[CPProt.net] An Odyssey in Antiquities Ends in Questions at the Getty Museum

[MSN CPPnet (Ton Cremers)]

October 15, 2005
An Odyssey in Antiquities Ends in Questions at the Getty Museum 
By HUGH EAKIN
It was a major coup for the museum, and the crowning glory of a curator's
career. After years of courting a wealthy New York couple, the J. Paul Getty
Museum had outmaneuvered the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other top
institutions to capture one of the world's finest private collections of
ancient art. 

That 1996 acquisition, encompassing more than 300 masterworks of Greek,
Roman and Etruscan art collected by Lawrence and Barbara Fleischman, was
envisioned as the anchor of a lavish new center for classical art and
archaeology planned at the Getty Villa in Malibu, Calif. As Marion True, the
antiquities curator, later described it, the collection was the center's
"greatest opportunity." 

Today, just three months before the villa's grand reopening, that collection
seems less like a coup than a disaster, a symbol of cultural plunder and
back-door trafficking that has tarnished the reputation of the world's
richest museum. 

Ms. True, who resigned from the Getty this month over a separate ethics
issue, faces trial in Rome on Nov. 16 on criminal charges of conspiring with
two art dealers to acquire millions of dollars' worth of looted antiquities.
Among those identified in the indictment are 12 objects from the Fleischman
collection, including several prominently displayed in the new Malibu
galleries.

Italian investigators argue that the Fleischman gift gave Ms. True the means
to acquire looted antiquities through a reputable owner, exploiting a
loophole in museum ethics guidelines that she had helped draft.

Rather than basking in their moment of glory, the museum and its parent, the
nonprofit J. Paul Getty Trust, now face an exodus of high-level staff
members and a barrage of questions about their ethics policies and
management. 

Adding to the pressure, The Los Angeles Times, in articles citing hundreds
of pages of leaked Getty documents, has reported that top Getty officials
had strong indications by the mid-1980's that the museum was acquiring
dubious antiquities; has detailed the outsize expense account of the Getty
Trust's powerful president, Barry Munitz; and has investigated the sale of
Getty property to one of his friends. 

For the Italians, the indictment of Ms. True signals a readiness to use
their judiciary's full artillery to pursue grievances against American
museums. "We have to do what we can," said Maurizio Fiorilli, a lawyer
representing the Italian Culture Ministry. "We're dealing with people who
have stolen pieces that belong to Italy's cultural heritage - and they paid
a lot of money to get them."

It is an ominous precedent for big museums with recent acquisitions of Greek
and Roman art, especially those that bought objects from the dealers
implicated in the indictment. Many are watching the case nervously.

"It would certainly be troubling," said Mary Sue Sweeney Price, president of
the Association of Art Museum Directors, "if the notion of bringing
Americans to trial in various foreign countries becomes a way of
adjudicating cultural property disagreements."

In recent years, the Italian government has tried to reclaim works from
other museums, including the Met, but has so far not taken formal legal
action against them. Harold Holzer, a spokesman for the Met, said the museum
had "had discussions" with Italy about a group of 15 silver objects dating
from the third century B.C. that the Italian government said were looted
from Morgantina, a site in Sicily, but he declined to provide details. 

Through her lawyer, Ms. True declined to be interviewed for this article,
citing the legal case. The Getty has refused to comment on the specific
charges beyond expressing confidence that she would be exonerated.

To support the charges, the Italians say, they have obtained documents
linking Ms. True to an Italian dealer convicted of antiquities trafficking
last year, and a trove of photographs of freshly plundered artworks, some
still encrusted with dirt, that later ended up in the museum. In addition to
the 12 Fleischman works, the art in the indictment includes dozens of
objects and vase fragments that the Getty acquired or considered acquiring
from 1977 to 1996. The bulk of those were obtained by Ms. True after her
arrival at the Getty in 1982.

Many of these were acquired directly from dealers in New York, London and
Switzerland. Others, like the Fleischman works, were acquired from private
collectors.

At the center of the case is the reckless youth of the Getty, which opened
in the villa in 1974 to fulfill the oil baron J. Paul Getty's twin
obsessions with art collecting and imperial Rome. But the case also presents
a paradox, for Ms. True had gone to considerable lengths to acknowledge the
Getty's past excesses and to cast the museum as a model citizen of the
museum and archaeological worlds. 

Those public efforts have left archaeologists and even some Italian
officials divided over whether criminal prosecution is the best approach to
dealing with these issues, and whether Ms. True is the right target. 

A Harvard-educated museum scholar who had been favorably regarded even by
critics of the antiquities trade, the curator, 56, was until recently best
known for skillful cultural diplomacy in archaeological source countries
like Greece and Italy. At her urging, for example, the Getty returned some
pieces to Italy during the 1990's - including several mentioned in the
indictment. And she has long been a fixture at conferences dealing with the
issue of smuggled antiquities.

