Federal Art Theft Prosecution

The trial of Robert Mardirosian has begun. For much more on the initial arrest of the former attorney, see my earlier summary here, and more from Donn Zaretsky.

Assistant US Attorney Jonathan Mitchell argued the defendant was “caught red-handed”, while the defense attorney argued his client only wanted to collect a finder’s fee for the works.
He’s accused of theft under the National Stolen Property Act for concealing and possessing stolen works, including this work by Cezanne, Pitcher and Fruits. This and six other works were stolen from Michael Bakwin in 1978, but had been entrusted to Mardirosian by the thief. The works had been shifted all over the world from Massachusetts to Switzerland to London to Monaco. I’ll have more on the trial when the jury reaches a decision.
Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Career Update

Apologies for the light posting in recent days. I’m in the process of moving from Aberdeen in Scotland to New Orleans, where I’ll be taking up a teaching fellowship for two years at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law. I’ll be continuing my cultural heritage research, and this blog as well, but I’ll also be working on a soon-to-be launched resource coordinated by some very good people at the London School of Economics, which I’ll be talking about as we get closer to launching the site.

Many thanks to all of you who read, and are kind enough to send along articles, your work, and advice. I hope to resume regular posting this week.

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

Does Energy Trump Heritage in the Four Corners

Kirk Johnson of the New York Times has an excellent article about a disheartening subject: the threat energy projects pose to Native American heritage in the West. Its a familiar story: not enough funding for surveys and archaeological research, pressures from development and expanding populations, plus the problem of illegal looting.

Above is a picture from the piece, of Chimney Rock Archaeological Area. Federal land managers are forced to make difficult judgment calls, considering using portions of funds for energy development to help safeguard and protect sites.

As the piece notes, “A spokesman for the Independent Petroleum Association of America, which represents drilling companies, described helping defend historical sites as good for business, especially if financing volunteers created more contact and understanding between local residents and energy explorers.”

That seems like a big lump to swallow and a dangerous compromise of heritage values. I’m highly skeptical of this kind of give and take, though perhaps some with more understanding of specific cases might offer some kind of hope for this kind of compromise. Consider that “[t]he Forest Service, for example, using research at Chimney Rock that suggests the place was chosen by the Anasazi at least partly for its vantage point of the San Juan Mountains and river valley below, recently decided that a big natural gas drilling project just a mile or so away must not be visible from the rock.” Wow, one would have thought that would have been a no-brainer.

Also at risk is the 2,000 year-old rock art in Nine Mile Canyon (previously discussed here); in Montana, a coal-fired power plant has been proposed near “one of the last wild sections of the Lewis and Clark trail”; and in New Mexico a uranium mine has been proposed on a national forest site sacred to Native American tribes.

It’s a disheartening story, which indicates I think how much more effort and advocacy is needed. Strict criminal penalties are in place for looting of sites, and there are even nimble civil fines which can quickly punish looters. But heritage policy does not start and stop with looting, it also requires funding, and good policy solutions. Sadly many of those appear to be lacking in the American West, despite some notable heroic eforts

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

More on the Caravaggio Theft in Odessa

Takingofchrist_1There are more reports now on the theft of Taking of Christ or the Kiss of Judas attributed to Caravaggio. It was stolen from the Museum of Western and Eastern Art in Odessa, Ukraine. Reportedly, the stolen work looks very similar to this work, also called The Taking of Christ which is on display in the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin.

There had been questions about the authenticity of the stolen work. It seems Soviet experts in the 1950s confirmed the works authenticity, and it was restored in 2006. I’m completely unaware of the Soviet art-authentication track-record, but there at least seems to be some suspicion that these authenticators may have gotten it wrong, especially given some of the Soviet practices just a few years earlier in World War II. Perhaps an art historian knows whether Caravaggio might paint the same work twice? One could be a study or earlier version perhaps.

Lyudmila Saulenko, the museum’s deputy director is quoted as saying:

“We came in here to find that the wind was blowing the blinds around through a window with no pane, … And where the painting had hung we just saw its stretcher. The painting had been removed from its frame…. Thefts, of course, do occur in great museums like the Hermitage (in St Petersburg) or the Louvre (in Paris),… But the answer is to put in a truly effective alarm system and not postpone this.”

