August 2, 2000, part II
CONTENTS:
- Two paintings get closer look, Ownership history incomplete, says Columbus Museum of Art
- Italy crusades for return of plundered antiquities
- Access Control Products Automatic Systems
- Phila. Museum of Art has had its own stolen-art controversy
- Museum musters resources for repairs (After 60 years, Maryhill Museum of Art's 100,000 visitors each year wear on its outdated buildings)
Two paintings get closer look, Ownership history incomplete, says Columbus Museum of Art
Felix Hoover Dispatch Staff Reporter
A veneer of mystery coats two paintings on display at the Columbus Museum of Art. Gaps in the ownership histories of David and Bathsheba by Artemisia Gentileschi and Earth: Vertumnus and Pomona by Francois Boucher have raised questions for which museum officials said they will seek answers. Around the world, other museums are coming to grips with similar omissions in the records of their collections. Sometimes, Holocaust survivors or their heirs have asserted that the art was looted by the Nazis, and they have taken legal action for its return. No such claim has been made about either painting at the Columbus museum, at 480 E. Broad St. But museum officials said tracing the questionable works' provenances -- their origins and histories -- will require lengthy, thorough investigation. Gaps in provenances aren't necessarily the result of improprieties. Legitimate sales might have taken place, yet the documentation might have been destroyed or lost. Except for masterpieces, it's common for tremendous numbers of art pieces to have gaps in their histories, said Constance Lowenthal, director of the World Jewish Congress' Commission for Art Recovery. Still, the commission is researching works with ownership gaps between 1933, when Adolf Hitler rose to power, and 1945, when World War II ended. Its goal is to get the works into the proper hands. The Columbus museum has begun the monumental task of tracing not only the two works with known gaps, but its entire collection of non-American art, Executive Director Irvin Lippmann said. Having the staff conduct such searches by itself would be too costly and time-consuming, so information about its works is being placed online. "If we're able to do it over the next year, we'll have made great headway," Lippmann said. Other museums nationwide are conducting similar searches and placing information online, including the Cleveland Museum of Art. In April, the Cleveland museum released findings of a two-year investigation of its collection that showed 370 paintings with questionable histories. Among them is Interior With an Etruscan Vase by Henri Matisse. The 1940 painting was among items belonging to French Jewish art dealer Paul Rosenberg that were confiscated by the Nazis. The Allies returned much of Rosenberg's collection after the war, but the museum hasn't found proof that its Matisse was included in the return and was later sold legitimately. Listing the works on the museum's Web site has sparked inquiries from Cleveland and other cities about some of the art but has resulted in no claims, a spokeswoman said. Columbus doesn't expect many of its works to be suspected as Holocaust loot, Lippmann said. "The museum, quite frankly, hasn't acquired a great number of works that are not American in the past 50 years," he said. Nevertheless, many of the museum's 6,000 pieces of art are to be researched and documented to ensure that the chain of ownership is as pure and unbroken as possible, he said. David and Bathsheba was purchased in 1967 from dealer P&D Colnaghi & Co. of London. Earth: Vertumnus and Pomona was bought in 1980 from dealer David Carritt, also of London. The effort to return any art that might have been illegally confiscated during the Holocaust is consistent with similar efforts by the museum. "For us, we've recently gone through repatriation of Native American objects, making sure that works of religious importance belonging to Native Americans got back to specific tribes," Lippmann said. Worldwide efforts to restore European artwork to its proper owners got a boost when the Cold War ended. "Free access of information in Russia and East Germany makes new information available," Lippmann said. The Association of Art Museum Directors, which represents 180 of the major museums in the United States, Canada and Mexico, is among the organizations dealing with looted art from the '30s and '40s. The association, which has characterized the unlawful confiscation of art as "one of the many horrors of the Holocaust and World War II," urges museums to respond promptly to owners and heirs who claim ownership of suspicious art. In the past, claimants had little chance of success without overwhelming proof. In 1998, the museum directors developed