Author: Derek Fincham

Workshop on the Human Dimension of Cultural Heritage

A colleague in Florence has passed along this event at the European University Institute in Florence, this Friday December 18th. Looks to be a terrific event this week:

The Human Dimension of Cultural Heritage
Workshop organized by Professor Francioni
in cooperation with Professors T. Scovazzi and L. Pineschi
European University Institute, Florence
18 December 2009, Sala Europa (Villa Schifanoia)

  • 10.00 Welcome to the participants and introduction to the workshop by Professors Francesco Francioni, Laura Pineschi, and Tullio Scovazzi
  • 10.10-11.00
    • Francesco Francioni (European University Institute), The Contribution of International Law to the Development of a Human Dimension of Cultural Heritage
    • Tullio Scovazzi (Università di Milano-Bicocca), Recent Developments in the Fields of Intangible and Underwater Cultural Heritage
    • Ana Vrdoljak (University of Western Australia), Illicit Traffic of Cultural Objects and Human Rights
  • Coffee break
  • 11.15-12.00
    • Federico Lenzerini (Università di Siena), Indigenous Peoples Cultural Rights vs. Cultural Heritage”: A Hard-to-Settle Tension?
    • Alessandro Chechi (European University Institute), Cultural Cooperation: A Revolutionary Tool for the Safeguarding of the Common Heritage of Humankind?
    • Uladzislau Belavusau (European University Institute), Freedom of Expression, Art and Pornography
    • General discussion
  • 12.15-13.00
    • Patrizia Vigni (Università di Siena), Claims To Discovered Shipwrecks: Restitution, Return or Something Else?
    • Valentina S. Vadi (Maastricht University), The Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage and International Investment Law
    • Nicola Ferri (Università di Milano-Bicocca), The Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage According to the General Assembly Resolution
    • General Discussion
  • Lunch Break
  • 14.30-15.15
    • Adriana Bessa Rodrigues (European University Institute), No Culture, NoHeritage: The International Regime on Access to Genetic Resources and Benefit-Sharing and Potential Threats to the Preservation of Local Cultures
    • Sabrina Urbinati (Università di Milano-Bicocca), (on intangibile heritage)
    • Mery Ciacci (European University Institute), The EU Ratification of the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions: New Challenges and New Implications for the EU
    • General discussion
  • 15.30-16.30
    • Riccardo Pavoni (Università di Siena), Developing Individual Criminal Responsibility for Wartime Offences against Cultural Property: The Italian Measures Implementing the Second Protocol to the 1954 Hague Convention
    • Micaela Frulli (Università di Firenze), International Criminal Law to the Protection of Cultural Heritage
    • Robert Peters (European University Institute), Defining Common Grounds in the Trophy Art Debate between Germany and Russia
    • Andrzej Jakubowski (European University Institute), Human and Cultural Heritage Aspects of State Succession: The Case of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
  • General discussion and final remarks by Professors Francesco Francioni, Laura Pineschi, and Tullio Scovazzi
Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Ceremony for Egyptian Relics

Pictured here are French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak during a ceremony today.  The French returned some relics taken from Egypt in recent years which were purchased by the Louvre in 2000 and 2003.  Egypt had made a dramatic call for the immediate return of the objects, ordering the removal of all French archaeologists from Egyptian sites if the objects were not returned.  They were returned quickly.

Egypt demanded the return of the stolen fragments in October and broke off relations with the Louvre. Afterwards, France agreed to hand back the works, which are from Luxor’s Valley of the Kings.  “France is particularly committed to fighting the illegal trafficking of works of art,” Sarkozy said, in a statement.  The other four artefacts were to be given to the Egyptian embassy in Paris during Mubarak’s visit to Paris, French officials said.  The French president emphasized that the Louvre museum had acted in good faith when it purchased the artefacts and said that doubts were only raised in November during archaeological work at the site.  Egypt had produced photographs from the mid-1970s showing the fragments in place on the tomb’s wall.

  1. AFP: France returns stolen Louvre relics to Egypt, December 14, 2009.
Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Italy Recovers 1,700 Looted Antiquities

The AP is reporting that Italian authorities have uncovered a looting network which raided tombs outside Naples and Venice.  The objects were then illegally exported to market nations like the United States.

During more than a year of investigations, authorities recovered nearly 1,700 statues, vases and other artifacts dating from pre-Roman times to the heyday of the empire. Police flagged 19 people for possible investigation by prosecutors.  The artifacts were mainly dug out from tombs in the areas around Naples and Venice and included a bronze bust of the emperor Augustus, customs police in Rome said.  Part of the loot had been smuggled to the United States to be sold to collectors, they said.  The Italians said they worked with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in New Haven, Connecticut, to recover 47 ceramic and bronze statutes that had been looted from a tomb in southern Italy dating between the 6th and 5th centuries B.C.

