February 8, 2000

CONTENTS:

Art Crime - Column on-line

Thai stone carvers are at the center of criminal activity

But they are criminals.

Will Britain lose its Marbles?

If the British Museum returned Lord Elgin's treasures to Greece, how safe would any loot be?

Feb. 5, 2000 | The British Museum has lost its charm for many of the tourists who throng its galleries. The government of Greece has lately been kicking up such a stink over the museum's handling of the marbles that Lord Elgin took from Athens' Parthenon 200 years ago that its 6 million annual visitors are beginning to distrust the evidence of their eyes. How much of what they had always assumed was perfectly preserved treasure has been tarted up? How plausible is the museum's long-trumpeted claim to be a caring steward? How many of its 6.5 million exhibits should be there at all? The story begins with a deal that Elgin struck in 1801. The Scottish Earl of Elgin, a passionate amateur collector of antiquities, had proposed himself for the post of British ambassador to Turkey's Ottoman Empire because of his health. He had syphilis, a disease which was to leave him as distressingly noseless as many of the chipped statues he collected, and the doctors recommended a warm climate. Europe was in the grip of the Romantic revival, and he was obsessively keen to record and, if possible, obtain as many of the ancient Greek treasures now in the uncaring care of Turkey. His purpose, he wrote, was to improve the modern art of Great Britain by permitting its artists to see firsthand the greatest examples of sculpture ever made. Ruling a wide swath of the ancient world, the potentates of Constantinople were pleased to accept bribes, gifts, money and munitions from the warring countries of England and France. In return, they gave permission to record, then sketch, then dismantle, and finally, transport the monuments and sculptures by earlier inhabitants of the empire they now ruled. They regarded the newfound passion of the European aristocracy and artists for ancient Greek artifacts as faintly ludicrous. But if the English and the French wanted to compete in carting those long-neglected relics halfway round the world, let them. So it was that Elgin (called "Eggy" by his vivacious young bride) was able to wheedle and buy permission to collect any chunks of the Parthenon crowning Athens' Acropolis that had crashed to the ground, and, he airily assumed, any more that might possibly fall down in the future. Built between 447 and 432 B.C., the Parthenon was a vast building masterminded by the Athenian statesman Pericles. Over the years, the Acropolis had many times been a battleground. In 1687 a Turkish powder magazine in the temple exploded after a direct hit by besieging Venetians, destroying a large part of it. The rubble was used as building material and rifled by souvenir hunters. All that was left intact of the three-dimensional art that had filled the building was part of the frieze and metopes (sculpted pictures) and some pediment sculptures. Elgin set about dismantling 274 feet of the original 524-foot frieze, 15 of the metopes and 17 figures from the pediments. They ultimately filled over 100 large packing cases. That some of the best examples of Phidias' art broke into fragments while being lowered to the ground was unfortunate, but that did not stop Elgin from squirreling up the bits. The treasures' subsequent adventures included sinking in shipwrecks, heavy-handed salvaging, being possessed by and rescued from Napoleon's fleet, and then lying, dispersed and neglected -- for many years awaiting transportation to London. Elgin himself suffered imprisonment in France, the infidelity and divorce of his countess, worsening health and near-bankruptcy caused by the enormous cost of dismantling, transporting and storing 120 tons of marbles, which were finally piled up in the back garden of a house at the corner of Piccadilly and Park Lane. Most distressing for Elgin was finding that his reputation had become that of a despoiler of an ancient civilization. His detractors were led by the mad, bad Lord Byron, whose hand probably carved on the Acropolis the lines, "Quod Non Fecerunt Gothi, Fecerunt Scoti" -- "What the Goths spared, the Scots have destroyed." In the bestselling narrative poem, "Childe Harold," Byron wrote:

The last, the worst, dull spoiler, who was he? Blush, Caledonia! such thy son could be! ... Cold as the crags upon his native coast, His mind as barren and his heart as hard, Is he whose head conceiv'd, whose hand prepar'd Aught to displace Athena's poor remains ... Dull is the eye that will not weep to see Thy walls defac'd, thy mouldering shrines removed, By British hands ..."

