Both the Dallas Museum of art and an alleged vandal had a very bad Wednesday evening last night. Dallas police have said that a young man of 21 allegedly went up to the glass doors of the Museum, smashed his way in using a metal chair, and then began breaking display cases and their contents. And the damage was considerable.
A Black-figure panel amphora
One of the smashed objects was this amphora, and according to the DMA website, it dates to the 6th Century and depicts a battle between Achilles and Prince Memnon of Ethiopia.
Batah Kuhuh Alligator Gar Fish Effigy Bottle
Another smashed object was this lovely more recent effigy bottle depicting an Alligator Gar by the artist Chase Kahwinhut Earles.
Details released by police about the incident seem to indicate the perpetrator was just really frustrated after an argument with his girlfriend. Motion sensors inside the Museum alerted security to the intruder, but he apparently also called the police himself.
In a statement the DMA noted “This was an isolated incident perpetrated by one individual acting alone, whose intent was not theft of art or any objects on view . . . However, some works of art were damaged and we are still in the process of assessing the extent of the damages.”
So hopefully then enough fragments were recovered that these pieces may be put back together again. And if so, who knows, maybe the cool Alligator gar effigy bottle will become world famous, like the Mona Lisa, which suffered an attack from an attention-seeker last week. Remember, it was the theft of that painting in 1911 by artist Vincenczo Peruggia which first sent that work into art stardom.
Elizibeth Marlowe reviews The Brutish Museum for the International Journal of Cultural Property:
Dan Hicks’s new book, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution, has made a splash. Designated by the New York Times as one of the best art books of 2020, featured on blogs, podcasts, webinars, and in mainstream newspapers, the book and its author, the professor of contemporary archaeology at the University of Oxford and curator at Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, are suddenly everywhere. This Zoom-enabled ubiquity can be understood in the context of the larger historical reckonings of 2020 and 2021 – a global pandemic fueled by global capitalism, climate change, and incompetent governance; a breaking point in the long saga of police brutality against racial minorities and white indifference to it; a toppling of statues to colonialist and Confederate leaders around the world; and, as I was finishing the book, a final attempt to impeach a hate-mongering US president for fomenting rebellion against the very democratic institutions he swore to serve. In its passionately argued call for the restitution of cultural artifacts looted in one of the most notoriously brutal episodes of colonial violence, The Brutish Museums encapsulates the zeitgeist.
Prang Temple of Jayavarman IV (928-41), Koh Ker Cambodia (via)
I want to praise the terrific reporting done by Peter Whoriskey, Malia Politzer, Delphine Reuter, and Spencer Woodman. Their piece titled “Global Hunt for Looted Treasures Leads to Offshore Trusts” gets so many of the details about the illicit trade in antiquities right, and is thoroughly sourced and researched. The longread details the extent to which the super-rich have turned to offshore trusts and asset havens in order to avoid the increasing object-focused investigation and regulation of the art and antiquities trade. The piece is fantastic, with a beautiful kicker at the end, don’t miss it.
The great detail about the antiquities trade, the wealthy collectors who fuel it with money, and the damage done to sites and heritage are a real highlight of the reporting. Here’s a glimpse:
“Latchford’s infatuation with Khmer artwork coincided with a hot market for antiquities looted from Cambodia and neighboring Thailand and Laos. All three countries were part of the Khmer Empire, which flourished from the 9th to 15th centuries.
Beginning in the 1970s, amid the tumult of civil war and Pol Pot’s genocidal regime in Cambodia, the temple complexes of the Khmer Empire — including three designated by UNESCO as World Heritage sites — fell prey to massive bouts of ransacking. Organized networks, often headed by members of the military or the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot’s radical communist movement, broke statues from their pedestals. Dynamite blasted other relics loose. Entire walls were trucked away. Proceeds from this pillaging, experts say, helped fund the fighting. The looting continued into the 2010s.
One particular target was the ancient city of Koh Ker, with its 76 temples and aqueducts, statuary and a seven-level pyramid. The statues of Koh Ker were distinctive and revolutionary for their time: Artisans carved sandstone masterpieces that were intricately detailed, larger-than-life and often infused with dynamic movement.”
