Art Theft – Page 20 – Illicit Cultural Property

Rare Book Thefts in Italy

Marta Falconi has an interesting AP story, Book Thief Investigation in Italy. An Italian man disguised himself as a priest and stole “dozens of 300-year-old books, drawings and watercolors from top libraries and public archives in Rome”. Italian authorities have recovered items worth close to $1 million.

The suspect, in his mid-40s, used ink remover to delete identification numbers and library stamps from the items, said Gen. Giovanni Nistri, who heads Italy’s police art squad.

When marks were engraved in the paper, he used an iron to smooth them out. He dripped coffee on pages to make them look moldy.

“He showed great competence and even ingeniousness,” Nistri said. “In some cases, he dressed as a priest and even locked himself in a bathroom for one day, besides altering the items to make their identification harder,” Nistri said.

Some items were sold in Italy and abroad, particularly in France, Nistri said. Nistri did not reveal what led police to the man.

The investigation is now aimed at tracing other trafficking channels, police said.

“Even in the libraries, there’s a gigantic cultural heritage that we risk losing for the pleasure of some,” Nistri told a news conference Monday.

The suspect, whom authorities would not identify, has been convicted of similar thefts in Turin and is believed to have stolen papers in Modena, Turin and Florence in recent months, Nistri said.

The suspect, who is cooperating with officers, has not been arrested, but police did not rule out an arrest in the future. Officers said there was no immediate risk he would try to flee the country.

An undersecretary in the Culture Ministry, Danielle Gattegno Mazzonis, said the ministry was planning to increase staff and set up alarm systems to monitor libraries and public archives because the trafficking is increasing.

“There are collectors and amateurs of specific epochs that would spend a fortune to have; for example, the original edition of a newspaper which came out the day Garibaldi was born,” Mazzonis said.

Police said that as of the end of August, 73,000 stolen books and archive documents were recovered across Italy.

That final number is staggering. How many items are still missing? These items are the most difficult to protect, as they are not especially rare or rise to the level of ultra-valuable items. This makes them much easier to sell.

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

The GAO takes the Smithsonian to Task

Many have argued that a compelling case can be made that art and antiquities should be displayed in market nations in the developed world because they are better preserved there than they might be if returned to source nations which are often underdeveloped. The GAO report which James Grimaldi highlights in today’s Washington Post seriously undermines such arguments. It reveals a troubling picture of what should be America’s proudest cultural institution. Instead a picture of staggering institutional incompetence is revealed:

Alarms ring and guards are unable to respond;
A water leak in the Sackler Gallery could have destroyed artwork worth half a billion;
Fossils were stolen from display cases at the Natural History Museum;
Plastic sheets are required to protect Native American artifacts from damage;

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

Another Dutch Holocaust Claim

Four heirs of art dealer Nathan Katz have brought a claim for 227 works recovered in German at the end of World War II reports Marlise Simons in todays NY Times. Among the contested works is this painting by Salomon van Ruysdael, Horsefair at Valkenburg. The claim was made public Friday, just as the Dutch were moving to discourage new restitution claims.

These restitution disputes are ill-suited to an adversarial litigation process with one winner and one loser as is the current situation in the United States. Professor Norman Palmer has persuasively made this case in the UK, while Jennifer Anglim Kreder has proposed an interesting idea. She makes a great case for an International Tribunal for dealing with Nazi-Looted Art. It’s forthcoming in the Brooklyn Law Review, an early version is up on SSRN. In the Netherlands the claims are studied by the Restitution Commission which advises the government on the return of objects lost or stolen when the Germans invaded in WWII.

Here’s an excerpt of the NYT story:

Although the Dutch government in exile had decreed that citizens could not trade with the enemy, many Dutch art dealers, both Jews and non-Jews, sold works to eager German collectors, who circulated wish lists in the first few years of the war. Dutch traditional painting was sought after, because the Nazis did not consider it “degenerate” art.