guidelines to lessen the burden of proof and to set aside statutes of limitation that might have barred families from recovering stolen art. With the guidelines comes a mood shift that makes museums more ally than adversary to claimants, Lowenthal said. The attitude toward art recovery increasingly is viewed as a moral, rather than legal, matter. "A museum often has pieces of the puzzle that the family doesn't," she said. The association recommends that museums seek as much provenance information as possible from scholars, donors, auction houses, dealers and other sources before buying art or accepting it as a gift. "If there is evidence of unlawful confiscation, and there is no evidence of restitution, the museum should not proceed to acquire the object," an association report says. The report suggests that mediation be used whenever practical to resolve claims of illegally taken art for which restitution hasn't been made. Databases have been set up on several Web sites to help rightful owners and heirs search for missing and illegally confiscated art. Museums also have set up databases for the public to list: Claims and claimants. Works of art illegally confiscated during the Nazi era. Works for which restitution has been made. Dealers known to have bought, sold or traded in art stolen by the Nazis are being publicly identified by researchers at the Commission for Art Recovery. The commission also lists names of families whose works were confiscated, insurance records, Nazi confiscation lists and postwar Allied restitution organizations. Other searching organizations include the Holocaust Claims Processing Office of the New York State Banking Department, the Art Loss Register and the Holocaust Art Restitution Project. Despite the willingness of museums to trace the history of their collections, impediments sometimes crop up, said Annegreth T. Nill, curator of 20th-century and contemporary art at the Columbus museum. "Auction houses don't have to disclose who the previous owner was," she said. Lowenthal said records of wartime confiscations are plentiful, but a huge part of the puzzle is missing: "art taken from Jews in Germany before Hitler crossed a single border." Another complication is that records of confiscated works are scattered among many nations, making it more difficult to compile the worldwide database that some envision. "Still, in theory, with money and time it will be possible," Lowenthal said.
Italy crusades for return of plundered antiquities
By Jeffrey Fleishman, INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
ROME - In his office near Piazza Venezia, Mario Bondioli-Osio, a jovial man with a desk full of papers and a head full of anecdotes, spends his days trying to recover art pillaged from Italy over the centuries by everyone from tomb robbers to Nazis.
He works in an unsavory world that is driven by money and greed. Italy has been a vast digging ground for art thieves and swindlers since the early days of the Renaissance. Many of its antiquities - including Etruscan pots and marbled images of Greek and Roman gods - have been illegally sold to museums, acquired by auction houses, and hustled into the private collections of the rich and famous.
The plundering has damaged historical sites and jeopardizes efforts to reconstruct past cultures, archaeologists say. The threat has intensified since the 1980s, when a boom in the world art market created a strong demand for artifacts. In more recent years, the Internet has become a clearinghouse for antiquities sales.
Italian authorities estimate that the looting of artifacts from illegal excavation sites - many of them controlled by the Mafia - may account for $100 million a year. A special Italian police unit has recovered more than 326,000 stolen artifacts since 1969. In the last five years, 99,970 pieces were found in Italy and 1,297 were recovered from abroad. "The theft of art and antiquities from Italy is like ripping a page out of our history," said Bondioli-Osio, whose office is in a palazzo owned by Pope Paul II in the 1400s. "It is the power of law and culture against the power of greed, and, unfortunately, this struggle is encouraging more and more illegal digging."
Italy's most recent effort to stop the theft of its treasures has stunned art dealers and museums across the United States. Last October, Italy formally petitioned the U.S. State Department to impose tough import restrictions on artifacts dating from the fifth century B.C. through A.D. 500. That would cover everything from Apulian vases to ancient coins and could strike a damaging blow to the estimated $50 million-a-year American market in Italian and Mediterranean antiquities. The U.S. government is expected to make a decision on Italy's request in coming months.
