with the paintings and leave giving awards for financing and turning a blind eye to archaeological looting up to somebody else.

UPDATE 21/8/2011:
Dues where dues are due: Derek Fincham reminds us that in 1988 it was Marion True who led to a dealer with some dodgy looted mosaics being caught: Did Marion True Ever Catch a Looter or Dealer? That's very nice, glad to hear it. We all know there are many dealers and museum people, even if they realised they were being offered dodgy goods would refuse to buy it, but not go that extra step and pick up the phone, so good for her on that occasion. Of course if ARCA feels that is enough to give her their award, that is their prerogative, it's their award.



Vignette: ARCA logo

More changes at the Getty

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Karol Wight, specialist in glass from the Roman Empire, is leaving the Getty to become the executive director of the Corning Museum of Glass in New York, replacing David Whitehouse, executive director since 1999. Wight has been the the Getty Museum's senior curator for antiquities since 2007 when she replaced Marion True, who had departed from the organization in 2005 amid accusations that the Getty had been buying looted antiquities. The LA Times notes that "Wight's resignation from the Getty comes on the heels of the appointment of James Cuno as the head of the Getty Trust". Ms. Wight’s departure leaves the Getty Museum without a curator of antiquities and without a director. Michael Brand, the museum’s director for a little more than four years, resigned in 2010 after differences with the president of the Getty Trust, which oversees the museum.

Vignette: LA Times

'Chasing Aphrodite' And Other Dirty Art World Deals

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The forthcoming book "Chasing Aphrodite" is the subject of a skilful marketing campaign with a lot of pre-publication hype, deservedly so, the extracts show it to be well-written and the subject is an important one. "Chasing Aphrodite" tells a big story about 'major antiquities' and highlights a more general problem, though one which is on the way to being resolved as museums look to their acquisition policies and get ethical. No longer are sale of 'big' items with no provenance (the no-questions-asked market model) as acceptable to public institutions as they were. Now of course we have the problem of the made-up provenances [collecting histories] and the existence of a not-enough-questions-asked institutional market.

The big problem however is still at the other end of the market, the hundreds of thousands of so-called "minor artefacts" dug out of the archaeological record and "surfacing" (from 'underground'?) on the market by various illicit means and being sold to private collectors who still function in no-questions-asked mode alongside items legitimately on the market. It is this whole process, more insidious and just as damaging as the trade in 'big' Getty-worthy items, which needs closer scrutiny. It ranges from the smuggling of shabtis and scarabs, to the bulk lots of metal-detected coins and artefacts stripped from Roman sites in the Balkans to the legalised stripping of archaeological sites of metal artefacts by metal detectorists in England under a misguided policy of tolerance.

But for the moment, let us plug the big story, as setting the scene for the time when the general public can be persuaded to look more closely at what is happening day after day to the so-called 'minor artefacts' that are being gouged destructively out of the world's archaeological record for entertainment and profit. Because this can only happen as long as the public allows it to.

There is a nice pre-publication interview and article on National Public radio (NPR) called 'Chasing Aphrodite' And Other Dirty Art World Deals. The interview well worth listening to (the article is a summary, not a transcript). It talks of the "object lust' which led to the Getty Museum acquiring contextless 'art' objects from dubious sources, from back alleys to basement bank vaults. Author Frammolino says that the "overpowering effects of antiquity" lead to excesses

"People who come in contact with antiquities — the history of it, the beauty of these antiquities, the thought that maybe somebody great had once possessed this — they lose reason," he tells NPR's Renee Montagne.

The Getty Museum had one of the largest acquisition budgets in the country, and perhaps the world which was used in a very savvy way to help it:

build what today is considered one of the most important antiquities collections in the world," Felch says. But that collection would not be possible without the help of a complex web of grave robbers, patrons, wealthy collectors and the complicity of some of the world's most revered museums. "The illicit antiquities trade is kind of the dirtiest corner of the art market," Felch says. "It brought together highly educated, Ph.D. Harvard-graduate curators, and you saw them doing business in bank vaults with people who were in the criminal underground."It might seem an odd partnership, but the brightest minds in the museum world were driven to deal with criminals in the pursuit of objects of beauty. To account for their illicit dealings, Felch says, the Getty adopted a see-no-evil policy. "They danced this very tricky dance for several years, where they publicly denounced the illicit trade and they decried the looting that their acquisitions fueled," he explains.[...]

