Category: Repatriation

"Rarely have lawyers been paid so much to lose so much."

Hugh Eakin Reviews ‘Chasing Aphrodite’. An excerpt:

I recently reviewed tax filings by the Getty Trust showing that it paid $16 million for outside legal services between mid-2005 and mid-2007 alone—a period during which it had handed its Italian dealings to a team of lawyers from a high-end Los Angeles firm. (This does not include the $750,000 that, according to Felch and Frammolino, the Getty paid to a “crisis management” firm, also in Los Angeles, for “largely unheeded advice.”) A truer estimate, though, would also have to take account of the hundreds of millions dollars’ worth of art—far more than the Italians would have been contented with in 2002—that was finally turned over to Rome and Athens, leaving the Getty Villa a pallid shadow of its former self. Rarely have lawyers been paid so much to lose so much.

  1. Hugh Eakin, “What Went Wrong at the Getty,” New York Review of Books, June 23, 2011, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jun/23/what-went-wrong-getty/?pagination=false.
Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

La Dea di Aidone

An Aerial View of Morgantina

Jason Felch reports from Aidone, Italy on the goddess formerly known as the “Getty Aphrodite” returned to Italy:

Since the Getty’s controversial purchase of the statue in 1988 for $18 million, painstaking investigations by police, curators, academics, journalists, attorneys and private investigators have pieced together the statue’s journey from an illicit excavation in Morgantina in the late 1970s to the Getty Museum. 

The Getty returned the goddess to Italy this spring, and a new exhibition showing the statue and other repatriated antiquities from a private American collector and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York was inaugurated here last week. 

The goddess’ new home is a 17th century Capuchin monastery that now serves as the archaeological museum in Aidone, a hilltop village of about 6,000 residents. The cozy museum, which holds up to 150 visitors at a time, contains the most important objects discovered in the nearby ruins of Morgantina.

Someone wrote to me this morning and said that we could offer an apt byline for this story by calling it ‘what comes around goes around’. That may be right, and the law leaves it up to Italy to decide where and how this object should be displayed. One hopes that the original looters will come forward in the coming months to reveal where they unearthed the object in the late 1970’s.

One also wonders whether such attention have been lavished on the statue had the statue remained at the Aidone museum after it was unearthed by archaeologists? Do we need to reconfigure how the public thinks about antiquities, encouraging them to visit them much nearer their original context? Does it matter how many will appreciate and can enjoy repatriated works if they are where they ‘belong’? How important is viewing the goddess in her context, even if far fewer people may seek her out?

In much the same way works of art like Munch’s The Scream, or even the Mona Lisa became widely known after their theft it seems likely that more visitors will visit the small Aidone museum; and one hopes help buttress the local economy in a more lasting way which will forge connections encouraging the locals to act as good stewards to other objects and information Morgantina may hold. The Getty certainly will not be acquiring any recently looted antiquities from Morgantina any time soon and one doubts very much of that $18 million purchase price made its way to the actual looters—those profits seemingly went to the dealers closer to the Getty.

  1. Jason Felch, “Goddess statue: Once a Getty prize, Italy’s goddess statue remains a mystery,” L.A. Times, May 29, 2011, http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-culture-exchange-20110529,0,6748034.story.
Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

" In effect the goddess has been returned to those who looted her. . ."

La dea di Morgantina

Catherine Schofield Sezgin interviews Jason Felch, co-author of “Chasing Aphrodite”. An excerpt:

ARCA Blog: When you were in Italy, did you wonder if anyone in the crowd had made money from selling “Aphrodite” to the Getty? How well were you able to explain this transaction in your book? 

Jason: Yes, there is plenty of irony here. In effect, the goddess has been returned to those who looted her, broke her into pieces and smuggled her out of the country for profit. Aidone is a very small town, and I was told that several of the locals who attended the ceremonies used to be clandestini — the Sicilian term for looters.

Read the full interview here.

