[CPProt.net] Getty - True case: Ancient art, modern crime

[MSN CPPnet (Ton Cremers)]

from the November 07, 2005 edition -
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1107/p13s02-alar.html 

Ancient art, modern crime
A respected art curator goes on trial next week for allegedly buying stolen
antiquities. Hers is not the only major museum under scrutiny.
By Gloria Goodale | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor 

LOS ANGELES - Museum directors hope the artwork they display will inspire
visitors - but not necessarily to ask, "Did they steal that?" Yet that is
precisely the question being asked at museums from New York's Metropolitan
to California's Getty and Boston's Museum of Fine Arts (MFA). The former
antiquities curator of the world's richest museum, the Getty, goes on trial
next week in Italy on charges that she helped the museum acquire stolen art.

Armed with new information from the memoirs of a controversial art dealer,
Italian authorities want at least 42 items in the Getty collection returned.
New York's Met may have to return a "supergem" of its collection, a 6th
century BC painted vase. They want at least 22 items back from Boston's MFA,
including a prized 2,500-year-old Greek vase.

The revelations have stunned the public, but cries of "Gimme my stuff back!"
have been resounding through the art world for centuries - mostly falling on
deaf ears. Greece still wants the Elgin marbles back from Britain. (They
were named for Lord Elgin, who chiseled them off the Parthenon two centuries
ago.) Greece may well get them soon, say observers, because the political
climate and national attitudes about culture have changed.

The bad old days of Indiana Jones-style museum acquisition no longer fly.
Countries have laws regarding the exportation of artwork, and what's legal
in one country may not be in another. And even if it's legal, it may not be
ethical.

Many in the art world say the media blitz surrounding the Italian charges
makes this a defining moment. From here on, says Thomas Hoving, former
director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it will be more difficult for
museums to have questionable items in their collections. "It's only going to
get more and more embarrassing for them," he says, "as attorneys general
start saying, 'What is a nonprofit organization doing with this kind of
ethics?' "

Even more important, art professionals hope the publicity will educate a
public that appears not to care about or understand the murky world of
"provenance" - that is, where a particular artwork comes from. "If we were
talking about the importation of material from native American dig sites to
China or Japan, we would be very aware of the damage being done to the
cultural patrimony of the United States," says Malcolm Bell, an
archaeologist and art history professor at the University of Virginia in
Charlottesville. "The public needs to be aware of this problem so museum
boards know what they think."

But provenance is tricky, even for experts, especially the provenance of
antiquities. Paintings, drawings, and other works of fine art are generally
well documented. But when it comes to items that could have come out of the
ground yesterday or 3,000 years ago, how to proceed taxes the most
experienced art connoisseur. A thriving black market for items looted from
poorly guarded excavations or dug up and sold by impoverished locals keeps
experts on the lookout for illicit treasures as well as forgeries. Museums
often rely on third parties, such as art dealer Hicham Aboutaam, cofounder
of Phoenix Ancient Art with offices in New York and Geneva. Mr. Aboutaam
says people bearing "prized family heirlooms" walk into his offices
regularly.

This past year, a woman in her 80s came to him with two items she said her
stepfather had gotten from Tutankhamen's tomb.

"Naturally, I didn't believe her," he says with a laugh. "But we had to
investigate, all the same. We asked for any documents she might have,
insurance papers, old photos, anything that might give some indication of
where the items [a funerary jar and a statue of Osiris] came from," he says.
She had nothing, but the inquiry intensified when Aboutaam discovered the
woman's stepfather was Frank Compton, author of Compton's Encyclopedia. He
had been researching topics in Egypt during the time King Tut's tomb was
opened.

While Aboutaam and his team ultimately concluded the items were not from
Tut's tomb, "they were genuine Egyptian antiquities," he says. The woman
signed and notarized an affidavit, Aboutaam guaranteed his research, and the
pieces were sold to a major US museum. (Such is the sensitivity of the issue
that the museum asked not to be identified in an article discussing charges
against the Getty.)

Museums are skittish about provenance policies, particularly museums with
large collections. Many fear strict policies will drive art into private
collections and encourage an already thriving black market. The first big
step toward changing those attitudes came with a 1970 UNESCO draft treaty
banning the purchase of looted art. The most important provision of the
treaty: the exclusion of all artworks purchased before 1970, effectively
grandfathering in the vast collections of museums worldwide. But the United
States didn't ratify the treaty until 1983, and US museums have been slow to
clarify their policies on provenance. Ironically, the Getty Museum has one
of the strictest provenance policies on record. It states unequivocally that
no works without airtight documentation will be purchased by the museum from
1995 onward.

While the spotlight may be painful for museums being targeted, the attention
is an important tool for change, says Johanna Keller, director of the
Goldring Arts Journalism program at Syracuse University in New York.

"Issues of provenance are coming up now because there's an effort to
understand history in terms of cultural fairness," she says. "Provenance
begins to look like an important cultural issue because we need to be
talking about who owns what culture ... and culture is valuable not just for
financial reasons, but because of what it tells us about who we are."

http://www.csmonitor.com/