After the war the Dutch government returned 28 paintings that the Katz brothers had claimed. Among them was Rembrandt’s “Portrait of a Man,” believed to have been used to buy their mother’s freedom.

Evelien Campfens, a member of the Restitution Commission in The Hague, said the claim of the Katz heirs would “be a complex case, with many different aspects to it: it will take time.” She said that the Katz brothers were important dealers involved in many transactions, and that many important paintings had passed through their hands.

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

Upcoming Conferences

Next week in London the American Bar Association will be holding its fall international meeting. On Thursday, from 4-5.30 there will be a panel discussion on the International Movement of Art & Cultural Property:

Customs/Trade
Public International Law

Museums around the globe confront numerous obstacles in dealing with claims made on the art works and cultural objects in their collections. In some cases, works may have been placed on loan years ago and a museum may not know the current owner or may be presented with a claim to restore the works to the lender. Museums must also safeguard the ownership rights of victims of theft, including nations whose antiquities have been illegally excavated and removed and Holocaust victims and their heirs whose art properties were stolen during World War II. Finally, works on loan may be claimed to satisfy judgments received against the owner. In the United States, the ability of museums to remove art works from their collections through deaccessioning depends on laws that vary from state to state. The problem is more complicated in countries where museums are prohibited by law to remove any works from their collections. This panel will address issues of deaccessioning, long-term loans, and return guarantees for works on international loan and consider policies that may lead to greater cooperation in this complicated area of international law.

Co-Sponsoring Committees:
Europe Committee International Commercial Transactions, Franchising, and Distribution Committee, International Intellectual Property Committee , Information Services, Technology, and Data Protection Committee, Immigration and Naturalization Law Committee, and Financial Products and Services Committee

Program Chair:
Cristian DeFrancia, Legal Adviser, Iran – United States Claims Tribunal, The Hague, Netherlands

Moderator:
Ricardo A. St. Hilaire, Chief Prosecutor, Grafton County, Concord, New Hampshire

Speakers:
Lawrence M. Shindell, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, ARIS Corporation, Milwaukee, WI
Norman Palmer, Rowe & Maw Professor of Commercial Law, Faculty of Laws, University College, London, England
Patty Gerstenblith, Professor, DePaul University College of Law, Chicago, IL
Bonnie Czegledi, Founder, Czegledi Art Law, Toronto, Canada

A likely topic for discussion may be the new consultation paper on Draft Regulations for the Museums and Galleries of Information for the Purposes of Immunity from Seizure Under Part 6 of the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act 2007.

Another conference will be taking place at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign April 24-25, 2008. It looks beyond the law at how heritage is constructed, and sounds fascinating. Here are the details:

CONTESTED CULTURAL HERITAGE IN A GLOBAL WORLD

Thursday and Friday, April 24-25, 2008
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Program

Spurlock Museum and the Collaborative for Cultural Heritage and Museum Practices (CHAMP) have organized a major conference on “Contested Cultural Heritage” to be held at the Museum on Friday, April 25, 2008. Dr. Donny George Youkhanna, former Director of the Iraq National Museum and now Visiting Professor at the State University of New York-Stony Brook, will deliver the keynote address of the conference (“Mayhem in Mesopotamia” on April 24).

The conference brings together an international group of scholars to discuss how forces of religion and nationalism may act to heighten inter-group tension around heritage claims, even to the point of causing the destruction of ancient and historic sites. Among the cases to be considered are the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan; Christian and Muslim conflict resolution at a major mosque in Cordoba, Spain; different views and practices toward the indigenous past among Native Americans and the archaeologists who study their ancestors; the Parthenon/Elgin Marbles debate; Egypt’s demand for the return of the Bust of Nefertiti; heritage frictions implicated in the recent Balkans War; Peru’s attempt to repatriate the Machu Picchu collections from Yale University; and the aggressive marking of Protestant and Catholic identities in Belfast, Northern Ireland through wall art. A roundtable discussion at the end of the conference seeks to chart new directions for implementing policies that lessen the negative dimensions of cultural heritage and further awareness of its value for a larger public, thereby promoting site preservation as well as social/political harmony.