The Pandora papers are the name given a consortium of hundreds of news organizations around the world who have done a terrific job of making the investigation into the 12 million documents that reveals hidden wealth, tax avoidance, and even money laundering. The data was obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). It focuses on the collection of art of the late Douglas Latchford, and the efforts by Federal Prosecutors to seize looted art from him and even indict him personally. The documents reveal that these offshore trusts are the mechanism used when investigators and prosecutors investigate, seize, or forfeit this looted material and the proceeds. As investigation and prosecution has advanced in recent decades, so too have the strategies used to evade the law.
One of the interesting details of the piece is how many museums still have pieces linked to Latchford or his associates:
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Denver Art Museum
British Museum
Cleveland Museum of Art
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Asian Art Museum, San Fancisco
Brooklyn Museum, New York
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Walter Art Museum, Baltimore
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Many of these of course are museums which have often been connected to the illicit trade in art and antiquities. The piece also offers a rundown of responses by these museums which range from LACMA’s ‘no comment’; to the MET’s empty claim that it ‘is committed to the responsible acquisition of archaeological art’.
L’Atleta di Fano/Bronze Statue of a Victorious youth, at the Getty Villa
The Italian Senate’s Culture Commission has unanimously approved a resolution to renew the call for the return of the ‘Bronze Statue of a Victorious Youth‘ currently in the possession of the Getty Foundation at its Villa in Malibu. The call has also been taken up by the mayor of Fano, Massimo Seri. Seri has been a dogged champion for the return of the Bronze, noting that Italian forfeiture decisions give Italy a right of recovery, and even trying unsuccessfully to make the Bronze a discussion at the Italian meeting of the G20 later this year.
The resolution by the Italian Senate Committee was according the the Art Neewspaper crafted by Senator Margherita Corrado. The resolution will involve streamlining the efforts to seek the return of contested objects of cultural heritage:
[T]o assign a smaller pool of district magistrates to restitution cases “to allow for greater specialisation”, favour the training of magistrates in cultural heritage law, and encourage universities to teach legal archaeology in relevant courses. Furthermore, the government will collaborate with the Rai public broadcasting service to raise general awareness among citizens about restitution through programming, the resolution states.
It is not clear how that streamlining will link up with the current framework created by the 1970 UNESCO Convention, the companion 1995 UNIDROIT Convention, or the various bilateral agreements currently in place. Specialized training and courses at University are a welcome step, but Italy already has world class legal experts at its Universities, so I look forward to learning more about what this new initiative will actually look like. And I’m most interested in the impact of an Italian Senate Committee resolution, and if it will unlock funding and substantial change. If so, it could be a most welcome development for the obligations Italy and other Nations have under International Cultural Heritage Law.
The Art Newspaper also reported on what may be a more impactful mechanism, which would be to shut the Getty out of future efforts. In 2020 an internal culture ministry communication absolutely foreclosed the facilitation of the stunning Torlonia marbles collection: “After the refusal of the Getty Museum to recognise the sentence of the Court of Cassation [. . .] the Ministry has limited relations with the American museum to projects that have already been initiated.”
The ancient greek Bronze, likely made between 300-100 BCE was most likely hauled up by Italian fishermen in the 1960s, on a vessel based in the fishing town of Fano on the Adriatic Coast. A full account of the likely journey of the Bronze can be found in the terrific investigative book on lots of the acquisitions by the Getty Foundation, Chasing Aphrodite by Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino. Italy has persistently asked for its return, and the Forfeiture ruling in Italy’s Court of Cassation gives Italy a domestic right to the return of the marbles.
The only hurdle then would be to have a compatible decision which would be enforced by American Courts. As I wrote in a 2013 Piece for Cardozo’s Arts and Entertainment Law Journal, United States Federal Law has such a mechanism, Italy simply needs to request its application.
I have been enjoying immensely the excerpts from this book, Forget the Alamo, which have been appearing in the Houston Chronicle and Texas Monthly in recent weeks. Today the book is published, and you can order a copy from bookshop here if you are interested. And I think you should be.
It seems that Phil Collins (yes, that Phil Collins) has been an avid collector of Alamo knives, belts, and memorabilia for decades. As you might expect, his appetite for acquiring the artifacts has created a kind of Collins-centered Alamo artifact trade. And as with any collector-driven trade without safeguards, much of the material may be fake.