Collectors and dealers will no doubt be discomfited by the clear expression in this book of the notion that it is the market that is the motor for illicit dealings in artefacts. The book also has a message concerning the customary "good home" argument applied by public museums and private collectors:

The "high" road often taken by antiquities curators — that they are nobly saving what would be otherwise lost pieces — is the core irony at the center of Chasing Aphrodite, Felch says. "The Getty and other American museums over the last decades have justified the acquisition of these things under questionable circumstances by saying that these poor orphan objects have been separated from their archaeological context already, and that we have a duty to rescue them from the market and to preserve them and display them publicly," he says. But the truth was that by buying these objects on the black market, these museums were further fueling the looting that was going on across the Mediterranean.

It is of course worth noting that the museums claim to be rescuing iteems from 'the market' where they could end up in private collections, and private collectors claim to be rescuing objects from ending up in "museum storerooms" where they would not be cared-for or exhibited.

Certainly I think this book will have a great deal to add to the ongoing debate on artefact collecting and in particular expose the hypocrisy of US antiquity dealers' attempts to whitewash the image of the international antiquities trade and its relationship to the looting of archaeological sites.

Chasing Aphrodite
By Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino
Hardcover, 384 pages
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
List Price: $28

The cover photo shows an ancient Greek depiction of the monstrosity of artefact collecting (right) and trade (left) descending on the fragile and defenceless archaeological record, dismembering it before our very eyes as society stands by helplessly. To save the victim, we need not only to sever the heads of these monsters by legal action, but remove the ground from under their feet by removing public support for their attack on the archaeological record.

Back to Square One at the Getty?

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It has been announced that Dr James Cuno has been appointed as CEO and president of the J. Paul Getty Trust to replace James Wood who died last June. The post of the Getty Museum's director remains to be filled. There have been a number of reactions to the news of appointment of Cuno:

The least impassioned is by Jori Finkel, 'Getty Trust's new CEO: Art Institute of Chicago's James Cuno', LA Times May 10, 2011.

Others are less sanguine:
Benjamin Genocchio, 'Why the Getty's Choice of James Cuno as CEO Is Clueless' ArtInfo: May 9, 2011,
Lee Rosenbaum, 'Archaeologists’ Red Flag: James Cuno Named Getty Trust President', Culturegrrl May 10, 2011.
David Gill, 'James Cuno as President of the Getty Trust: Reactions' Looting matters, May 10th 2011.
Peter Tompa, 'Cuno to Getty', Cultural Property Observer 10th May 2011 hopes that the appointment means "a new determination to get tough with Italy, whose demands for repatriation have seemingly escalated despite the Getty's efforts to seek accomodation" (sic).

One cannot but think that Cuno's appointment is in some way concerned with the attention that the May 24 launch of Ralph Frammolino and Jason Felch's exposé Chasing Aphrodite of the Getty antiquities scandals will doubtless attract in a few weeks.

Rosenbaum sees the appointment of the author of the controversial 'Who Owns Antiquity' in this post as potentially potentially damaging to the well-established international collaboration the Getty has established, she has written of him:

By taking an extremist stance that belittles the deeply felt and legitimate concerns of archaeologists and source countries to preserve archaeological sites and national heritage, he undermines efforts by reasonable people on both sides of the cultural-property divide to arrive at mutually beneficial compromises. And he self-destructively undermines any role he might personally have played in working cooperatively with foreign governments to forge mutually beneficial sharing arrangements.