  1. The Associated Press: Italian police recover hoard of looted artifacts, Associated Press, December 11, 2009.
Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Hawass Wants Rosetta Stone Loan

“We are not pirates of the Caribbean – we are a civilised country”

So says Zahi Hawass in calling for the British Museum to loan the Rosetta Stone to Egypt. The British Museum has said the museum’s trustees will consider the request. Hawass wants the loan in contemplation of the opening of Egypt’s Grand Museum at Giza, in 2013. Other prominent objects Hawass would like returned on loan:

  • a statue of Hemiunu, the architect of the Great Pyramid at Giza (Germany);
  • the bust of Anchhaf, builder of the Chepren Pyramid (Boston);
  • a painted Zodiac from the Dendera temple (Louvre); ann a statue of Ramesses II (Turin).

The requests are part of a series of prominent requests by Hawass in recent months.

  1. Rosetta row ‘would end with loan’, BBC, December 8, 2009.
Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Update on the Drouot Arrests

The AP reported yesterday that charges have been filed against nine employees of the Drouot auction house. French authorities last week found a stolen work by Gustave Courbet.

An auctioneer and eight commission agents were given preliminary charges, including ”organized theft,” the prosecutor’s office said.
Three others detained last week in the police raids on Drouot, its warehouses and homes of employees were released with no charges filed against them.
When the bust was announced last week, there was initial confusion about which Courbet work had been recovered. The painting — stolen several years ago from a collection whose owner had recently died — was not clearly identified, and the heir had confused it with another work, an official close to the inquiry said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because the case is ongoing.
Police initially identified the recovered Courbet work as ”La Vague” (The Wave), worth euro900,000 ($1.3 million), but officials said Monday it was actually ”Paysage marin sous un ciel d’orage” (Marine Landscape Under a Stormy Sky), worth about euro100,000.
The stolen Courbet — one of several paintings by the convention-smashing realist master with a stormy ocean theme — was found at the home of one of the commission agents being investigated. Other pieces recovered in the sweep included artworks, frames and furniture.
Under French law, preliminary charges give the judge more time to investigate and determine whether to send the case to trial. Three commission agents were jailed in the case, with the prosecutor’s office accusing them of deep involvement in thefts dating back to 2001.
The auctioneer was released pending the investigation with the stipulation that he stop hosting sales.

  1. The Associated Press, Preliminary Charges vs 9 in Paris Auction Sweep, The New York Times, December 7, 2009.
Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

César Baldaccini and the Definition of Art

One of the ways criminal defendants can often try to evade “art crime” offenses is by challenging the definitions of art.  The most recent example is the Piedoie brothers.  The two are accused of pawning off 130 of their own creations as genuine works by César Baldaccini Baldaccini.  Baldaccini died in 1998, and was known for his sculptures which were made by compressing consumer goods like cars or refrigerators into metallic blocks, like this one.

During a trial this week, the brothers will attempt to argue that made these César works as a kind of imitation, but not fakes.  In a report by a French magistrate, the “lack of seriousness” of several auction houses was blamed, and the French prosecutor has expressed dismay that the French art market has been “flooded” with these kinds of fakes since the artist’s death in 1998. 

The investigation into these forgeries began in 2001 by mistake:

Police in the south of France searching for stolen art works, including a Chagall and a Magritte, bugged several suspects in a world of high-living, cocaine-taking art lovers and dealers. They stumbled on evidence that Eric Piedoie was flooding the Côte d’Azur with fake Césars.

The appearance of so many unknown works enflamed feelings within César’s family and entourage. The artist’s wife Rosine Baldaccini and daughter Anna Puységur Baldaccini were disputing his inheritance with his mistress Stéphanie Busuttil. Each side accused the other of selling off works before the dispute was settled in court.
Mme Busuttil was allegedly approached by the Piedoie brothers to sign certificates of authentification for some of their works. She says she did so in good faith: a claim accepted by the prosecution.
In other words, both César’s own mistress and the art critic who catalogued his work could not tell authentic “compression” sculptures from fake ones knocked off in a garage. Awkward questions therefore arise. Were César’s “compression sculptures” really art? Are the Piedoie brothers con-artists or true, accidental artists themselves?

 

  1. On trial: the question of what is modern art, The Independent, December 1, 2009.
Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

The FBI Returns pre-Columbian Antiquities

Pre-Colombian pieces found in retirement community head homeOn Tuesday the FBI announced it was returning 150 pre-Columbian artifacts which had been smuggled out of Peru and Ecuador.  The objects were found in the home of a recently deceased man, who had apparently been a collector of the antiquities. 