"She was the one prepared to face the music, of all the museum curators in
the United States," said John Pedley, a professor emeritus of classical
archaeology at the University of Michigan.

But the indictment centers on Ms. True's earlier years of aggressive buying
for the Getty - and what she knew about the history of those objects then. 

An Appetite for Antiquities

When Marion True arrived as an assistant curator at the Getty in 1982, the
museum was already known for its appetite for antiquities, and the
freewheeling ways it acquired them. By then occupying the Getty Villa, a
fanciful classical structure based on a 2,000-year-old Pompeian house, the
museum had inherited the oil magnate's love of ancient Rome. (Getty likened
himself to Caesar.) The year Ms. True arrived, the Getty Trust also
inherited his immense wealth. With a mandate to collect, the museum quickly
became one of the most active players in the antiquities market.

According to evidence in the indictment and two former senior museum staff
members, many of the acquisition practices had already been well established
by Jiri Frel, the Getty's first curator of antiquities, hired by Getty in
1973. 

Mr. Frel cultivated two dealers who would later be named in the indictment:
Giacomo Medici, an Italian dealer who kept a warehouse full of top-drawer
antiquities in the duty-free port area of Geneva; and Robert Hecht, an
American dealer based in Europe with connections to top museums.
Investigators have traced dozens of objects to Mr. Medici, according to the
Italian evidence record, which was obtained by The New York Times. 

According to purchase records cited in the evidence, 10 objects in the case
were acquired under Mr. Frel and his successor, Arthur Houghton. Mr. Frel
left the Getty in 1984 in a scandal over fakes and inflated insurance values
for donated works, and his whereabouts are unknown; Mr. Houghton, who was
acting curator from 1984 to 1986 and faces no charges, declined to comment
on the case. 

According to evidence collected by the Italians, Ms. True was in direct
contact with both Mr. Medici and Mr. Hecht in the 1980's and 90's and
visited Mr. Medici in Rome. 

When she became curator in 1986, the Getty had a distinguished but still
moderate collection of Greek and Roman art; Ms. True was soon put in charge
of a long-term project to turn the Malibu villa into a stand-alone
antiquities museum while the rest of the collection moved to a hilltop site
in Los Angeles. The board wanted a top-quality collection for the villa, and
it was up to her to obtain the best works available, using the Getty's deep
pockets. 

"Collecting was at its most productive between the mid-1980's and
mid-1990's," said John Walsh, who was the museum's director from 1983 to
2000. "It was about 10 years of absolutely tremendous acquisitions." 

With her elegance, erudition and diplomatic charm, Ms. True found it easy to
develop contacts as she shuttled from Rome to London to Paris. In 1993, she
acquired a stone torso of an archaic Greek kore, or woman, that the museum
has called "the finest statue of its kind in America." According to museum
records cited in the evidence, the Getty bought the object from Robin Symes,
a London dealer whose clients included most of the top American museums and
collectors. 

The Italian police later recovered, from Mr. Medici's warehouse, a picture
of the kore still caked with fresh dirt and showing cracks apparently made
during the excavation. Mr. Symes, who is not a defendant in the indictment,
declined through a lawyer to comment on any transactions he made as a
dealer.

By its nature, the antiquities trade is an opaque business. As part of a
long tradition of client secrecy, the dealers - unlike, say, sellers of old
master paintings - rarely disclose the previous owners of an object. In
fact, it was common through the 1980's and 90's for museums to buy ancient
art that had no known provenance, curators say. Because of export
restrictions in archaeological-source countries, it has been typical for
dealers to be based in free-market countries like Switzerland and Britain,
and for objects to pass through several intermediaries before reaching an
American buyer. 

The onus was on dealers to provide documents showing that a work could be
legitimately exported, and dealers were required to compensate museums in
the case of an eventual repatriation claim. 

Getty officials, including Ms. True, have acknowledged in recent years that
by the mid-1980's, the museum knew that the antiquities dealers with whom it
negotiated were not always trustworthy. Still, Mr. Walsh, who as the
museum's director oversaw all acquisitions, denies that Ms. True or other
museum officials had explicit knowledge of illegal activity at the time of
any purchase. "We have never bought an object that we knew or strongly
suspected came from an illicit source," he said.

Italian officials, however, say that Ms. True knew she was buying works from
Mr. Medici and, like her predecessors, avoided using him as vendor of
record. Citing evidence linking Mr. Hecht and Mr. Medici, they argue that
Mr. Hecht and other European dealers were fences for Mr. Medici. They also
argue that the Getty sometimes bought art from galleries and front companies
based in Switzerland or New York yet closely affiliated with Mr. Medici and
Mr. Hecht. 