Cuno dismisses such concerns, he says:

"In terms of my criticism of cultural property laws, I think reasonable people can disagree on these matters, and I very much look forward to engaging in conversations with colleagues around the world. I think we are all seeking the same thing: to preserve the objects of antiquity and broaden public and scholarly access to them.

Sadly Cuno here ignores the fact that the whole problem with the trade in illicitly obtained artefacts is that they are obtained by the destruction of archaeological contexts, sites, monuments and assemblages. It is not ownership or "protection" of the objects that is the problem, it is where they come from before they surface (from underground?). it was the failure to recognise this that was a fundamental flaw of the arguments he advanced in 2008, and it is sad that the new CEO of the Getty still has not taken this idea on board.

Getty's Stolen Goddess Finally Returned to Sicily

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The Aphrodite statue of disputed origin which came on the antiquities market in 1988 and once displayed in the Getty Museum has now been returned to Sicily (Jason Felch, 'Getty ships Aphrodite statue to Sicily', Los Angeles Times March 23, 2011). The statue was taken off display in December and freighted under an Italian diplomatic seal aboard an Alitalia flight to Sicily where it arrived on Thursday. From there it travelled with an armed police escort by ship and truck to the small hilltop town of Aidone, Sicily, where it arrived Saturday to waiting crowds. The town lies next to the remains of the ancient Greek colony of Morgantina, where it is believed that the object had lain buried in archaeological deposits for centuries before it was illegally excavated and smuggled out of Italy.

When the Getty bought the Aphrodite for $18 million in 1988, the statue's importance outweighed the signs of its illicit origins. "The proposed statue of Aphrodite would not only become the single greatest piece of ancient art in our collection; it would be the greatest piece of Classical sculpture in this country and any country outside of Greece and Great Britain," wrote former antiquities curator Marion True in proposing the acquisition. For years, the museum clung to the implausible story that the statue had been in the family of a former Swiss policeman, Renzo Canavesi, for more than 50 years after being purchased by his father in Paris in the 1930s.

The credibility of that cover story was destroyed with the appearance of evidence of its illicit origins and an alleged link between its appearance on the market through the agency of organized criminal activity.

In 2006, private detectives hired by the Getty uncovered more than a dozen photos of the statue. One shows fragments of the goddess scattered in a pile of dirt on a brown tile floor. In another, pieces of varying sizes were lined up in rows on a large, thick plastic sheet. Another photo showed the statue's marble face still encrusted with grime. It is not clear who took the photos or where they were taken. But the fact that the statue had been in fragments and covered in dirt as recently as the early 1980s — the date on the photographs — was seen as clear evidence that it had been illegally excavated not long before the Getty bought it. The investigators [...] also found evidence connecting Canavesi with an alleged Sicilian antiquities smuggler whom investigators were told had ties to organized crime [...] Canavesi told investigators that he was a friend of Orazio di Simone, who in 1989 Italian authorities charged with smuggling the Aphrodite out of Italy. (The case was eventually dismissed for lack of evidence.) When the Getty's investigators tried to interview Di Simone, they were warned against it by Italian authorities, who suggested he had ties to the Mafia. In an interview [...], Di Simone denied the charge and any involvement with the statue.

It turns out, as a result of a 2007 LA Times investigation which revealed the existence of the photos, that Getty officials had turned down an opportunity to see them a decade earlier. Only then, reportedly, did the Getty send an attorney and a museum official to Switzerland to secure copies of the photos, apparently from Canavesi, and confirm they were of the object they had bought (these images have still not been made public).