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

Arrests in Italy

From UPI, Italian authorities have arrested a group of antiquities smugglers. Based on the description of the goods, I wonder if a portion of these objects were destined for a domestic sale in Italy to Italians. Not all of the antiquities trade is international, and adequate regulation begins with the source nations themselves. Italy is the model, as its cultural policy is perhaps the most comprehensive and, more importantly, successful. Here’s an excerpt:

ROME, Sept. 20 Police have foiled a scheme to sell millions of dollars worth of artifacts plundered from historic sites throughout Italy.
Investigators prevented a group of art traffickers from selling the stolen property, which included thousands of priceless objects bought from tomb raiders, the Italian news agency ANSA reported Thursday.
The coins, lamps, funerary objects and other ancient artifacts were believed to have been transported through the Republic of San Marino, where they were assigned fake provenance documents.
Among the 26 people charged in the operation was a 60-year-old Italian dealer from England who was caught just as he was about to cross the Italian border into Austria. “This is an amazing haul and proof that we are intensifying our efforts to stamp out illicit trading in antiquities,” said General Ugo Zottin, head of the Carabinieri’s special unit for protecting Italy’s cultural heritage. “We got to the traffickers as they were about to move the objects through various outlets in Verona, Bolzano and Rimini — some of them quite respectable establishments.”

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

A Sad Day for Danes (UPDATE)

In a puzzling theft, Denmark’s national treasure, copies of the already stolen and destroyed Golden horns of Gallehus were stolen early Monday morning. From AFP:

COPENHAGEN (AFP) — One of Denmark’s national treasures, a set of two horns made in the 1800s, was stolen in the early hours of Monday, Danish police said. Called “Guldhornene” in Danish, or the Golden Horns, the pieces are silver replicas of two original gold horns made in 400 A.D. which were stolen in 1802 and destroyed. The replicas, with a thin gold coating, were on loan from the National Museum of Denmark for an exhibit in Jelling, near the central Danish town of Vejle, when they were stolen by thieves who smashed a display case.

Even though the works are replicas they are part of the country’s cultural heritage, National Museum curator Carsten Larsen said.

The originals were discovered in the town of Gallehus in southern Denmark in 1639 before they went missing and were found again in 1734.

They were stolen in 1802 from the Royal Chamber of Art by an indebted jeweller, Niels Heidenreich, who melted the gold to make jewellery and counterfeit coins.

The horns are a national symbol known to all and have even inspired a famous poem penned by Danish writer Adam Oehenschlaeger. Experts said the thieves would not be able to sell the treasures. “The thieves cannot put them to any use whatsoever,” said Michael Fornitz from Copenhagen’s Bruun Rasmussen auction house. “Maybe they thought the horns were made of solid gold and thought they would melt them down. But they are gilded and do not have any intrinsic worth.” He also shot down the idea that a collector could have ordered the theft. “Our experience shows that this hypothesis only exists in detective novels,” he said. “Collectors are proud of showing off their acquisitions, not hiding them.”

Danish police have meanwhile stepped up a search for the thieves who fled from the precincts in a Volvo V40, according to witnesses.

The thieves appear to have been ignorant of the true nature of the horns, or they were trying to make a political statement. The horns probably looked more valuable than they really are; or perhaps that’s what the police are saying to try and convince the thieves to make a quick return. Wikipedia indicates the copies were made some time in the 1980’s. It seems difficult to guess what the motive for the theft might have been.

UPDATE:

The horns have been recovered, and a press conference has been scheduled for this morning to give more details. From AFP:

COPENHAGEN (AFP) — One of Denmark’s national treasures, a set of two horns made in the 1800s, was recovered by police Tuesday after being stolen in the early hours of Monday, local television station TV2Syd reported.