In 1987, for example, Ms. True was offered two Etruscan objects - a tripod
and a candelabrum - from Mat Securitas, a Swiss company acting on behalf of
Burki & Sohn, a Swiss seller. But several days later, in a letter sent to
Mr. Medici in care of Mat Securitas, Ms. True indicated that she knew the
two works had really come from Mr. Medici, and reassured him that she would
buy the works in the coming year, according to a summary of the letter in
the evidence. 

In 1992, Ms. True informed Mr. Medici in Geneva that she would send the most
recent volume of the Getty's catalog of Greek vases. She added, "I think you
will find many pieces included that you will recognize." In the same letter,
which is included in the evidence, she mentions future visits to Rome and
her hope that "we will be able to get together and have some further
discussions about future acquisitions."

Making the Rules

Yet while Ms. True was expanding her contacts with Mr. Medici, she was also
establishing in-house acquisition rules to protect the Getty against
restitution claims. In 1983, Congress enacted a law mandating enforcement of
an international treaty prohibiting imports of archaeological objects that
are part of another country's patrimony and in danger of pillage.
Archaeologists and countries rich in artifacts, from Italy to Mexico, were
already giving American museums closer scrutiny. In 1986, the same year Ms.
True was appointed to head the antiquities department, she helped draft a
Getty acquisitions policy for ancient art, the first of its kind for any
large collecting museum in the United States. 

"The single most important element in this policy," she later wrote, "was
the refusal to rely on documents of provenance provided by dealers in
ancient art and artifacts. Experience had amply demonstrated that they could
be, and often were, manufactured to assist the sale."

Yet the policy, adopted by the Getty a year later, did not deter the museum
from buying suspect material. In a 1999 letter to the chairman of the
Cultural Property Advisory Committee of the State Department, Ms. True
wrote: "We were still able to acquire a number of works of art without
established provenance. A number of these most certainly have come from
Italy."

The policy also did little to appease a growing number of critics. By the
early 1990's, the museum's thirst for acquisitions was beginning to have a
negative effect on the Getty Trust's conservation and research arms. "It was
making things difficult for the Conservation Institute, which has major
collaborative projects in archaeological countries," Mr. Walsh said. "It was
making matters difficult for scholarship, when foreign scholars were invited
but didn't feel perhaps like they could come." 

Ms. True began to move on several fronts to clean up the museum's image. She
opened a dialogue with Italian cultural officials about a number of disputed
works in the collection. She organized, with the Getty Conservation
Institute, a big conference about archaeology in the Mediterranean attended
by archaeologists and cultural officials from 19 countries. In November
1995, the Getty board ratified a strict new acquisitions policy for
antiquities, based in part on the charter of the Archaeological Institute of
America, usually an opponent of big collecting museums. The Getty seemed to
be announcing that it would no longer purchase unknown, unprovenanced
material.

But many in the archaeological community argued that the new policy was not
as rigorous as it appeared. It specified that new acquisitions had to be
"published" before they were acquired but did not rule out the possibility
that the museum itself could publish them. In effect, the board had given
the museum a loophole to allow it to continue buying. 

"The museum hierarchy didn't like what we were doing in archaeology, and
there was pressure to collect," said a former member of the antiquities
department, who spoke on condition of anonymity and eventually left the
Getty over this issue. Part of that pressure arose from gaps in the
collection destined for the renovated Getty Villa. To fill those gaps, Ms.
True was actively courting the Fleischmans, whose much-admired collection
had been given comprehensive shows at the Getty and at the Cleveland Museum
of Art in 1994 and 1995. Shortly after its exhibition, the Getty began
formal negotiations to acquire the collection. 

The deal was closed in 1996, only months after the new acquisitions policy
took effect, to the consternation of many in the archaeological community.
Technically, the objects had been published, since the Getty had prepared a
major catalog of the collection for the 1994 show. 

"If they had a decent ethical policy at the time they acquired the
Fleischman collection, they would not have been compelled to acquire dubious
pieces," said Colin Renfrew, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge
in England.

Paradoxically, the Fleischmans had spent much of the 1980's competing with
Ms. True for the same top antiquities on the market. And as with many of the
works at the Getty, the collection consisted overwhelmingly of
unprovenanced, recently surfaced material. 

For Italian investigators today, the Fleischman collection is the strongest
indication that Ms. True was harnessing private collectors to acquire looted
antiquities for the Getty. To support this theory, they charge that she had
ties to the couple well before the collection was actually acquired. 

Assembling the Fragments

In 1992, for example, Ms. True acquired from the Fleischmans a major
red-figure cup, signed by the Greek painter Syriskos, and eight other works,
with a total value of $5.5 million, according to evidence. The Fleischmans
had bought the cup, which had been reconstituted from a number of fragments,
from Mr. Symes, the London dealer, in 1988. The Italian police have
recovered multiple photographs belonging to Mr. Medici that show the cup in
early and later stages of restoration. The Getty, meanwhile, had also
acquired a separate fragment of the cup in 1988 from Fritz Burki, a Swiss
restorer, according to the evidence.

