Karen Zraick at the NY Times reported on looted antiquities that are being sold on Facebook. The problem is broader than just Facebook because looting networks sell their illicit wares through many online outlets. The internet is an appealing place for these illegal sales because buyers and sellers may easily remain anonymous. The sales also aren’t as widely publicized as in other marketplaces. And making it even more challenging is that communications move from these online marketplaces to encrypted channels like Whatsapp. Zraick references the important research and publications of Dr. Amr Al-Azm and Katie Paul. The two colleagues have called upon Facebook and other social media sites to handle looted goods more responsibly.
The discussions concerning illegal sales on social media sites illustrate the much larger issue of shutting down the looted antiquities market. Items illicitly removed from the ground are often difficult to trace. Unlike fine art, newly discovered antiquities have not seen the light of day for centuries. Fine art objects can often be traced back to their creator through examining prior sales and transactions. It is not the same with looted antiquities. Without a clear record of their discovery and removal, it may be difficult to determine from where these stolen objects were found. This problem is compounded by the fact that looters and their networks intentionally conceal this information to avoid penalties from law enforcement agencies.
It is necessary for online providers to ensure that they are not providing the black market with an unregulated marketplace in which to sell stolen cultural heritage.
Note: All of the information in this blog post is taken from a publicly filed document. No confidential or privileged information was used in preparing this post.
On September 22, Matthew Bogdanos submitted an application in NY Supreme Court in a matter involving a stolen antiquity from Lebanon. Our founder served as a cultural heritage law expert on this case. It was an honor to once again work with Bogdanos, a talented trial attorney. His track record for excellence is impressive, and the filing in this case is a tour de force of legal writing, reading like a suspenseful crime narrative and primer on cultural heritage law. The document was full of famous art world names, citations to landmark cases and conventions, and introduction to the world of art crime and heritage looting.
The cast of characters involved in this matter have become household names in the heritage field. The Aboutaams (owners of Phoenix Ancient Art) have been involved in numerous legal battles; Robin Symes, described as a “disgraced” art dealer, has been connected to dozens of pillaged antiquities; Frederick Schultz (former New York gallery owner and former president of the National Association of Dealers in Ancient, Oriental and Primitive Art) served time for dealing in looted Egyptian antiquities; Michael Steinhardt, founder of a hedge fund and referred to as “Wall Street’s Greatest Trader,” has faced many legal controversies for his art collection (including this year’s disputed sale of the Guennol Stargazer at Christie’s); and Frieda Tchacos, a dealer with a history of antiquities violations has been profiled for her role in the illicit antiquities trade. All of these individuals have been featured in books like Chasing Aphrodite and the Medici Conspiracy. In fact, the dispute over the Bull’s Head reads like a redux of the Euphronios Krater debacle at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (“the Met”). However, as Bogdanos notes in the government’s filing, the Met acted “admirably” by removing the item from display and delving into the object’s past.
The current controversy involves an antiquity that was purportedly looted from storage in Lebanon during the nation’s civil war. It went missing for decades and then appeared at the Met after it was loaned to the museum by Michael Steinhardt. He had purchased the item from wealthy collectors, Will and Lynda Beierwaltes. Once Steinhardt was informed of the work’s problematic provenance, he demanded a refund for the purchase and transferred title to the object back to the couple.
One of the most interesting aspects of this case is Bogdanos’ discussion about “good faith.” The Beierwaltes are not novice collectors; they owned a collection of antiquities valued at nearly $100 million. As “professional” collectors, did they really use good faith in acquiring the antiquity? As Bogdanos rightly asks: where are the documents related to the object? If an antiquity of such high value (over a million dollars) crosses international borders multiple times, there should be documentation that traces its movements.
“There is no customs declaration form, no shipping document, no air waybill, no tracking form, no insurance form, no invoice, no bill of sale, no photograph, and no mention in any contemporaneous correspondence or email. No proof of any kind of the possession and repeated transportation across oceans and international borders of a two-millennia-old statue valued at more than one million dollars by either of the names listed by the Met on October 20, 2017.” As stated on page 45, “…twenty-four years (1981-2004) of movement across international borders of a million-dollar statue generated four handwritten words, a couple storage invoices, and one piece of paper from the infamous Robin Symes. A neon sign flashing ‘stolen’ would have been more subtle and less insidious.”