These writers are focused mainly on how politicians in Texas are trying to tell the story of the Alamo, and how efforts to incorporate a full and rich telling have been met with Republican in-fighting between the newest rising politician with the last name Bush, George P., and the state’s super-conservative Dan Patrick. But the excerpt in Texas Monthly has some really wild details. Like when you are acquiring material you have to just trust your gut:
Nesmith gave McDuffie some out-of-the-box advice: documents proving an artifact’s authenticity are important, but in the end, you have to trust your gut. “Why do you care what other people think?” McDuffie recalls Nesmith saying. “What do you think? What does your gut tell you?” It was advice McDuffie took to heart. “When I started listening to my own gut, that’s when I really started finding pieces that were just really great,” he says.
Another detail that was just astounding is a collector/dealer named Joseph Musso claims to have acquired not one but two artifacts he claims were owned by James Bowie. And how did he know? He just applied some cleaner to them and held them up to the sun to reveal the initials ‘JB’. Not once but twice! And this is apparently not ever how initials on older weapons get revealed!
Also, he felt the need to authenticate that this was the personal knife of Bowie, so what did he do? Took it to a psychic, as you do of course. But not just any psychic, he didn’t believe in the paranormal so he wanted a really really good psychic, the late Peter Hurkos who passed away in 1996. What’s better object history than an anonymous collector? A superstar deceased psychic!
Hurkos, who had worked on the Charles Manson and Boston Strangler cases, agreed to a meeting, Musso says. After Musso handed him a brown paper bag with the knife inside, Hurkos reportedly named the man who had sold the knife to Musso. Musso says he then laid out several photos facedown and Hurkos pointed at one, which Musso then flipped over. It was Bowie’s portrait; Hurkos declared the knife had belonged to him. To Musso, this was just another piece of evidence that would help him build a case for authentication.
The Alamo is enshrined on the World Heritage list, not by itself, and not because of a warped version of history, but as part of a mission system created by Catholic colonizers from the 17th century. The book has jumped to the top of my reading pile, and I’ll post a full review when I’m finished. It promises to tell a full accounting of how the State of Texas is trying to scrounge up the astounding $300 million needed to revitalize the Alamo and its surrounding area and create a museum full of Phil Collins’ and his dodgy Alamo purchases. While some of that material sounds as if it may actually be authentic. We absolutely can make an educated guess that a lot of the material will be fake, will be found out, and will be a colossal embarrassing waste of tax revenue. What might that funding go for instead? Solving the State’s homelessness crisis? Arts education? Environmental regulations?
I was forwarded a message that the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies and the Institute of African Studies, both at Columbia University, will hold an online live event on Friday called: The Benin Bronzes: Towards the Resolution of a Long-Standing Dispute?.
The University of Aberdeen has joined other forward-thinking institutions such as the Humboldt Forum museum in Berlin and announced that it will return a Benin bronze to the Nigerian government. In a statement the University announced the return because of its “extremely immoral” acquisition, and called on other Museums in the United Kingdom to conduct their own inquiry and follow their lead. I could not be more proud of my former University and I hope this move will continue to push other institutions holding on to their colonial treasures to pursue justice for these objects and the creator cultures which desire their return.
Benin’s cultural patrimony was looted by British forces in 1897 during a violent dispute in which a British delegation was attacked, and then a large Punitive Expedition was assembled and exiled the leader of benin Oba Ovonramwen. The British destroyed Benin City and took back to Britain bronze sculptures, brass plaques, and sculptures created with the lost wax process. The Kingdom of Benin as I understand had been a capable and vibrant trading partner with Europe for hundreds of years, but in the 19th Century drive to colonize Africa, the culture and independence of the Kingdom of Benin was an inconvenience for the British empire and so was eradicated and impoverished.
This return continues a rich history of repatriation by the University. Neil Curtis, who head’s Aberdeen University’s museums and special collections said in a statement:
The University of Aberdeen has previously agreed to repatriate sacred items and ancestral remains to Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and has a procedure that considers requests in consultation with claimants. An ongoing review of the collections identified the Head of an Oba as having been acquired in a way that we now consider to have been extremely immoral, so we took a proactive approach to identify the appropriate people to discuss what to do.
The University museum has a small but lovely collection, and its location, the former Marischal College in central Aberdeen is being renovated, so there were not large numbers of visitors that will be disappointed in not being able to see this object on display. But that should not diminish the just result here. This head will be returned and viewed in context at a new cultural complex in Benin City which will be designed by David Adjaye.
A couple of art museum intruders did their best Third Man impression in Houston last night. Two people allegedly broke into the Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens, a satellite museum run by the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. The individuals set off a security alarm at the Bayou Bend and were chased by a security guard. They then apparently hopped on a boat on Buffalo Bayou and evaded law enforcement long enough to scurry into a large storm drain and were able to escape.