Reward Offered for Missing Shrunken Head

$16,000 Artifact Stolen from Museum

Price on the head

Culprit climbs fence to break in

Cézanne heist a movie carbon copy

The intruder smashed a skylight and lowered himself down a rope, the police say, before tossing a smoke canister onto the floor. In an instant the room filled with smoke, obscuring the view from the security cameras. The burglar and fire alarms went off, throwing the museum into chaos that bought the intruder a few precious moments. The police responded to the alarm at 1.43am. When he slipped out of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England, less than 10 minutes later, melting into the crowds celebrating the New Year around the city, the thief carried with him exactly what he had come for, a $US4.8 million ($7.5 million) Cézanne oil on canvas, Auvers-sur Oise, which was painted between 1879 and 1882 and marks an important transition between the artist's early and later work. He carried nothing else. Left behind was a room full of Renoirs, Rodins and Toulouse-Lautrecs. So the Ashmolean Museum became the latest victim of a crime that has plagued the art world over the years: the daring, made-to-order art theft. It is a crime deeply connected with the unsavoury underworld of drug smuggling and money laundering, even as it evokes images of languid, amusing thieves wearing dinner jackets and relishing their stolen collections, cunningly concealed in fabulous mansions on remote private islands. That theory is as good as any at this point, said Duncan McGraw, a spokesman for the Thames Valley Police, which has six officers working on the case but hasn't turned up anything yet. "The theory we're going on is that it was stolen to order," McGraw said. "We think an art lover from somewhere in Britain or the world probably earmarked the painting for a collection and hired a professional art thief to steal it." At the same time, experts in tracing stolen masterpieces say that while the Thomas Crown-style plot, in vogue because of the movie starring Pierce Brosnan as a handsome, self-satisfied thief, is certainly possible, it is not probable. "People obviously like the scenario where there is this international art thief going around and stealing valuable paintings for his own pleasure, but I really feel that is far-fetched," said Malcolm Kenwood, a former detective with the Sussex Police antiques squad. Kenwood is now the client services manager for the Art Loss Register, which helps recover stolen art and antiques. "The majority of items are stolen because they are readily convertible to cash in the underworld." Thefts of art and antiquities are big business, with some experts estimating that some $US4.8 billion worth are stolen worldwide each year. "Art is very easy to transport around the world," said James Emson, the managing director of the Art Loss Register, who noted that criminal organisations often trade in stolen artworks as collateral in making deals with one another. "It's a very valuable commodity that allows you to launder money very easily." Literally tens of thousands of readily identifiable paintings have been stolen and never recovered. Among the missing, according to the Art Loss Register, are 47 works by Degas, 54 by Rodin, 142 by Rembrandt and 14 by Kandinsky. The Ashmolean thief was able to take advantage of scaffolding being used in a construction site next door, he said, and although there were guards in the museum at the time, they were not in the gallery where the Cézanne was hanging. "This is a very, very large building," Brown said. "Unless you can put staff in every gallery every night, how can you deal with this?" Why did the thief - the police say they think there was just one intruder, though there may have been accomplices outside - steal the Cézanne and leave so many other valuable paintings behind? Perhaps the sale of a Cézanne in December made the thief erroneously assume he could get the same sort of price for it on the black market, said Katrina Burrows, the editor of the London magazine Trace, which tracks stolen art and antiques. My personal theory is that they're very media alert," she said, noting that people had pointed out the similarities between the Ashmolean theft and the movie Entrapment, in which Sean Connery pulls off a stunning art theft. "It was a combination of factors that included watching films and reading the papers." But the people who have Auvers-sur Oise may well be finding that they have saddled themselves with a beautiful, 40cmx56cm albatross. "People in the trade are saying right now that the era of the great art theft is over," Burrows said. "Really serious criminals are realising that art isn't worth their while anymore, because it's so quickly traceable, and they'll get nothing like a decent market value for it." This is not much consolation for Brown, who can only wait and hope. "There's not much else you can do," he said. "We want people to know that this picture, should it be offered to them, is the property of the Ashmolean Museum."
http://www.smh.com.au/news/0002/05/text/spectrum5.html

Plundered art on the line

Germany's culture minister is cleaning house.

That has since changed.

Scopes Papers Sought After Fire