One of the most prized collections that Italy wants returned resides in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It is a 15-piece silver set crafted around 211 B.C. in Morgantina, Sicily. Italy says the silver was stolen by Mafia-hired tombaroli (grave robbers) in the early 1980s. It was eventually smuggled to Switzerland and acquired by the Met for $2.7 million through international art dealer Robert E. Hecht Jr. American archaeologist Malcolm Bell 3d, who oversees Morgantina's excavation sites, was asked by the Italian government to investigate the silver set's origin. The trail led Bell deep into Sicily's history. The silver, he said, was most likely hidden beneath a floor of a house by a Greek man named Eupolemos, who was trying to protect his wealth from invading Roman armies. But Bell found more than antiquity at the site. As he dug within the ancient house, he discovered two holes that had been recently filled in and littered with flashlight batteries, cigarette butts, bottle caps and a 100-lire Italian coin dated 1978. It appeared, according to Bell and Italian police, that looters using metal detectors had unearthed the silver set, which included a libation dish and an incense container. "I have no doubt about the local origin of this set," said Bell, who, after first being refused access to the silver, was permitted last year by the Met to examine it. Italian authorities say that patterns and emblems on the silver set - including the image of a mythical beast - resemble other artifacts found near Morgantina.
The Met bought the silver in two shipments in 1981 and 1982. The museum's dealer, Hecht, acquired the silver in Switzerland from a Lebanese businessman. Hecht had earlier been barred from Italy for his involvement in the 1972 sale to the Met of another famous antiquity, a 2,500-year-old Greek vase known as the Euphronius Krater. The Met paid $1 million for the vase, which Italian authorities said was looted from an Etruscan tomb. In an interview, Met spokesman Harold Holzer said discussions between the Met and the Italians "are continuing" over the fate of the Morgantina silver set. He added that the silver was "under constant study." In recent years, the Met has returned treasures that were proven to have been looted, including an 11th- century stone Buddha stolen from India.
"It's not a problem of whether art belongs in the Met or in Rome," said Rick Elia, an archaeologist at Boston University. "It is more the question of the destruction of archaeological content. Looters rip these sites apart. They smash bones and pots and paintings looking for something to sell. . . . It's really a form of cultural genocide. You're left with big holes in the ground and smashed-up pieces of history."
Elia's main concern is protecting Apulian vases that were crafted by Greek artisans and were prominent in southern Italy between 430 and 300 B.C. The vases, said Elia, are the "poor cousins" of the classical Athenian vases that depict Greek mythology. Theft of Athenian vases has been rampant over the centuries.
So in the 1970s and 1980s, looters and art dealers created a market for Apulian vases. The vases are made of fired clay and glazed in black with red clay figures. They generally sell for between $20 and several thousand dollars each, although a few have fetched as much as $200,000. About 14,000 Apulian vases are known to exist, most of them in museums and private collections around the world. Fewer than 800 have been found in legal excavations. About 4,200 of the vases have appeared in the art world since 1980. A study by Elia found that Sotheby's, for example, since 1965 has sold about 2,000 Apulian vases, 85 percent of which were undocumented. "This proves [these vases] are being looted," Elia said. Sotheby's did not return phone calls to its offices. In recent published reports, the auction house disputed Elia's contentions. When U.S. Customs agents caught up with David Holland Swingler in the early 1990s, they found that he had 230 Apulian and Etruscan vases stashed in his home in Laguna Hills, Calif. The cache was worth about $300,000. Bondioli-Osio said the vases were illegally shipped to Swingler by his Italian partner and fellow food importer, Licio DiLuzio.
"Parts of this case are rather comical," said Bondioli-Osio. "It seems that DiLuzio's wife, Sandra Scarabelli, had a [falling-out] with her husband. She told police, '[My] husband kicked me out, but he has a load of antiquities in his cellar.' Swingler was actually advertising the sale of these pieces by slipping brochures on car windshields in his neighborhood." DiLuzio was arrested for violating Italy's 1939 law that forbids the digging up and trafficking of antiquities. His case is still in court. Swingler was not charged by U.S. authorities. In 1996, Italian courts sentenced him in absentia to four years in prison and $6,000 in fines. U.S. customs began returning the artifacts to Italy on June 30 this year.
"I think there is a trend that governments and museums realize much of our art has been plundered and should be returned," said Bondioli-Osio, sitting before files of cases scattered over his desk. "Historically, theft of artifacts was not morally seen as a crime."