The episode calls to mind the theft in 2000 when gunmen took works of art by Rembrandt and Renoir and then escaped the waterfront National Museum of Sweden by boat. There was also speculation in 2020 that thefts from the University of Oxford’s Christ Church Picture gallery were done by thieves who came and went by boat on either the River Cherwell or the River Thames near Oxford.
These unsuccessful Bayou bandits were not able to take anything of value according to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, but were able to lose a perfectly good boat in their escape attempt.
Here’s the local ABC13 affiliate report this morning:
On Tuesday a terrorist mob of hate-filled buffoons and strong men managed in a low brow, comical, yet utterly frightening way to break into the Capitol building of the United States. The seat of the U.S. Congress was knocked out of commission for hours on Tuesday. Amid the threats to members of Congress, their staff, security, press and others, the lawlessness was a scary opportunity for looters to make off with art and artifacts. So far it seems the major works of art in the building did not suffer any serious harm.
Sarah Bahr reported for the New York Times that the most serious damage appeared to be contained to:
A 19th-century marble bust of former President Zachary Taylor was flecked with what appeared to be blood. A picture frame was left lying on the floor, the image gone.
The photos and videos, some of them taken inside by the rioters themselves, were startling. One man crammed a framed photo of the Dalai Lama into his backpack, while another smoked marijuana in a room with maps of Oregon on the wall. A man in a leather jacket ripped up a scroll with Chinese characters.
Barbara A. Wolanin, a former curator for the Architect of the Capitol noted that while the major works of art appear to be mostly unharmed, the mob of terrorists “had no respect for any of these things . . . That’s what’s really scary.”
Offices were ransacked. Windows were smashed. And a small memorial to the late John Lewis was desecrated. Much of the loss and damage will now be up to the reported hundreds of Federal attorneys and investigators to determine in the coming weeks. For now American democracy remains the laughing stock of the world.
Two antiquities dealers have been arrested today in connection with what prosecutors allege was an antiquities fraud scheme from 2015-2020. The dealers were announced in an unsealed Indictment in Manhattan federal court today: Erdal Dere of Fortuna Fine Arts Ltd., and his alleged “associate and co-conspirator” Faisal Khan. The defendants are alleged to have defrauded buyers and brokers in the antiquities trade through the use of false provenance. The false histories allegedly fraudulently used the identities of deceased individuals. Fortuna is described in the indictment as a Manhattan-based gallery which sells “antiquities and numismatics”. The indictment here seems to be targeting the false information provided by the defendants to buyers and brokers, which included names of deceased collectors and fabricated documents. The indictment alleges the material originated from Asia and was given false history with fabricated documents.
The criminal offences alleged to have been violated include Wire Fraud under 18 U.S.C. §1343, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and identity theft under 18 U.S.C. 1028A.
In a press release today announcing the arrests, statements from the U.S. Attorney and FBI Assistant Director attempt to tie this investigation into broader efforts to regulate the art and antiquities trade. Audrey Strauss, the Acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York said:
The integrity of the legitimate market in antiquities rests on the accuracy of the provenance provided by antiquities dealers, which prevents the sale of stolen and looted antiquities that lack any legitimate provenance. As alleged, Erdal Dere and Faisal Khan compromised that integrity, and defrauded buyers and brokers of the antiquities they sold, by fabricating the provenance of those antiquities, and concealing their true history. Now, thanks to the FBI’s Art Crime Team, Dere and Khan are in custody and facing prosecution for their alleged crimes.
Also, FBI Assistant Director William F. Sweeney Jr. tied the investigation into safeguarding the objects themselves:
Antiquities and art allow us to see a piece of history from a world that existed hundreds and, in some cases, thousands of years ago. As alleged, the men who trafficked in fake documents and used dead people’s names to bolster their lies had no care for the precious items they sold and no regard for the people they defrauded.
The press release has asked for assistance from the public at NYArtCrime@fbi.gov .
The alleged actions certainly link up with much of the conduct that researchers and criminologists have shown to run through the trade in art and antiquities. The use of identity theft and wire fraud charges are noteworthy and likely particularly useful. The fraud charge seems to me to be a particularly useful avenue as it gets at the core wrong of so much of what dodgy dealers engage in, as I have argued elsewhere. Remember that these arrests and the information contained in the complaint are only allegations, and it will be up to the prosecutors to meet their burden if they are to convict these men.