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

The Getty Returns a Work to Goudstikker Heir Marei von Saher

The Getty has voluntarily agreed to return a work it purchased—in good faith they claim—in 1972. According to  Mike Boehm’s report in the L.A. Times, the Getty stands as the first North American Museum to voluntarily return a work to the Heir of Jacques Goudstikker. The work, Landscape With Cottage and Figures, by Mieter Molijn, dates to the 1640s. It is unclear how the disputed painting came to light, but the return of this work stands in contrast to the ongoing dispute between von Saher and the Norton Simon:

The Norton Simon Museum’s “Adam and Eve” also were among the Goudstikker-owned works the Allies repatriated to Holland after the war. But the Dutch government subsequently sold them to an heir of Russian nobility who claimed that his family, the Stroganoffs, had a prior claim on them, having owned them before they were seized by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution. Goudstikker bought them at an auction in 1931, then lost them to the Nazis. Whether “Adam and Eve” had belonged to the Stroganoffs during the early 1900s is part of the dispute between Von Saher and the Norton Simon Museum. The museum’s founder and namesake bought them from the Stroganoff heir for $800,000 in 1971; the museum has had them appraised at $24 million. 

In the “Adam and Eve” case, a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled in 2007 that Von Saher had filed her claim too late to meet the three-year statute of limitations for suing to recover allegedly stolen art, and that a 2002 California law suspending the statute of limitations for Holocaust-era art-restitution claims filed through the end of 2010 was unconstitutional because it intruded on the federal government’s sole prerogative to set foreign policy and war policy. 

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed in 2009 that the California law was unconstitutional, although it directed the trial judge to reconsider whether Von Saher nevertheless has a legitimate claim under the regular statute of limitations. 

Von Saher has appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court in hopes of reinstating the voided state law. The high court indicated in October that it is considering whether to take up the case, but first it asked the U.S. solicitor general to file a brief giving the federal government’s view. Kaye, the Von Saher attorney, said the brief hasn’t been filed yet.

So the Getty has voluntarily returned the work to the dispossessed heir, and should be praised for doing the right things. Yet that decision surely was much easier given that the painting was never displayed. The Norton Simon has decided to fight to retain possession of its disputed works—which are more valuable, and have a much more complex history, touching both the Bolshevik revolution and World War II.

  1. Mike Boehm, Getty Museum: Getty Museum agrees to return painting looted by Nazis, L.A. Times, March 29, 2011, http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-getty-painting-20110329,0,2892909.story (last visited Mar 29, 2011).
Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Asking (politely) for the Fano Athlete

The Bronze Athlete

Governor Gian Mario Spacca, president of the region of Marche where this bronze athelete was brought ashore in 1964, visited Los Angeles to seek the return of the object. Catherine Sezgin reports on the visit for ARCA here and here.

The context for the visit is an ongoing seizure action in Italy which the Getty is appealing. Even if the appeals process runs its course, and the object is ordered returned, it appears unlikely that a U.S. court will enforce the seizure order.

And so into that context comes a friendly visit from Spacca saying, as reported by Jason Felch in the L.A. Times:

“We are not here to declare war on the Getty,” Spacca said in a statement to The Times. “We are here to resolve the dispute in a way that will benefit the museum, the people of Italy, and most important, art lovers around the world.” 

Getty spokesman Ron Hartwig described the meeting as “a good discussion” but said serious talks would be possible only after the court case ends and would need to involve the Italian Ministry of Culture. 

“We were clear at the start of our conversation that the statue of a “Victorious Youth,” known as the “Getty Bronze,” was not a matter for discussion since legal issues regarding this object are ongoing in Italy.”

  1. Jason Felch, Antiquities: Italian official seeks return of ‘Getty Bronze’, L.A. Times, March 27, 2011, http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-getty-bronze-20110328,0,7566636.story (last visited Mar 29, 2011).
Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

The Morgantina Goddess Returns to Aidone

Greeted by the Carabinieri, townspeople and a brass band:

Jason Felch reports for the LA Times:

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. 