The story of the unravelling of the illicit origins of the "Getty" Aphrodite is described in a forthcoming book about the dispute - "Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World's Richest Museum". The authors are Jason Felch and former LA Times staff writer Ralph Frammolino, the book will be published May 24 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

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Marion True: “Neither condemned nor vindicated”

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“Neither condemned nor vindicated”. Marion True, the former antiquities curator of the Getty Museum, speaks out on why it is hard for her to accept the lack of verdict after her five-year trial for "conspiring to receive antiquities that had been illegally excavated and exported from Italy" (The Art Newspaper 5th January 2011). The trial began in November 2005. True presents her side of the story:

the prosecutor, fully aware of the statutes, consumed the past five years with the presentation of his case, interspersed with endless delays. [...] During this time, my lawyers were able to cross-examine witnesses but not to present my case. [...] This politically motivated process accomplished its goals long ago. It made headlines with groundless accusations that destroyed my reputation and career, while intimidating other American museums into returning objects without question. [...] The intention was to use the case against me to condemn publicly the collecting of antiquities and to terrorise museums and collectors, especially in the United States. [...] The strategy worked extremely well. American museums chose not to join forces to challenge the Italian position, but silently went their separate ways, with directors travelling to Italy to make private deals to return objects in the hope of appeasing the prosecutor. There was even a sense of relief that I was the only target of the Italians. Yet, it now appears that I will not be the only victim. [...] If the case against Princeton goes forward, perhaps American museums will stand together and not yield to intimidation. Their antiquities collections have been built carefully over more than a century, and are important educational resources in a country that considers the achievements of ancient Greece and Rome fundamental to its own culture. Certainly, methods of collecting in the United States and elsewhere have changed over this time, as have laws and conventions protecting cultural patrimony. But negotiations and collaborations that I and many others promoted with Italian colleagues for years are far more productive in the long run than endless, destructive and expensive litigation.

I suppose the question is just what it is that is to be "negotiated" when a museum is caught out with looted or illegally exported material on its hands. The time for collaboration is before the event, not after. In the case of "Princeton", just what it is American Museums would be "standing together" in defence of and why?

Photo: Marion True in happier days

True A Scapegoat for the Sins of a Generation of Collectors

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There have been many recent texts covering the end of the Marion True trial in recent days. Cristina del Rivero in the "Art meets Law" blog has a post ('Marion True, the scapegoat...', Sunday, October 17, 2010) which takes a step back from the news itself and reflects on the wider context.

We will never know whether Marion True knowingly "acquired" or conspired to "traffic in" looted antiquities now that a court in Rome has ruled that the statute of limitations on the two criminal charges brought against the longtime curator had expired. The trial had continued on-and-off for five years during which time the prosecution presented its arguments to the court and called witnesses "who, according to Italian court procedure, were rarely subject to cross-examination." This, together with the fact that the defense never made its case nor did the court ever reach a verdict, means it's virtually impossible to draw any solid, substantiated conclusions with respect to the defendant and the specific allegations made against her.

The whole affair became highly politicised in connection with the continued efforts of the Italian authorities to reclaim illicitly obtained antiquities which had subsequently been bought by major American museums. To a large degree this was connected with the "hugely incriminating evidence found at the Geneva warehouse of Giacomo de Medici (convicted antiquities smuggler and alleged associate of Robert Hecht, Marion True's co-defendant and the dealer she transacted with)". The trial undoubtedly had a great effect on museum practices in the US, and probably gave museum curators elsewhere much else to think about too. It was under the shadow of this trial that museums such as the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Metropolitan and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts came to "arrangements" with the Italians concerning recently acquired material in their collections. In 2008 the Association of Art Museum Directors adopted stricter guidelines for acquisitions of antiquities.

In an interview with The New Yorker. Marion True said of the Getty:

I have nothing but the greatest contempt for them in the world. They acted like I ran the place. Above me I had a chief curator who was deputy director, a director, an in-house counsel, a president, a board of trustees to whom the president reported, and a chairman of the board. What about the lawyers who drafted the acquisition policy, who were supposed to be vetting all documents? They were perfectly happy to assure all that [the alleged acquisition of illegal art] was my work. Never once have [former Getty director] John Walsh or [his successor] Deborah Gribbon stepped forward to say one word about their responsibility.