One of the disturbing aspects of this controversy is the allegation that the sculpture was taken during the civil war in Lebanon. If true, then the item was pilfered by opportunists taking advantage of political upheaval to steal priceless and irreplaceable treasures. Sadly, this type of theft occurs around the world and is still common today, particularly prevalent in Syria and Iraq.
Purchasing items without complete provenance is risky. As I explained in this editorial in The Guardian, looted antiquities are problematic from an investment perspective. Bogdanos warns against this risk, stating “The obvious, but all-too-often ignored, risks attendant to never asking about ownership history is that the buyer may one day have that purchase seized and confiscated as stolen property. Here, the absence of the required inquiry, not only subjects the Beierwaltes to potential prosecution for criminal possession of stolen property, but it also defeats any claim that they were good-faith purchasers of the Bull’s Head.”
As outlined in the government’s conclusion, there are a host of important facts to recognize in this case. (1) The Bull’s Head was excavated in 1967 and stolen in 1981 during a civil war, nearly 50 years after Lebanon’s patrimony laws (the laws vest ownership of all discovered antiquities in the nation). (2) The sculpture surfaced in the hands of Robin Symes in NY in early 1996. As revealed by several international investigations, Symes was a major participant in an antiquities trafficking network in the 1980s and 1990s. The network’s black-market supply chain started with tomb raiders, passed through the launderers and middle men, and terminated at the demand end with collectors, like the Beierwaltes. (3) The Symes-Beierwaltes relationship was responsible for 98% of the vast Beierwaltes Collection, valued at almost $100 million in 2006. The acquisition of the collection appears to have coincided with the peak of the Medici, Becchina, and Symes empire of loot. (4) There is a shocking lack of documentation produced by the Beierwaltes. (5) The lack of records is especially telling for collectors involved in the art trade for 62 years. (6) The Beierwaltes avoided submission of any materials pursuant to discovery requests, despite multiple subpoenas and repeated requests. There is also no evidence concerning how Robin Symes acquired the Bull’s Head or whether he legally possessed it. (7) Lebanon made commendable efforts to protect and to recover its cultural heritage.
A copy of the the government’s filing can be found on the Chasing Aphrodite website: https://chasingaphrodite.com/2017/09/24/the-sidon-bulls-head-court-record-documents-a-journey-through-the-illicit-antiquities-trade/
Our founder at the repatriation ceremony in 2017
UPDATE: The Bull’s Head (as well as two other pieces) were returned to Lebanon in December 2017.
Last night, Tom Mashberg of the NY Times broke the story about an ancient vase that was seized from the Metropolitan Museum of Art (“the Met”). The 2,300-year-old object, the “Python Vessel,” had been displayed at the NY institution since 1989, when it was purchased from Sotheby’s for $90,000. Matthew Bogdanos, a celebrated and Assistant District Attorney in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office (as well as author and colonel in the United States Marine Corps Reserves), seized the work based on evidence that it was looted from Italy in the 1970s. He was presented with evidence from forensics archaeologist Christos Tsirogiannis that the vase was connected to well-known looter Giacomo Medici. Medici was convicted in a Rome court of conspiring to traffic in ancient treasures, and is perhaps best known for his role in the looting and trafficking of the Euphronios Krater.
The Euphronios krater (also known as the Sarpedon Krater) is a red-figure vase attributed to the famous Greek painter Euphronios and the potter Euxitheos, dating from around 515 BCE. The Euphronios Krater is believed to have been illegally excavated sometime in December 1971 near Cerveteri, Italy, from the Greppe di Sant’Angelo region of the town’s ancient Etruscan cemetery, by tombaroli (tomb raiders). The looters sold the vase to Medici who them smuggled it into Switzerland and sold it for $350,000 to an antiquities dealer, Robert Hecht. By this point, the vase, which had been found in a remarkably excellent state, was intentionally damaged and broken into fragments to more easily illegally export it. After restoring the fragmented object, in February 1972, Hecht wrote to Dietrich von Bothmer, the Met’s Curator of Greek and Roman Art, about the krater. In August 1972, the Met bought the vase for $1 million.
