[CPProt.net] April 11, 2003 reports

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April, 11, 2003
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- Up to £7m likely for Schiele masterpiece looted by Nazis 

- US lobby could threaten Iraqi heritage 

- Elgin Marbles: Centerpiece of new museum?

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Up to £7m likely for Schiele masterpiece looted by Nazis 

Maev Kennedy, arts and heritage correspondent
Friday April 11, 2003
The Guardian 

A masterpiece of 20thcentury art, which hung for half a century in a 
public art gallery in Austria before being recognised as Nazi war 
loot, will be auctioned in June by the heirs of the original owner. 
The search through museums and private collections across the world 
for thousands of works of art looted by the Nazis and still missing 
has intensified during the past decade. 
In Britain, the Tate gallery has returned one Dutch landscape to its 
Jewish owners, and the British Museum's trustees are still 
considering what to do about a claim for four old-master drawings. 
Dozens more works of art in British collections still have a question 
mark over them because their history during the Nazi years cannot be 
established. 
The painting by Egon Schiele was bought in 1953 by the Neue Galerie, 
in Linz, Austria, and the proprietors were unaware that it had been 
stolen by the Nazis in 1938 from the Viennese home of Daisy Hellman, 
a Jewish arts patron. When it was finally traced last year the mayor 
of Linz presented it to Hellman's heirs, who plan to sell it at 
Sotheby's, London, for between £5m and £7m. 
The painting is a rarity: a nearly cheerful picture by the usually 
gloomy Schiele, better known for his skeletal and anguished, often 
bleakly erotic, human figures. Over the past 20 years prices have 
steadily risen for his work. 
One of his landscapes, sold in New York 10 years ago, fetched more 
than $9m; two years ago at Sotheby's an early Schiele portrait sold 
for £7.7m. 
The landscape is of Krumau, a town now in the Czech Republic, where 
Schiele's mother was born. The artist, who died of the 1918 flu 
epidemic aged 28, often painted parts of the town, and seems to have 
regarded it as a refuge from the troubles of his life.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/

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US lobby could threaten Iraqi heritage 

Donald MacLeod
Thursday April 10, 2003 

Apparent lobbying by American art dealers to dismantle Iraq's strict 
export laws has heightened fears about the looting of the country's 
antiquities as order breaks down in the last stages of the war. 
After the last gulf war a lot of treasures disappeared onto the black 
market and archaeologists in Britain and the US are concerned this 
will be repeated on a much larger scale in the power vacuum after the 
fall of Saddam Hussein, as happened in Afghanistan. For poor Iraqis 
the temptation to sell stolen antiquities will be greatly increased 
if it is known there is a ready market in the west. 
Iraq, which encompasses Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilisation, is 
so rich in remains dating back 10,000 years that it has been 
described as one vast archaeological site. 
Dominque Collon, assistant keeper in the department of the ancient 
near east at the British Museum, said today that alarm bells had been 
set ringing by reports of a meeting between a coalition of 
antiquities collectors and arts lawyers, calling itself the American 
Council for Cultural Policy (ACCP), with US defence and state 
department officials before the start of the war. The group offered 
help in preserving Iraq's invaluable archaeological collections, but 
archaeologists fear there is a hidden agenda to ease the way for 
exports post-Saddam. 
The ACCP's treasurer, William Pearlstein, has described Iraq's laws 
as "retentionist", and the group includes influential dealers who 
favour a relaxation of the current tight restrictions on the 
ownership and export of antiquities. 
Dr Collon said: "This is just the sort of thing that will encourage 
looting. Once there is American blessing they have got a market for 
these antiquities and it becomes open season. The last thing we want 
is condoned looting." 
The ACCP denied accusations of wanting to change Iraq's treatment of 
antiquities and said at the January meeting they offered post-war 
technical and financial assistance and conservation support. 
This week an international group of archaeologists petitioned the UN 
and Unesco, a cultural education body, to ensure that whatever body 
oversees post-war Iraq takes steps to preserve its priceless heritage 
from destruction and looting. 
They urge that security personnel be posted throughout Iraq at its 
many archaeological sites and museum storage facilities as soon as 
possible to halt future thefts. "In the aftermath of the previous 
gulf war, Iraqi archaeological sites and museum collections suffered 
from extensive looting, the fruits of which continue to disappear 
into the international black market for illegally procured 
antiquities," they say. 
The archaeologists and scholars want their Iraqi colleagues to 
continue in or be restored to their positions in museums, 
archaeological projects, and universities. 
The Iraqi antiquities authority should be offered the assistance of 
specialists from around the world to begin restoration and 
preservation of antiquities that have been damaged and the training 
of a new generation of Iraqi experts. 
They add: "Whatever body oversees post-war Iraq [should] be ready to 
offer material assistance to the Iraqi authorities and any concerned 
international agency prepared to apprehend and prosecute persons 
responsible for the theft and purchase of Iraqi cultural heritage 
materials, and to strive for the recovery of those materials and 
their restoration to the Iraqi people".
http://education.guardian.co.uk/
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Elgin Marbles: Centerpiece of new museum?
Greece preparing arts for 2004 Olympics