Cristina del Rivero comments that this case:

marks the culmination of decades of (unethical, if not illegal) acquisitions by museums (dealers and collectors too) of antiquities of unknown or dubious provenance. It has long been the case that market participants have simultaneously acknowledged the prevalence of looted antiquities in the market while routinely dealing in ancient artifacts that lack adequate provenance and denying the causal link between market demand and the growing profit-making business of looting (evidence of the causal link is practically conclusive). The True trial illustrates this intolerable reality perfectly - the pervasiveness of appallingly low standards in acquisitions of antiquities has been such in the last 20 years that either Marion True thought she could get away with it or even a curator of her knowledge and experience (she served as curator of antiquities at the Getty from 1986 to 2005) could not distinguish between an insufficiently documented antiquity and an illicit one. As the director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Maxwell L. Anderson, said, Marion True was being indicted "for what was a practice of American museums."

That a single curator has had to "carry the burden" for the practices of a board of trustees that was fully aware of the risks the acquisitions entailed and approved them nonetheless only to condone them later is undoubtedly unfair, not to mention the fact that the charges were anomalous from the outset since as a curator, True was never the recipient of the objects in dispute- the objects were acquired by the board of trustees on behalf of the Getty museum.

The blog's author ends by concluding that "the trial has served as a deafeningly loud "wake-up call" to museums in the US (and, ehem, around the world) that BUYING UNDOCUMENTED OR INSUFFICIENTLY DOCUMENTED ANTIQUITIES HAS GOT TO STOP".

Photo: Marion True outside the Rome court (from the New Yorker)

Italian judge Drops Charges Against Marion True

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The trial of former Getty Museum antiquities curator Marion True on the criminal charges that she had conspired to traffic in looted artefacts is over. Today (Weds 13th October) the the Rome judge ended the proceedings on the grounds that the statute of limitations had expired. This long case [series of cases] has had a considerable effect on the acquisition policies of American museums.
She had been charged by an Italian prosecutor in 2005 on the basis of her apparent involvement in a number of purchases for the Getty Museum collections of items which turned out to have been of questionable origins. Readers will know that the whole saga began in 1995 when authorities raided Giacomo Medici's warehouse in Geneva. Among its contents were his records which included Polaroid photographs of hundreds of items which appeared to be recently looted antiquities, and many of them could be traced to museums across the United States, Europe and Asia. Some are still turning up today in auction rooms. Medici was convicted on antiquity trafficking charges and his conviction was twice upheld on appeal. His business partner Robert Hecht remains on trial as the alleged head of the conspiracy to trade in these items, but the statute of limitations on his charges will expire in July. True had dealings with both Medici and Hecht. The alleged conspiracy between Hecht, Medici and True would have continued until April 2002 (the date of a letter between True and Hecht, under that analysis, the crime expired in July).

Jason Felch, 'Charges dismissed against ex-Getty curator Marion True by Italian judge', LA Times, October 13, 2010

Nadja Brandt, 'Italy Drops Charges Against Ex-Curator Marion True, Getty Says', Bloomberg Business Week, October 13, 2010.

Elisabetta Povoledo, ' Time Limit Ends Antiquities Case Of Ex-Curator' New York Times ("Art and Design'), October 13, 2010.

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Booktryst on the Zeyt'un Gospels

The blog 'Booktryst: A nest for book lovers takes a refreshing look at the use of temporary institutional exhibitions to launder illicit antiquities. The post (The Case Of The Purloined Letter And The (Allegedly) Stolen Bible, Part Two) discusses the dispute with the Getty Museum over the rightful owner of seven pages [the canon Tables in fact] ripped from a 13th century illuminated manuscript known as the Zeyt'un Gospels. The Getty claims it has every right to these pages, noting that "these canon tables were separated from the manuscript at some point in the past and eventually acquired by the Getty Museum, while the rest of the manuscript is in a public collection in Armenia". The Museum is "confident that it has legal ownership of these pages, [...] which have been widely published, studied and exhibited." It says the pages were purchased only "after a thorough review of their provenance," though not apparently how they were ripped out of the object in the first place (apparently during the 1915 genocide of the Armenians by the Turks), and that the upcoming lawsuit on behalf of the Armenian Church to get it back "is groundless and should be dismissed". As Nancy Mattoon sarcastically remarks:

The vague language used to describe the history of these pages makes it sound like they just accidentally slipped out of the binding and got lost. As if that happens all the time. Churches just lose track of the most important pages of their sacred religious texts, and they turn up in a museum 7,000 miles away on the other side of the Atlantic sixty years later.