It certainly appears as if the window was not terribly difficult to remove, and not a hard night’s work given the reported $100 million USD value placed on the work, though that’s a very speculative number, and the thieves certainly won’t get more than a fraction of that kind of money I would imagine.

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

Community Archaeology Conference

Via the Portable Antiquities Scheme Blog, I noticed there is an upcoming community archaeology conference in early 2009:

Community Archaeology in South West England
Free Conference held at Exeter University on the 21st of February 2009.

For abstract submissions and registration please see their website or contact Faye Simpson at fs216@exeter.ac.uk.

The South West of England has a plethora of innovative community archaeology projects working within the region to provide archaeological outreach to local communities. These archaeological outreach and education projects are varied in both there approaches and organisation. They range from ‘grass roots’ projects initiated and organised by interested amateurs, individuals and local societies, to ‘top down approaches’ by commercial archaeology firms and universities. Furthermore, they include a range of hands on activities such as standing building surveys, historical research, field-walking, oral history projects, excavations and finds processing, to name just a few.

As hosts, the Heritage Lottery Fund and University of Exeter’s Exploring Archaeology Project (XArch), provides the means in which the conference can act as a forum to discuss the variety of community initiatives in the South West of England, and assess how they work in practice. It will also open up communication between these different individuals, groups and organisations as to where the future lies for community archaeology in this region, and investigate the possibility of partnerships between these groups and projects.

Abstracts for papers should be no longer the 200 words in length and should be received by the 30.09.08.

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

Estate Recovers Three Works Stolen 30 years Ago (UPDATE)

The Worcester Telegram and Gazette reported yesterday that three works stolen more than 30 years ago will be returned to the original owner’s estate according to a Federal District Court ruling in Rhode Island. Recovered were The Shore of Lake Geneva by French painter Gustave Courbet, Lady as Shepherdess by William Hamilton and In the Sun by American impressionist Childe Hassam:
The paintings were stolen by three armed, masked men the night of July 1 into early July 2, 1976, from the home of Mae Persky, 520 Grafton St. The three men cut the telephone wires to the home, bound Ms. Persky, her nurse companion and caretaker and ransacked the home. They stole the paintings, furs and other valuables. The roughly two-hour robbery ended with one of the robbers stating, “Give us an hour to get away or we’ll come back and burn the …. place to the ground,” according to the police report. The paintings had been purchased in 1945 by Mrs. Persky’s husband, Abraham Persky. The insurance company for the Persky estate paid $45,000 on the policy for the three paintings. OneBeacon Insurance Co. is the “successor-in-interest” to the insurance company at the time of the robbery, Commercial Union Assurance. Mrs. Persky, whose husband was the former president of the Worcester Knitting Co., left the paintings to Ms. Yoffie and her husband, William Yoffie, in her will. he died Aug. 21, 1979. She was 86 at the time of the robbery, according to news reports. Mr. Yoffie was president of Worcester Knitting Co. and a trustee of the Abraham S. Persky Charitable Trust. He left the interest in the paintings to his wife when he died April 2007. For years, the paintings remained missing. They resurfaced last year when Patrick Conley went to have them authenticated by a Newport, R.I., art dealer. Mr. Conley had received the three paintings from his brother William Conley as collateral for $22,000 in loans in 1998 and 1999. Because William Conley never repaid his brother, Patrick Conley kept the paintings as part of their written loan agreement. It is unclear how antiques dealer William Conley obtained the paintings. When the paintings were determined to be stolen, the FBI took custody of them and the legal battle began. In previous interviews, Patrick Conley said he had no idea the paintings were stolen.

I haven’t been able to track down the judgment yet, so I can’t comment on the legal issues involved. I can say with some certainty that this is a classic stolen art dispute between an original owner (or her successor in interest) and a subsequent purchaser or acquirer who purports to be in good faith. This is a dispute between two relatively innocent parties, and jurisdictions have very different handling of this kind of situation — not so much in the US or the UK, but in civilian systems like Iitaly or Switzerland purchasers can acquire good title to these stolen works.

UPDATE:

Donn Zaretsky notes that this was seemingly not a judgment but rather the court signed off on a settlement agreement among the parties, ending the dispute, which has not been made public. He wants to know “what did the insurance company get in return?”