It took dramatic evidence of the statue’s illicit origins — and an alleged link to organized crime — to destroy the credibility of that cover story and persuade the Getty’s board to return the statue.
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’ discovery of the photos is described in a forthcoming book about the dispute. “Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World’s Richest Museum” was written by this reporter and former Times staff writer Ralph Frammolino, and will be published May 24 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Should be a fascinating work.

  1. Jason Felch, Getty’s Aphrodite is returned to Sicily, L.A. Times, March 23, 2011, http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-return-of-aphrodite-20110323,0,6998689.story (last visited Mar 23, 2011).
Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

U.S. Initiates Forfeiture

The Mask on Display in St. Louis

As expected the United States has initiated a civil forfeiture action over the Ka Nefer Nefer mask purchased by the St. Louis Art Museum in 1998. The government holds a number of important advantages in these forfeiture proceedings, which is why the Museum brought a suit last month to preclude a forfeiture, based on a lapsed five-year limitations period. As the government’s complaint explains, the mask was professionally excavated, so this is not a case of looting and destruction of context. Rather the mask was either stolen later or was given to one of the archaeologists working at the site.

The government’s filing outlines what it suspects happened next: that the mask was stolen sometime between 1966, when it was shipped off to Cairo for an exhibit, and 1973, when the Egyptian Museum in Cairo ran an inventory and discovered it missing. Box number 54, in which it had been packed, was empty. 

In 2006, Egyptian officials learned the St. Louis museum had bought the mask from Phoenix Ancient Art, in New York. 

The museum has said it thoroughly researched the mask’s ownership history before buying it, and was given no indication that there were questions about how it arrived in the U.S. 

The museum’s research showed the mask was part of the Kaloterna private collection during the 1960s, before it was purchased in Switzerland by a Croatian collector, Zuzi Jelinek, who then sold the mask to Phoenix Ancient Art in 1995. 

It also maintains in its lawsuit that the government’s statute of limitations for seizing the mask has expired.

  1. U.S. demands art museum hand over Egyptian artifact | Reuters, Reuters, March 16, 2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/17/us-museum-mask-idUSTRE72G06E20110317?feedType=RSS&feedName=domesticNews (last visited Mar 17, 2011).
  2. Jennifer Mann, Government sues to seize St. Louis museum’s mummy mask, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 17, 2011, http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/article_98d72244-9976-5b8a-a73d-5c211c6a771b.html (last visited Mar 17, 2011).
Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Moctezuma’s Crown

This Headdress the “Mona Lisa of anthropology” may be returning to Mexico for the first time in 500 years

Mexico and Austria may be nearing an agreement which would allow this stunning crown to be returned to Mexico. This feaethered headdress, or kopilli ketzalli currently sits in the Vienna Museum of Ethnology. It was sent there by Hernán Cortés in the mid 16th century as a gift to Charles V, the Kindg of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire. There are over 400 Quetzal feathers in the headdress. The gold helmet attached to the feathers was melted down. But there are obstacles to the return of the headdress:

Two issues need to be resolved before a loan can be arranged. The first hurdle is legal, since there is a long-standing Mexican law that forbids the re-export of any archaeological material from the country. Initially it was hoped that the headdress would not be regarded as archaeological, but the Vienna museum needs assurance that its return would not be blocked. A special presidential decree on the headdress was discussed, but this might not be legally binding on future presidents. The Mexican government is now considering a change in the law on the re-export of antiquities.
Austrian and Mexican conservators also need to agree to the loan. The headdress was remounted on a display board in 1992 and cannot be easily detached. Conservators are reluctant to do so until a decision has been made on a new backing. This will depend on whether it has to be fit to travel. The feather vanes are fragile so a vibration-free case would have to be devised.