She points out that the claim the object is "rightfully ripped-out" because it has been previously exhibited and nobody then cried foul is also pretty reprehensible:

The Getty has also been known to indulge in what has become a fairly common practice for museums unsure of the ownership background of ancient works: "antiquity laundering." Pieces with shady backgrounds start out in private hands for some years, then are loaned to a prestigious museum for a high profile exhibition. Photos and descriptions of the pieces are published in an exhibit catalog, and presto!, provenance is established. Of course this never accounts for how the items were removed from their country of origin in the first place. The Getty has in at least one case purchased an entire collection of questionable antiquities from a private collector, with the only published "provenance" being two exhibit catalogs produced when the items were on loan: one from the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the other from (you guessed it) the Getty itself.

Renfrew on the griffins of Ascoli Satriano

In the paper summarised above, Renfrew gives some reflections on seeing the exhibition ‘The Secret of Marble: the Painted Marbles of Ascoli Satriano’ at the Palazzo Massimo during the December 2009 symposium which I would like to discuss. Renfrew reflects on the "despicable role" of Giacomo Medici, the illicit dealer and middleman involved in the splitting up of this assemblage and also the "foolish irresponsibility" of those at the Getty who authorised this purchase of an evidently looted antiquity of major importance.

This exhibition contained two important antiquities returned to Italy by the Getty Museum: the marble Griffins (marble table decoration) and the painted ceremonial basin (‘podanipter’: Bottini and Setari 2009, 44 cat.1 and 60 cat. 10). Initially when Renfrew saw the marbles in the Getty Museum, so striking and unexpected was the impression they made on him that he was at the time quite doubtful of their authenticity. "That is one of the prices which one pays when antiquities are clandestinely removed from their context of discovery".

And now, at the Palazzo Massimo I saw not only the Griffins and the remarkable painted marble basin but a whole assemblage of marble artefacts, including the painted calyx crater and the splendidly severe group of marble vessels (loutrophoros, epichysis, oinochoe) which apparently formed part of the original tomb group. A single de-contextualised artwork now had an important series of accompanying pieces. These added greatly to the significance of the extraordinary Griffin piece. But in addition they themselves became of vastly greater importance. [...] Now this wonderful assemblage of objects had been re-constituted. As a result we see not just a single, perhaps rather anomalous art work, but a whole remarkable assemblage of objects: the partial reconstruction of one of the most remarkable tomb groups recovered from Magna Graecia, safely assigned to the fourth century BC and to Ascoli Satriano.

So these important finds are in process of becoming to some extent re-contextualised after the disastrous disjuncture of the looting episode. Renfrew was prompted to believe that there is hope that more can be achieved in the near future. When in future investigations the location of the tomb looted between 1976 and 1978 is found it may prove possible to find associated fragments matching those in the Palazzo Massimo assemblage. This in turn would allow a fuller (though still partial) reconstitution of the association of objects. The objects remaining in the tomb will be more 'minor' antiquities, "since the tombaroli will have taken the obviously saleable pieces, but they might include many significant artefacts and associated materials". Renfrew argues that it should be emphasised that the great academic and cultural significance of the investigations which brought the finds back to Italy is not the act of restitution ("repatriation") but the successful act of re-contextualisation through the investigation of the passage of these items through the clandestine market in illicitly obtained goods.

Post-disjunctive forensic re-contextualisation

This triumphantly successful episode or re-contextualisation carries wider implications. For it exemplifies a process of recovery which can be highly significant on occasions when looted antiquities are successfully returned to their area of origin. Each act of looting represents a disastrous disjuncture, a destructive episode in which the artefacts are illicitly and clandestinely removed from their original context of discovery, with its rich and informative associations. The information crucial to the effective archaeological interpretation of the excavated assemblage is lost in this process: a disaster for any attempt to increase our understanding of the human past. For the interpretive process can only work when the context of discovery can be carefully researched.