Police inspector Steen Edeling told the station in the central town of Vejle that the horns had been found. He did not give any details, but a press conference was to be held in Vejle at 0800 GMT Wednesday.

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

Iraqi Cultural Heritage

In today’s Independent Robert Fisk has a special investigation on Iraqi cultural heritage. It’s an interesting account, though it gives only one side of the argument. I’m not sure what the special investigation was, he seems to be relying in large measure on one Lebanese archaeologist. Here’s an excerpt:

In a long and devastating appraisal to be published in December, Lebanese archaeologist Joanne Farchakh says that armies of looters have not spared “one metre of these Sumerian capitals that have been buried under the sand for thousands of years.

“They systematically destroyed the remains of this civilisation in their tireless search for sellable artefacts: ancient cities, covering an estimated surface area of 20 square kilometres, which – if properly excavated – could have provided extensive new information concerning the development of the human race.

“Humankind is losing its past for a cuneiform tablet or a sculpture or piece of jewellery that the dealer buys and pays for in cash in a country devastated by war. Humankind is losing its history for the pleasure of private collectors living safely in their luxurious houses and ordering specific objects for their collection.”

Ms Farchakh, who helped with the original investigation into stolen treasures from the Baghdad Archaeological Museum in the immediate aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, says Iraq may soon end up with no history.

“There are 10,000 archaeological sites in the country. In the Nassariyah area alone, there are about 840 Sumerian sites; they have all been systematically looted. Even when Alexander the Great destroyed a city, he would always build another. But now the robbers are destroying everything because they are going down to bedrock. What’s new is that the looters are becoming more and more organised with, apparently, lots of money.

“Quite apart from this, military operations are damaging these sites forever. There’s been a US base in Ur for five years and the walls are cracking because of the weight of military vehicles. It’s like putting an archaeological site under a continuous earthquake.”

I’m afraid I have a pessimistic view of conflict and cultural property. Conflict always leads to theft and destruction. The activities of the US military in and around some of these archaeological sites is indeed troubling as I’ve written about before. But I have a bit of skepticism about the looting of sites. Is this something that only began after the Invasion in 2003? I’m not sure about the answer to that question. But though the 1954 Hague Convention is mentioned briefly, no mention is made of the efforts of Marine Colonel Matthew Bogdanos, the import restrictions in the US and the UK on Iraqi objects, or any other efforts.

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

Moving Cultural Property

Alasdair Palmer has half a good article titled The greatest art should not be moving in yesterday’s Telegraph. Why half? He only gives one view of the argument against transporting cultural property (though Italian Senator Paulo Amato surely agrees).

The background for the article is the exhibition at the British Museum of 20 terracotta figures from the grave of Chinese emperor Qin Shihuangdi. It is the largest number of these figures to ever leave China. Palmer does a good job of giving the argument against transporting works. But only by summarizing the work of Michael Daley and Michael Savage in the ArtWatch UK Journal, which I have been unable to track down.

Palmer cites the following:

In 1994 the Tate lent two Turners to a Frankfurt museum, but they were stolen and were not returned until a £2 million ransom was paid.

Canova’s Three Graces developed a crack when it was transported to Madrid in 1998.
A Swiss Air jet carrying Picasso’s Le Peintre was lost when a Swiss Air flight crashed off Nova Scotia.
Speculation exists that some of the 251 Assyrian objects the British Museum shipped to Shangai in 2006 were partially damaged.
The Goya which went missing last year is cited as well. Though it was incorrectly assumed it came from Spain. It was actually on its way from Cleveland. It was also recovered.