  1. Martin Bailey, Heading back to Mexico a step at a time, The Art Newspaper, March 10, 2011, http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/Heading+back+to+Mexico+a+step+at+a+time+/23243 (last visited Mar 10, 2011).
Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Why Get so Worked up over the Ka Nefer Nefer Mask?

I’m a bit puzzled by all the criticism being directed at the St. Louis Museum of Art. The looting of antiquities destroys archaeological context, but the Ka Nefer Nefer mask was not looted. Both the Museum and those who would have the mask returned to Egypt agree that the mask was professionally excavated in 1952. Egypt has claimed the mask was stolen from a storehouse at some point, while the Museum argues it researched the provenance and found no information to indicate it had been looted. One may argue that the acquisition procedures of museums are generally lacking. And we can certainly criticize the imperfect procedures implemented by the museum to ask questions of the mask in this case—though they did ask some questions in good faith. Though there was no export permit for the mask, but I’m not sure that justifies the criticism of the museum for its suit against the federal government. The museum is only asserting that the Federal government sat on its hands and waited too long to bring a forfeiture claim. This is a perfectly reasonable cause of action, particularly given the enormous benefits to the government and the claimant when a civil forfeiture is brought.

If you are upset that no claims were brought earlier, why not criticize the U.S. government for waiting so long to bring a forfeiture proceeding? I think one of the frustrating things about these repatriation issues are what I’d call the tone deaf nature of much of the rhetoric irrespective of the merits of the claims. This claim is not the same as every other repatriation claim, they all have their strengths and weaknesses. And though I’d agree that many objects need to go back, not all of them do. Universal repatriation should not be the preferred remedy. The Museum here certainly could have checked closer into the history of the mask, but Egypt also didn’t realize the mask was missing. As Mark Durney pointed out, this might be a good reason for renewed emphasis on documenting objects which are in storage. If you don’t, it will be difficult to leverage the trade into ending the sale of objects completely, and that argument loses persuasiveness when the same rhetoric is used for each and every dispute, irrespective of its strengths and weaknesses.

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

Yale and Peru Finalize Agreement

On Friday, Yale University signed an agreement with Peru over the disposition of objects removed from Machu Picchu nearly a century ago. The agreement, which will avoid continued litigation will create a joint Center for the Study of Inca Culture in Cusco, Peru. The center will preserve the artifacts, make the objects available for study and display, and promote research. This looks to be a beneficial agreement for all the parties involved. There will be a new joint research center in Cusco, pairing Yale University with the University of San Antonio Abad del Cusco. And though the objects will no longer be in Connecticut, the objects will be available for future study, and will still be cared for. And finally, Peru’s suit against Yale is no longer necessary to resolve the dispute. A memorandum of understanding was created in November, but Peru had backed out of agreements in the past with Yale. This time though, the dispute looks to be resolved for good.

As always, the best place for coverage of the dispute is the Yale University paper, and reporter Sarah Nutman is writing a series on the returns:

Since Yale and Peruvian officials signed a Memorandum of Understanding outlining the return of the objects last November, both sides have been eager to underscore the goodwill between the two parties. The document, they say, allows Peru and Yale to move beyond the mistrust that has often characterized their interactions over the century-long struggle — it has eliminated any underlying disagreement. 
For the most part, the two sides agree. Peru will repatriate thousands of pieces. Some will arrive in time for the centennial this July; the rest will be in Peru by December 2012. But there remain aspects about which Yale and Peru tell very different stories. For instance, how the pieces came to stay in New Haven for so long, and why, after nearly a decade of bickering, Yale simply offered to cede them to Peru.

  1. Sarah Nutman, Yale and University of Cusco sign collaboration agreement, Yale Daily News, February 11, 2011, http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2011/feb/11/yale-and-university-cusco-sign-collaboration-agree/ (last visited Feb 14, 2011).
  2. Sarah Nutman, Returning to Machu Picchu, Yale Daily News, February 14, 2011, http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2011/feb/14/returning-to-machu-picchu/ (last visited Feb 14, 2011).
Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com