There are occasions, however, when the looted antiquities can be subjected to forensic study (in both the legal and scientific senses) in such a way as to allow the partial reconstitution [my emphasis PMB] of that original context. This is well exemplified by the case of the Ascoli Satriano Griffins. This piece and the painted ceremonial basin reached the Getty from the same dealer (Medici). But it was the forensic work (in the historical and legal senses) which led to their reunion with the other marble pieces from their original find spot. And it was forensic work (in the scientific sense, namely the study of marble and of pigments in the painted decoration) which confirmed their original association and their association with the calyx crater and the other pieces which had remained in Puglia.

It is perhaps worth recognising this process and of giving it a specific designation: ‘PDFR’ or ‘post-disjunctive forensic re-contextualisation’. This refers to the possibility, after a catastrophic episode of looting (the ‘disjuncture’) to use investigative (forensic) techniques to bring about the restoration of aspect of the original context of discovery. In this way important information can be recovered, and the catastrophe of the looting at least partly mitigated.
The same approach has been applied, although not yet with great success, to the Euphronios calyx crater returned from the Metropolitan Museum (Silver 2009). Recently attempts have been made to apply it to the Early Cycladic marble figures looted in the late 1950s from the site of Kavos on the Cycladic island of Keros (Sotirakopoulou 2005; Papamichelakis and Renfrew 2010), For there are many cases where at least partial forensic re-contextualisation can be attempted after the disjuncture occasioned by looting.

Like Renfrew, I am convinced that cases of illicit trade should not end with the mere restitution of the "out-of-place artefact" to the country in which it was dug up. In my opinion, these cases do not finish there, they should each be followed back to identify who was responsible for the items getting there, which means doing that "forensic" footwork and tracing the route of the object back to source. I am less convinced however by Refrew's suggestion that the uniting of scattered objects in itelf is "re-contextualisation". Archaeological context cannot, surely, be reconstructed, recreated just by bringing two decontextualised objects together in the same room or exhibition case. There is more to it than that.

References
Bottini A. and Setari E. (eds.), 2009, I Marmi Dipinti di Ascoli Satriano, Roma, Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali.
Papamichelakis G. and Renfrew C., 2010, Hearsay about the ‘Keros Hoard’, American Journal of Archaeology 114, 181-5.
Silver V., 2009, The Lost Chalice, New York, William Morrow.
Sotirakopoulou P., 2005, The “Keros Hoard”: Myth or Reality? Searching for the Lost Pieces of a Puzzle, Athens, N.P. Goulandris Foundation.
Watson P. and Todeschini C., 2006, The Medici Conspiracy: the Illicit Journey of Looted Antiquities from Italy’s Tomb Raiders to the World’s Greatest Museums, New York, Public Affairs.

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Rome Displays Ancient Greek silverware

I was struck by the terminology used in the Associated Press article: "Rome to display ancient Greek silverware" March 19th.

A collection of ancient Greek silverware dating to the third century B.C. is going on display in Rome after being returned by the Metropolitan Museum in New York, officials said Friday [...] The pieces are known as "The Morgantina Treasure" after the name of the ancient Greek settlement where they were excavated, near what is now the Italian city of Aidone.


... Italy's aggressive campaign against illegal trafficking in antiquities...
... came back as part of a deal with the Met ...
...Italy has been aggressively campaigned (sic) to ....
... recover antiquities it says were looted ...
... secured the return of dozens of [...] artifacts in deals with museums...

[Those nasty "aggressive" foreigners, eh? But its a good job the Americans tricked them into agreeing to some kind of "deal"].