In a telephone interview, Barbara Fleischman, who became a trustee of the
Getty in 2000, said that her husband, who died in 1997, had been chiefly
responsible for the collecting and that neither of them had any knowledge
that any objects came from illicit sources. She said she and Mr. Fleischman,
well-known museum benefactors, were drawn to the Getty because of the 1994
show and because of Ms. True's long-term plans for the Getty Villa. "It's
not a museum alone," she said. "We loved the scholarly things she was
planning." 

In defense of Ms. True, several people in the art world close to the
Fleischmans and the Getty point out that in the 1980's, when the couple was
buying most aggressively, they were much closer to other large museums,
including the Met and the British Museum. Those associates say that it was
not evident before the 1994 show that the collection would end up at the
Getty. 

'Doors Would Open for Her'

Despite the Fleischman acquisition, Ms. True's and the Getty's relations
with Italy strengthened in the late 1990's. On repeated occasions, the
curator's public candor about restitution issues and the need for tougher
acquisition standards won her supporters in Italy's cultural establishment.
In 1997, she was able to obtain a 13-month antiquities loan from Italy for
an inaugural show at the new Getty Center in Los Angeles. 

"All the doors would open for her in the Roman bureaucracy when she came,"
said a Getty colleague who traveled with her in the mid- and late-1990's but
insisted on anonymity because of the criminal case. In 1999, Ms. True
bolstered her reputation in Italy by giving vocal support to a sweeping
American import ban on Italian antiquities, a measure that dealers and other
museum curators opposed. "She was considered anti-market," said William
Pearlstein, a lawyer who represents several antiquities dealers. 

In July 2001, Ms. True presided over the return to Italy of some 3,000 terra
cottas and small bronze artifacts that had been acquired, without known
provenance, in the 1970's. But all the while, Paolo Ferri, an Italian
prosecutor working with the country's formidable art police, had quietly
been preparing the case against the Getty. Drawing on an archive of some
5,000 photographs seized from Mr. Medici's Geneva warehouse in 1995, Mr.
Ferri had pieced together a paper trail that he charges leads from Italian
tombs to Switzerland to Malibu.

In 2000, Italy notified the Getty that the prosecutor was investigating Ms.
True. The Getty, under Deborah Gribbon, then the director, said it would
cooperate and expressed the desire to negotiate some kind of settlement,
Italian officials said. By 2002, however, efforts by Ms. Gribbon to reach an
agreement had failed and Ms. True was indicted. In 2004, the Italian Culture
Ministry joined in the case after it became apparent that Mr. Ferri had
assembled strong evidence to support his accusations, said Mr. Fiorilli, the
ministry lawyer. 

Her Resignation

On Oct. 1 - fully three years after the Italian indictment was handed down -
Ms. True resigned from the Getty. The museum said that her resignation was
related to improprieties involving her purchase of a vacation home on a
Greek island in 1996. A loan for the purchase was arranged by a lawyer
recommended by an antiquities dealer associated with Mr. Symes; according to
Getty policy, this was a conflict of interest. 

But The Los Angeles Times has reported that the museum was familiar with the
circumstances of her purchase as far back as 2002 and took no action.

Both the Getty and Ms. True's lawyer, Harry Stang, declined to comment on
whether they would continue to collaborate on her defense. But with so many
of the disputed objects in its possession, including some acquired before
Ms. True's tenure, it seems highly unlikely that the Getty will or can
distance itself from the case. Under Italian law, the trial can proceed
without her being present, and lawyers interviewed about her case cast doubt
on the prospect that the United States would accede to an extradition
request on charges of this nature.

One of the biggest paradoxes of the case is that other American museums,
including the Met and the Cleveland Museum of Art, pursued the Fleischman
collection and, along with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and other
institutions, have continued to buy antiquities. They have remained "under
the radar," said Malcolm Bell III, an archaeologist who has helped the
Italian government identify looted sites in Sicily. 

Mr. Holzer, the Met spokesman, acknowledged that the museum had bought many
pieces from Mr. Hecht over the years, but said the museum "follows the law
strictly and adheres to the highest ethical guidelines" in its acquisitions.
He declined to comment on the True case. Spokesmen from the Cleveland and
Boston museums also declined to comment on the accusations against her.

Italian officials say that the evidence they have assembled reaches far
beyond the Getty. Whether more prosecutions are planned or such warnings are
simply intended to force the return of art and deter illicit purchases
remains unclear. 

"It's not about getting the pieces back," Mr. Ferri, the prosecutor, said.
"It's about the destruction, by museums, of history that can never be
recovered. That destruction has to be stopped." 

Elisabetta Povoledo contributed reporting from Rome for this article.

http://www.nytimes.com/