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

Protection, Preservation and Commodification

Italy has been making tremendous strides of late in securing the return of objects. A major tenet underlying these successful repatriation claims has been the idea that by cutting off buyers of illicitly excavated objects, and by ensuring objects are not entering major museum collections, the demand for the illicit trade will be substantially reduced.

This is an important policy shift, and has unquestionably altered the cultural property policy landscape. However I think its worth asking if nations like Italy are following through with their aspirations, and if everything is being done to preserve sites and archaeological context. It stands to reason that more nations of origin will be adopting this Italian strategy, but we should ask ourselves if perhaps these efforts are looking at only one part of the problem.

In fact as I tried to point out last week, it looks like more nations of origin will be banding together and attempting perhaps to negotiate as a bloc, in much the same way that OPEC has dominated the world’s supply of oil. TIME Magazine’s Richard Lacayo in his “Looking Around” blog responded to my assertion by rightly pointing out that “OPEC is powerful because it sits on top of a natural resource that, at the end of the day, the world requires. Antiquities source nations have…..antiquities.”

He’s right of course that there isn’t nearly the same demand for antiquities as for a commodity like oil, but nations of origin do need market states in a number of ways which aren’t often fully appreciated. Italy, though it was very forceful in its recent negotiations with the Getty, the Met, and the MFA Boston chose not to use all of the legal ammunition it perhaps could have, and even reached very generous reciprocal loan agreements in exchange for the repatriated objects. The obvious question is: why be so accommodating if there were such powerful ethical principles and photographic evidence which called for the return of these objects?

The answer I think is that these nations need good relationships with other nations, and one of the major reasons is the enormous tourist dollars visitors from America (and elsewhere) can bring to these nations. Capitalizing on this tourism can have a heavy price however.
Adam L. Freeman has an excellent article on Bloomberg in which he details the struggle Italian authorities have had in properly caring for Pompeii (pictured above), “Chunks of frescoes depicting life in the Roman city are missing, carried away by visitors or eroded by the elements. Graffiti is gouged into walls. Tourists ignore signs forbidding flash photography as they take pictures of erotic designs inside the Lupanare, an ancient brothel.” This all comes as Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi attempts to cut expenditures, with the Culture Ministry likely to receive heavy cuts after the former government cut protection by 20 percent this year already. In fact, Italy has declared a state of emeregency for the ancient city and appointed Renato Profili former head policeman for Naples to oversee the situation.
Profili is quoted “It’s obvious that there is an emergency in a country like Italy where there’s so much to protect and so little money to do it.” This despite the 33 million euros generated by all the tourists who visit the city.

Other nations are having similar struggles. Robert Turnbull a few weeks ago in the New York Times details a museum/retail mall development in Cambodia near Angkor Wat, pictured here.

There aren’t easy answers of course, but merely returning objects to nations of origins won’t by itself protect sites, heritage and context.

The valuable tourist dollars which these sites bring in can help alleviate the situation, but it also carries with it the distasteful tradeoffs, such as the commodification of heritage, and the wear-and-tear which millions of visitors will always cause. Hopefully nations of origin will be able to move beyond the dramatic repatriations, which are a necessary step, and continue to work to preserve the sites themselves.

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

Art Theft and Recovery Blotter

There’s a slew of news about art theft, recovery and sentencing this morning:

First, thieves broke into a museum near Stockholm and stole five works by Andy Warhol (Mickey Mouse, and Superman) and Roy Lichtenstein (Crak, Sweet Dreams, Baby!, and Dagwood).

Second, authorities in Brazil have recovered a Picasso print, The Painter and the Model, which was stolen along with four other works back in June from the Pinacoteca do Estado in São Paulo, Brazil. Police had the men under surveillance for a planned ATM robbery, and overheard mention of the Picasso.

Third, a Vermont man has been ordered to serve a five-to-20 year prison sentence for stealing bronze sculptures to sell as scrap metal. He and two other men had stolen a number of sculptures from Joel Fisher’s studio while the artist was out of the country.

Finally, Artinfo is reporting that the Art Loss Register has recovered a Mario Carreño work stolen from a New York law firm in 1993.

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