Somewhat more balanced and informative was Elisabetta Povoledo's "Antiquities Once Owned by Met Go On Display in Rome" New York Times March 19, 2010, which gives a bit more of the background to the Morgantina Treasure affair. "In 1981 and 1982 the Met bought the silver hoard from the American dealer Robert Hecht for $2.74 million. Mr. Hecht is currently standing trial in Rome on charges of conspiracy to traffic in looted artifacts". The objects were returned to Italy as part of a 2006 agreement between the government and the Metropolitan Museum. In recent years Italy has signed similar accords with other American institutions and archaeologists praised such restitutions "as indicative of a cultural sea change that recognizes that “archaeology is context,” according to Malcolm Bell III, a professor at the University of Virginia who played a crucial role in establishing the provenance of the objects, which led to their return".

The silver will be on display in Rome until May 23, when it will travel to Sicily, where it will eventually be exhibited in Aidone. It will return to the Met periodically in keeping with the 2006 agreement, which also provides for a continuing exchange of antiquities. Last month the Met installed a recently excavated ancient Roman silver dining set from Moregine, on the outskirts of Pompeii, sent by Italy in exchange for the silver.

Getty Trust to slash budget and lay off staff

The Los Angeles Times has an article about the Getty (Getty Trust to slash budget and lay off 97 workers April 27, 2009) about the effects of the current US economic crisis on the institution. Besides running a museum of classical 'art', pre-20th century European art and and photographic art some of it in a replica Roman villa (!), the J. Paul Getty Trust issues grants to other arts institutions and operates institutes dedicated to art research and global programs in art conservation.

The Trust has announced that under a newly adopted budget for the 2009-10 fiscal year that begins July 1, it will slash its workforce by 14%. Among other things the cuts will include reductions in the amount of money the institution spends on acquisitions of more ancient Greek and Roman antiquities. That at least is good news for the archaeological heritage of the “source countries”.

The ‘Silence Dogetty’ blog makes depressing reading, it is a blog for Getty Museum employees on the eve of the decisions concerning the staff cuts that were announced at the end of April, and immediately following. The posts are all anonymous. Those of us who have been in the same position (and who has not?) can sympathise. One comment (April 28th 7:13 AM) caught my eye:

Where could the Getty be at this point if we had not spent millions – MILLIONS – in antiquities acquisitions that have been returned to the countries of origin? It’s not like we didn’t know that these acquisitions were high risk. Talk about
bad stewardship of resources! Has anyone assumed responsibility? Only Marion [Marion True PMB] made the scapegoat - where was the Board? Not use wondering
now, but perhaps we can draw a lesson for the future about thinking about consequences down the line.

Consequences of course not just for the Getty and its staff.

Daniela Rizzo Identifies the Real Issue

In remarks made in a Rome court, Marion True, the former curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, defended herself last week against accusations that she knowingly bought antiquities that had been illegally excavated (Elisabetta Povoledo, ‘Getty Ex-Curator Testifies in Rome Antiquities Trial’, New York Times 20th March 2009.
In this stage of the long-running trial, the defence lawyers plan an object-by-object rebuttal of the prosecution’s case for each of the 35 artifacts that Ms. True approved for acquisition by the Getty which the Italians say were looted. This should prove interesting. The defence lawyers have begun their first day of questioning of archaeologist Daniela Rizzo, from the Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici dell'Etruria Meridionale, a prosecution witness who has been on the stand for about a dozen hearings over the past two years.

Responding to her remarks in the cross-examination, True said on Friday in court that “if ever there was an indication (sic) of proof” of an object coming from an illegal excavation, the Getty would eventually deaccession it and return the object. Ms. Rizzo pointed out in court that the issue here is not one of “repatriation” or “whose past” is being collected by foreign museums patronising the international no-questions-asked antiquities market. She remonstrated that Ms. True could have, and indeed should have, done more to prevent the trade in looted antiquities. “You are an archaeologist, a scholar and a great expert, and you had the knowledge to recognize objects that could have come from Etruria.” Perhaps “a closer, more direct collaboration with Italian archaeologists would have been more useful than to return objects over time,” Ms. Rizzo said. Absolutely true, this is the real issue here.