The United States has worked to allay some of Italy's fears. The U.S. government in 1983 ratified the UNESCO Cultural Property Convention that forbids the sale and trafficking of antiquities and art. But last fall, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D., N.Y.) introduced legislation that would ease import restrictions. And, according to Italian authorities, U.S. District Courts often can be less than sympathetic in hearing international art-theft cases.
"It can get very bureaucratic, a lot of red tape," said Bondioli-Osio, who prefers a less cumbersome approach. He is negotiating with New York millionaire collector Maurice Tempelsman for the return of two marble heads that Italy says were taken from Morgantina.
The heads - of the Greek goddesses Demeter and Persephone - are in Tempelsman's
private collection. Tempelsman maintains the art was legally acquired and says he doubts that the heads are Italian in origin. Bondioli-Osio said he does not like to talk about the specifics of the two-year delicate negotiations. Instead, he preferred relying on broader sentiment.
"The art is the soul of a nation and should not be taken away," he said.
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Phila. Museum of Art has had its own stolen-art controversy
The Philadelphia Museum of Art does not collect ancient art (Egyptian, Roman, Greek, Etruscan), which is the kind most often involved in stolen-art disputes such as those involving Italian authorities and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. But the Philadelphia museum had its own stolen-art controversy earlier this year. It announced in May that it had returned to a museum in Dresden, Germany, five pieces of armor that apparently were stolen from the Dresden collection near the end of World War II. Anne d'Harnoncourt, director of the Art Museum, was a member of a task force organized by the Association of Art Museum Directors to develop a policy on art looted during the Nazi era. The policy, created in 1998, urged museums to respond promptly to any claims by owners or heirs and proposed attempting to resolve such matters "in an equitable, appropriate and mutually agreeable manner."
Philadelphia Newspapers Inc.
Museum musters resources for repairs
After 60 years, Maryhill Museum of Art's 100,000 visitors each year wear on its outdated buildings
By Jeanie Senior, Correspondent, The Oregonian MARYHILL, Wash. -- Maryhill Museum of Art -- the remote fine arts museum that grew from the unconventional friendship of a queen, the heiress to a San Francisco sugar fortune, a former Folies-Bergere dancer and visionary Sam Hill -- is 60 years old and starting to show its age. From mid-March through mid-November, approximately 10,000 visitors a month find their way to Maryhill, 100 miles east of Portland on Washington 14, to gaze at displays in the museum, or to walk through an outdoor sculpture garden. The museum's collection is best described as eclectic. It includes golden treasures from Romania's royal heritage, a unusual group of miniature French mannequins modeling the 1945 Parisian haute couture collection, a much-admired exhibit of Native American work, plus sculpture and drawings by French artist Auguste Rodin. But the aging museum's outdated and overworked wiring, plumbing and heating systems all need upgrading, a massive project that is going to cost more than $3 million. Nearly every aspect of the museum's physical plant, mostly dating from the late 1930s, is over-taxed by the crowds and the demands of operating a museum in the year 2000. Maryhill has, for example, only three toilets and one urinal to accommodate up to 100,000 visitors a year as well as the museum's 10 to 14 staff members. Because there's no air conditioning, the three-story concrete building swelters in summer. In the winter, the antiquated furnace in the basement sends little or no heat to the two upper floors. "In some ways," Museum Director Josie De Falla said,"we may have camouflaged our needs too well. We've done it out of professional pride. Now, we're are starting to bring it out." Pat Perry, who has worked as the museum's operations manager since 1986, said efforts during her tenure have focused on upgrading Maryhill as a museum. "Just since I've been here, we've catalogued the collection," she said. "It never had been done before. We're in the process of accreditation." Under both De Falla, at Maryhill since 1992, and her predecessor, Linda Brady Tesner, who worked there for nine years, the museum has grown. It has acquired professional staff -- including a curator, registrar and collections manager -- added a security force, improved its displays, performed conservator work, started education programs, and written guidebooks to the collection, not to mention the lengthy, ongoing process of obtaining accreditation with the American Association of Museums. "All these