Those are some good examples of the drawbacks; but these traveling exhibitions do a great deal of good as well. It promotes cultural internationalism, improves access, allows institutions and source nations to raise funds. Most importantly traveling exhibitions allow for compromise between ardent cultural nationalists, and those who think art should be accessible internationally. There are right and wrong ways to go about it to be sure, and there are risks. But Palmer gives only half the picture, and even that is inaccurate. Perhaps the biggest inaccuracy: there are 1,000 of these figures excavated, and perhaps as many as 6,000 more which have yet to be unearthed. Are the risks of damage to a select few enough to outweigh the benefits? I think not.

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

More on Antiquities Leasing

Can antiquities leasing form a good compromise between strict regulation, which can be counterproductive, and the cultural property trade? Tim Harford has an interesting article in Slate today, Rent-A-Treasure: How to Eliminate the Black Market in Stolen Antiquities. He talks more about the working paper Antiquities: Long-Term Leases as an Alternative to Export Bans, co-authored by Michael Kremer and Tom Wilkening. Kremer and Wilkening take an economic perspective and argue antiquities leasing is a better alternative to the current rigid regulation which ends up fostering a black market.

Leasing is an exciting idea as I’ve argued before; but not in every case. The Slate article does a good job of painting the problem in broad strokes, and traces the idea to the antiquities controversy which is probably the most widely known, the Parthenon Marbles. Some kind of sharing agreement between the British Museum and Greece might work in theory, but neither side would be willing to undergo such a compromise in my view. A better use of leasing would be in developing source nations in response to the illicit trade of today, not long-standing repatriation disputes. Source nation antiquities leasing could produce revenue, foster international appreciation, all while objects are still under the control of the source nation

The first mention of the idea, that I am aware, came in 1993 by Nusin Asgari. The former head of the Antiquities Museum in Istanbul, Turkey, argued that ten-year loan agreements between major museums might reduce the temptation to acquire antiquities illicitly. (Suna Erdem, New Trojan War Highlights Pillage of Turkey’s Past, Reuters, Oct. 13, 1993, available in LEXIS, News Library, Curnws File).

There are a few versions of this idea in practice, including the blockbuster King Tut exhibition, which I would venture to say was more about showing off the gold than anything else, and that seemed to be Tyler Cowen’s take as well.

But a far better example is the Menil Collection Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum in Houston, pictured here. The frescoes were stolen during the Turkish occupation of Cyprus in the 1980’s. With the permission of the Church of Cyprus, the Menil Foundation agreed to a long-term lease and restoration. This is a far better example than the King Tut exhibition, which seemed far more concerned with earning revenue than education or conisseurship. I haven’t seen the chapel in Houston, but the final product looks stunning. It’s an example of what the antiquities market can and should produce, and everyone wins.

There was also a great deal of uproar over Lynne Munson’s criticism over the National Geographic Society’s deal with Afghanistan to display the Bactrian gold, which I talked about here. Are folks aware of other good, or bad antiquities leasing schemes? I’d be very interested to know, if you would care to share them in the comments section.

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

Why Distort the Facts when they support you?

The Former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld responded to the looting of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad by saying, “Stuff happens… the images you are seeing over and over and over. It’s the same pictures of some person walking out of some building with a vase and you see it twenty times. And you think, my goodness, were there that many vases?” Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?” Those are callous and ridiculous comments to be sure, and there were a myriad of failings in protecting the museum when hostilities began.

However Naomi Klein in her new book The Shock Doctrine is just plain wrong when she attempts to criticize the coalition forces after the Iraq invasion. An excerpt of her new book is published in today’s Guardian. After reading the piece I wondered, why distort the facts so badly when the solid facts actually could support your position. Here is the relevant excerpt:

The bombing badly injured Iraq, but it was the looting, unchecked by occupying troops, that did the most to erase the heart of the country that was.

