Bonhams Pots in the News Again

.
Well, there's a turn up for the books. The Independent Crime (not "Arts") section has an interesting article by Mark Hughes ("Bonhams: Lots of trouble on New Bond Street", Wednesday, 27 October 2010) subtitled "Allegations of dirty tricks are haunting the leading auction house [...] the strange saga of the Medici Dossier". What really raised my interest was the first paragraph:

On a Wednesday afternoon earlier this month, lots 94 and 95 went under the hammer at Bonhams auction house in New Bond Street, London. The items, a 1,600-year-old Attic jar and a Greek jug from 350BC, were listed for sale at between £2,000 and £4,000. Only one of them sold. Lot 95, the jug, intricately decorated to resemble a man's head, fetched £3,600. But the buyer pulled out after learning what distinguished lots 94 and 95 from the rest of the 436 items under the hammer that day: both are believed to have passed through the hands of Giacomo Medici, an Italian art dealer who ran one of the world's biggest antiquities trafficking networks.

It is a shame the buyer did not take the trouble to look more closely into what they were buying before they decided to place a bid, isn't it? But what a development, here I was thinking the buyers who buy this stuff don't give a monkeys, and it turns out one DID.

Hughes descriptively labels the "Medici Dossier" as a collection of documents "whose very name etches anguish across the faces of auctioneers around the globe". As well it might.

Selling goods once owned by a notorious art thief would undoubtedly sour the reputation of Bonhams, one of the most reputable auction houses in the world. But Bonhams was aware of the potential criminal link between lots 94 and 95. Days before the auction the house received an email from an eminent academic alerting them to the questionable provenance of the lots, but it pressed ahead with the sale.

OOops. If that is indeed the case, perhaps they thought nobody would notice, that their clients would not be able to check, that no collector worth his salt would be reading the arts newspapers or become aware of any of the web traffic on these items. Well, at least one did and I assume they are not very pleased with Bonhams for not being more transparent.

While it would be terribly nice to think that a gentleman collector was unwilling to sully his collection with an item of somewhat dubious provenance, perhaps the more prosaic reality was that having paid all that cash for this thing and then finding out what was being said about it, they realised that (bar a deaf-dumb-blind bed-ridden collector from Kazakhstan) thety might have trouble selling the object again and getting their money back (like the owner of the Sevso Treasure). Poorly researched antiquities may be false investments.