things take people to do them," Perry said. "It's taken every penny we've got just to pay electricity and salaries." "Something breaks down all the time," she said. "The equipment is old, too. Mowers and pumps -- we've got three springs (to provide water) and the chlorinator went out this year. It's one thing after another. "The money," Perry said, "goes to maintain the status quo." Throughout the museum, discreet signs explain some of the maintenance problems, as well as the need for upgrading. The museum director had a clear door installed on one of the fuse boxes, so visitors can see the antiquated screw-in glass fuses, part of the 1914 electrical system. De Falla and other members of the museum staff may joke about using the microwave oven only when they're sure heating lunch won't cause someone's computer to crash, and timing their restroom visits before the arrival of tour buses, but the museum director said the effects on Maryhill's exhibits can't be dismissed. "The extreme range of temperatures -- from 100 degrees to 40 degrees -- this is what's not good for the collection," she said. Neither are the dust and smoke that drift in through windows opened to provide cross-ventilation. Outside Maryhill's main entrance, De Falla points to an orange extension cord snaking down the museum's east facade from a window air-conditioner in a top-floor gallery. It's plugged into an outlet two stories below. To keep from blowing fuses, she said, "We have to run cords all over the building to find different power sources."
As eclectic as its history
Maryhill builder and founder Sam Hill, an attorney and the son-in-law of Great Northern railroad magnate James Hill, was a complex, dynamic man who played a key role in the construction of the Columbia River Highway. A world traveler, he helped the Russians organize the 7,000-mile Trans-Siberian Railroad, built the international Peace Arch at Blaine, Wash., and erected a replica of Stonehenge as a war memorial east of Maryhill. He built the first stretch of paved highway in the Northwest a few miles from the museum. When work started on Maryhill, Sam Hill intended it to be his country house, the centerpiece for a 6,000-acre model agricultural community along the Columbia River. But his family wasn't interested in living there, even part-time, and the community failed to flourish. Famed dancer Loie Fuller, visiting Maryhill in 1917, suggested to Hill that the still-unfinished house would be a splendid museum of fine arts. Hill persuaded their mutual friend, Queen Marie of Romania, to come to Klickitat County to dedicate Maryhill Museum as part of her grand tour of the United States in 1926. "A curious and interesting building," said the queen, who had brought crates of items for display and was confronted by a building without electricity, windows and interior walls. She added, "there's a dream built into this place." The dream didn't become reality until nine years after Hill's death in 1931, three years after his will was settled and the endowment he left for the museum freed for use. The fourth friend in the group, San Francisco socialite Alma Spreckels, guided the museum to its 1940 opening. She donated a large number of royal Romanian artifacts, Russian icons, paintings, and works by Rodin. She also rescued the Theatre de la Mode, the celebrated collection of French fashion dolls, from the basement of the defunct City of Paris department store in San Francisco and saw to its shipment to Maryhill.
Every fix in due time
Some renovation work has been done. The leaking and cracked ramps on the building's east and west sides were repaired three years ago. And it wasn't a moment too soon, the museum director said. "We actually had water flowing down the walls in the Native American gallery" and into collection storage areas, she said. This month, workers are finishing the job of replacing the museum's single elevator, which was so old that parts to fix it no longer could be found. It became apparent last year, De Falla said, that replacement was overdue. The car frequently got stuck between floors, and its doors didn't always open reliably. Staff members became adept at rescues, and at manipulating the creaky old elevator to make it work. Museum spokesman Lee Musgrave said it is hoped that enough money will be raised so that the third stage of the renovation can begin at the end of 2001. More than 400 individuals, corporations and foundations have donated to the museum's capital campaign. Maryhill recently got three $50,000 grants from The Allen Foundation for the Arts, the Ben B. Cheney Foundation and the U.S. Forest Service's rural community assistance program.
The museum, 100 miles east of Portland on Washington 14, is open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., March 15 to November 15. You can reach Jeanie Senior at 541-386-5662 or by e-mail at newssr@gorge.net.