Throughout the 1990s, Italian authorities investigated Giacomo Medici, and they eventually found enough evidence to bring legal claims against him. The Italian authorities also demanded the repatriation of the Euphronios Krater from the Met. The case drew international attention and led to the restitution of dozens of Italian artifacts from institutions across the country, including the Met, the MFA in Boston, and the Princeton Art Museum. The return of objects also led to the cultural exchange of artifacts from Italy in the form of long-term loans to the American institutions repatriating looted good. The Euphronios Krater has since returned home and is now on display at the Archaeological Museum of Cerveteri.
In the case of the Python Vessel, Mashberg reports that the Met removed the item from its viewing case and that it is now in the custody of law enforcement agents.
Standing 9 inches high, the Guennol Stargazer is one of the finest and largest preserved Anatolian marble female idols of Kiliya type — and will be offered in the Exceptional Sale on 28 April at Christie’s in New York. The Guennol Stargazer is from the Chalcolithic period, between 3000 and 2200 BC, and is considered to be one of the most impressive of its type known to exist. It is further distinguished by its exhibition history, having been on loan at The Metropolitan Museum of Art at various periods from 1966 to 2007.
The Guennol Stargazer garnered a great deal of attention, with the sale estimated to bring in about £2million. However, today’s sale exceeded all expectations with the hammer price being $12,700,000. Although auction results often exceed estimates, this sale was particularly surprising because the work’s legal title is in dispute. Turkey claims that the work was looted and that it should have never been placed up for auction.
Then today, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of Turkey posted an open letter in the NY Times (see the image below to read the text) calling for the return of objects looted from Turkey. The letter praises institutions and collectors who have shown good faith and repatriated looted works to their origin nation. The letter does not mention the Guennol Stargazer (although the silhouette of the object appears on the top of the page), but the meaning of this letter is not lost to anyone in the antiquities field.
As the legal title of this object is in dispute, a U.S. court ruled that Christie’s cannot release the work to the purchaser until a final determination on its legality is made.
The Art Newspaperrecently reported that the long-held freeze on museum loans between Russian and U.S. museums could finally come to an end.
In December, both the Senate and President Obama approved the Foreign Cultural Exchange Jurisdictional Immunity Clarification Act. The Act is intended to protect artworks and culturally significant objects on temporary loan to the United States from foreign institutions, by granting those artworks immunity from seizure.
Director of the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Mikhail Piotrovsky, openly praised the Act to The Art Newspaper, noting that the law could potentially provide new assurances that Russian-owned artworks would not be subject to seizure while in the United States. Piotrovsky’s statements came while visiting his long-time friend President-elect Donald J. Trump at his Florida home in December. Trump himself has been very vocal about his intent to warm US-Russian relations, so the possibility of seeing Russian-owned artworks once again in the U.S. could become very real after his January inauguration.
The new law has nevertheless faced heavy criticism from groups including the Holocaust Art Restitution Project. Although objects subject to Nazi-era restitution claims are not afforded protection under the Act, critics point out that the new Act could extinguish valid restitution claims, such as claims against the Russian and Cuban governments.
The Russian government suspended all artwork loans to US museums in 2011, fearing that any loaned artwork could be seized as part of an outstanding court order requiring Russia to turn over a vast library of religious texts to the Chabad-Lubavitch Orthodox Jewish community. In 2010, a federal judge in Washington had ordered that the Russian government turn over the “Schneerson Library,” a collection of more than 70,000 religious texts and documents to the Chabad organization. The organization has been trying to regain possession of the library for years, which was seized by the Bolsheviks during World War II, and Russia has yet to return the documents. In response to Russia’s cancellation of museum loans to the United States, US museums have also frozen lending artworks to museums run by the Russian government.
On September 22, Matthew Bogdanos submitted an application in NY Supreme Court in a matter involving a stolen antiquity from Lebanon. Our founder served as a cultural heritage law expert on this case. It was an honor to once again work with Bogdanos, a talented trial attorney. His track record for excellence is impressive, and the filing in this case is a tour de force of legal writing, reading like a suspenseful crime narrative and primer on cultural heritage law. The document was full of famous art world names, citations to landmark cases and conventions, and introduction to the world of art crime and heritage looting.