The 153 pieces of jewelry as well as pottery, baskets, sculptures and figurines were found last April in the home of a man after he died in his retirement community in Avon Park, Florida, according to the bureau’s Miami field office.
Experts indicated that the artifacts, presented in a Miami ceremony to representatives of the Peru and Ecuador governments, were between 500 and 3,200 years old, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said.
The FBI teamed up with specialists from Florida International University who determined that 141 of the pieces originated in what is present-day Peru, and the other 12 came from neighboring Ecuador.
“These artifacts represent the cultural heritage of Peru and Ecuador. They can never be replaced and should be on display for many to see, not locked away,” said the FBI’s chief agent in Miami, John Gillies.
“We are honored to return these items to their rightful owners,” Gillies added.

These announcements have become almost routine, with an estimated 2,600 items recovered just since 2004.  

  1. AFP: FBI returns smuggled artifacts to Peru, Ecuador, Dec. 1, 2009.
Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

First British Repatriation after Nazi-Era Law

The British Library will be returning the Benevento Missal, which was stolen from a cathedral during World War II.  The British Library has possessed the book since 1947.  This is the first repatriation of an actual object under the Holocaust (Return of Cultural Objects) Act which applies only to claims during the Holocaust era, 1933-45.  The Spoliation Advisory Panel recommended the missal should be returned four years ago to the cathedral.

It was brought to Britain by an intelligence officer, Captain Douglas Ash, who bought it in Naples in 1944 and later auctioned it in London.
Captain Ash wrote in a letter: “I bought an old book in Naples in April 1944, knowing nothing about it, except that it was very old, being described by the second-hand bookseller as molto antico … I am interested in anything old and have a collection of swords and armour, but this book is completely beyond me.”
How the book reached Naples is unknown, but the cathedral argued successfully that it vanished from its library after it was bombed in September 1943, directly relating the loss to “circumstances of the mayhem of war”. Jeremy Scott, of the law firm Withers, who represented the cathedral on a pro bono basis, welcomed the new law. “I will be submitting a renewed claim [on the cathedral’s behalf] after it comes into force,” he said.

By all accounts this was the right thing to do with the missal.  Yet the wrongful purchase here had little connection with the holocaust, only during the “holocaust era”.  It was a sale which occurred in the wake of armed conflict, and presumably the missal was appropriated in an effort to remove valuable objects from the cathedral in anticipation of allied military action. 

Will this signal a creep toward increased repatriation for objects in other institutions, and for other historical periods?  This law has a limited scope, and will expire in 10 years.  In the United States much of the legal groundwork for repatriation first came in the context of holocaust-era claims via repatriation lawsuits.  It will be interesting to see whether a similar development may take hold in the U.K. in the wake of this law and the coming claims.   

  1. Ben Hoyle, British Library to return Benevento Missal under Nazi loot law – Times Online, The Times, December 1, 2009.
Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

A Profile of the Art Market

The Economist discusses the current state of the art market:

The current downturn in the art market is the worst since the Japanese stopped buying Impressionists at the end of 1989, a move that started the most serious contraction in the market since the second world war. This time experts reckon that prices are about 40% down on their peak on average, though some have been far more volatile. But Edward Dolman, Christie’s chief executive, says: “I’m pretty confident we’re at the bottom.”
What makes this slump different from the last, he says, is that there are still buyers in the market, whereas in the early 1990s, when interest rates were high, there was no demand even though many collectors wanted to sell. Christie’s revenues in the first half of 2009 were still higher than in the first half of 2006. Almost everyone who was interviewed for this special report said that the biggest problem at the moment is not a lack of demand but a lack of good work to sell. The three Ds—death, debt and divorce—still deliver works of art to the market. But anyone who does not have to sell is keeping away, waiting for confidence to return.

Good thing then that other buyers have appeared in Russia, the Middle East, and China.  In fact China has increasingly used the art market to seek repatriation:

The sensitivity of the subject was shown up in February this year when the collection built up by the late Yves St Laurent, a French fashion designer, and his partner Pierre Berge was put up for sale. The auction included bronze heads of a rat and a rabbit, two pieces that had been looted from the imperial palace of Yuanmingyuan by French and British soldiers in the opium wars in 1860. The heads, part of a series of 12 figures which dominated a zodiac fountain in the palace garden, had not even been designed by a Chinese artist but by a Jesuit priest from Venice who lived in the imperial capital. All the same, their provenance and history made their sale controversial.
The government let it be known that it did not approve of a public sale of the precious bronze heads in the West and did not want its citizens to take part. Even so, both the winning bidder and several underbidders turned out to be Chinese. One, a London-based businessman, had been planning to present the bronzes to the Chinese government as a gift. The buyer, Cai Mingchao, who secured the two pieces for EURO 31m ($46m), turned out to be an adviser to a Chinese foundation which seeks to retrieve plundered treasures. He announced very publicly soon afterwards that he would not pay up. The heads were quietly returned to Mr Berge. The government has since announced that it wants to catalogue all the pieces looted from Yuanmingyuan, which some believe is the first step in a campaign to reclaim them.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com