“The hundreds of looters who smashed ancient ceramics, stripped display cases and pocketed gold and other antiquities from the National Museum of Iraq pillaged nothing less than records of the first human society,” reported the Los Angeles Times. “Gone are 80% of the museum’s 170,000 priceless objects.” The national library, which contained copies of every book and doctoral thesis ever published in Iraq, was a blackened ruin. Thousand-year-old illuminated Qur’ans had disappeared from the Ministry of Religious Affairs, which was left a burned-out shell. “Our national heritage is lost,” pronounced a Baghdad high-school teacher. A local merchant said of the museum, “It was the soul of Iraq. If the museum doesn’t recover the looted treasures, I will feel like a part of my own soul has been stolen.” McGuire Gibson, an archaeologist at the University of Chicago, called it “a lot like a lobotomy. The deep memory of an entire culture, a culture that has continued for thousands of years, has been removed”.

Thanks mostly to the efforts of clerics who organised salvage missions in the midst of the looting, a portion of the artefacts has been recovered. But many Iraqis were, and still are, convinced that the memory lobotomy was intentional – part of Washington’s plans to excise the strong, rooted nation that was and replace it with their own model. “Baghdad is the mother of Arab culture,” 70-year-old Ahmed Abdullah told the Washington Post, “and they want to wipe out our culture.”

As the war planners were quick to point out, the looting was done by Iraqis, not foreign troops. And it is true that Rumsfeld did not plan for Iraq to be sacked – but he did not take measures to prevent it from happening either, or to stop it once it had begun. These were failures that cannot be dismissed as mere oversights.

During the 1991 Gulf war, 13 Iraqi museums were attacked by looters, so there was every reason to believe that poverty, anger at the old regime and the general atmosphere of chaos would prompt some Iraqis to respond in the same way (especially given that Saddam had emptied the prisons several months earlier). The Pentagon had been warned by leading archaeologists that it needed to have an airtight strategy to protect museums and libraries before any attack, and a March 26 Pentagon memo to coalition command listed “in order of importance, 16 sites that were crucial to protect in Baghdad”. Second on the list was the museum. Other warnings had urged Rumsfeld to send an international police contingent in with the troops to maintain public order -another suggestion that was ignored.

Even without the police, however, there were enough US soldiers in Baghdad for a few to be dispatched to the key cultural sites, but they weren’t sent. There are numerous reports of US soldiers hanging out by their armoured vehicles and watching as trucks loaded with loot drove by – a reflection of the “stuff happens” indifference coming straight from Rumsfeld. Some units took it upon themselves to stop the looting, but in other instances, soldiers joined in. The Baghdad International Airport was completely trashed by soldiers who, according to Time, smashed furniture and then moved on to the commercial jets on the runway: “US soldiers looking for comfortable seats and souvenirs ripped out many of the planes’ fittings, slashed seats, damaged cockpit equipment and popped out every windshield.” The result was an estimated $100m worth of damage to Iraq’s national airline – which was one of the first assets to be put on the auction block in an early and contentious partial privatisation.

From what I understand, Klein argues in her book that crisis has been manipulated by leaders to bring about sweeping social change. That seems like an interesting hypothesis, and its the kind of controversial and engaging argument that I usually find interesting. But in discussing the looting of the Iraq museum, she gets a myriad of facts wrong, distorts the truth, and wholly fails to account for the good work American soldiers, led by former prosecutor, and then Colonel Matthew Bogdanos did in tracking down objects. I talked about this last year.

Most notably, the 170,000 figure has been discredited, and the number of objects still missing is probably around 3,000. That’s still an alarming number to be sure, but why quote old and inaccurate estimates? Also, the Iraqi military occupied the site, and fired on coalition troops from the museum. To be sure, the invading forces dropped the ball when they neglected to secure the museum after the museum was abandoned, but that paints a very different picture from what Klein describes here. When you have plenty of good accurate evidence to support your position, why would you resort to this kind of lazy inaccuracy? I presume that in her zeal to lay out here position she neglected to account for other points of view. This is the same kind of myopic view which has plagued the current administration. It becomes all the more puzzling though when you consider Rumsfeld did most of Klein’s work for her.

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