NEW YORK (AP) --The halves of a carving depicting an ancient Greek 
chariot race interlock on the gallery wall like parts of a jigsaw 
puzzle.
"Both pieces, currently divided between Athens and London, should be 
rejoined at the New Acropolis Museum," says the caption.
Greece is presenting its case for the return of the Elgin Marbles in 
an exhibit at the Alexander S. Onassis Cultural Center in Manhattan, 
using nationalism, finger-pointing and appeals to fair play to gain 
support.
The spectacular setting awaiting the treasured sculptures -- if 
they're ever returned from exile -- is laid out in "The New Acropolis 
Museum." But like mythical playthings of 
the gods, these fifth century B.C. carvings may be fated to remain in 
Britain, their destiny ordained by museum politics.
Greece is rushing to build the $100 million New Acropolis Museum to 
house the Marbles for the 2004 Summer Olympics, locating it next to 
the rocky citadel in the heart of 
ancient Athens. The three-level museum will be topped with a glass-
walled Parthenon Gallery to display the carvings in brilliant 
sunlight, just 800 feet from, and slightly 
below, the temple they once adorned.
Innovative and earthquake-proof, the museum aims to rebut longtime 
British objections to the Elgin Marbles' return -- that Greece lacked 
first-rate display space to assure 
the safety of the 480-foot-long section of the Parthenon frieze.
British officials are also worried that a repatriation of the 
Marbles, even on loan, could set a precedent for other claims on 
antiquities removed from original sites.
The Greeks counter that the Marbles belong in their homeland, and 
they've proposed opening an Athens' branch of the British Museum so 
the sculptures would be 
maintained under British ownership.
Contacts "are being held at multiple levels -- political, public 
opinion, between experts ... we do not think the British side has 
'shut the door' to communication with the 
Greek side," said Dimitris Pandermalis, president of the museum 
construction organization.

Finding a place
The tale of the 2,500-year-old Marbles -- 17 figures depicting an 
Athenian procession -- is almost Homeric. The carvings were purchased 
in 1803 by Lord Elgin, the British 
ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, which occupied Athens at the time. 
The sculptures were dismantled from the Parthenon, shipped to London 
and sold to the British 
Museum, quickly becoming the most celebrated pieces in the 
collection.
The new museum "offers the opportunity for Britain ... to reunify the 
sculptures of the Parthenon for this and subsequent generations," 
Minister of Culture Evangelos 
Venizelos writes in the exhibit catalog.
Until the sculptures are returned, Venizelos adds, "the spaces for 
the metopes, frieze, and figures of the pediment will remain void -- 
as a constant reminder of this unfilled 
debt to world heritage."
The frieze formed an ornamental band of marble carvings around the 
top of the Parthenon. Additional sculptures decorated the metopes -- 
openings for structural beams -- 
and the pediment, or portico, on the roof line.
Greece will show the remnants of the Parthenon frieze that it managed 
to keep, along with other Athenian treasures, at the New Acropolis 
Museum opening for the Summer 
Games. Other stages of the museum will follow.
The New York exhibit, open through April 9 with no entry fee, 
features elaborate scale models of the new museum, including a 
detailed layout of the entire Acropolis site, 
architectural drawings and topography maps.
Four priceless relief sculptures in marble dating from the sixth, 
fifth and fourth centuries B.C. are also shown.
The architectural elements will be displayed April 22-May 24 at the 
Royal Institute of British Architects in London as a part of an 
exhibit on the 2004 Summer Games and 
its impact on Athens. However, the marble reliefs won't be sent to 
London, said Amalia Cosmetatou, director of cultural events for the 
Onassis foundation.

Using light
The 250,000-square-foot museum is going up at the southern base of 
the Acropolis, at the ancient road that led up to the "sacred rock" 
in classical times under the great 
leader, Pericles. A 1.5-mile walkway links the archaeological sites 
in this font of Western civilization.
Visitors will ascend through the galleries to the top level, where 
the crowning gallery is being laid out on the same plane and with the 
precise geometry and harmonious 
dimensions of the columned Parthenon.
Architect Bernard Tschumi of New York, who won the competition to 
design the New Acropolis Museum, is using glass walls, skylights and 
an atrium to bring Athens' brilliant sunlight into the museum to 
illuminate the sculptures.
The principle is demonstrated in the exhibit with a spotlight-with-
dimmer directed at the relief sculptures to show how the carved 
figures become highly visible and then obscure in the changing light.
http://www.cnn.com/

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