August 29, 2000, part II

- Re: Sotheby's Response (Michel van Rijn)
- INVALUABLE, Collect and protect (August/September issue)
- One year of Stolen Art CD-ROM
- DEALER TELLS ALL . . . WELL, SOME (A review of Richard Feigen's Tales from the Art Crypt)
- Re: Comment on Shelby White's nomination to the government's Cultural Property Advisory Committee (James Linza)

Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2000 12:27:47 +0200
Subject:

Re: Sotheby's Response

From: info@michelvanrijn.com
To: Museum Security Mailinglist securma@xs4all.nl

Forum Provenance

Dear Mr. Cremers,
The following info I would like to share with your subscribers.
With great interest I have taken notice of Sotheby's response to your forum, trough Mrs. Rena J. Moulopoulos. Let's for a moment assume that 'Sotheby's, the inside story' by Peter Watson has not yet been written. Protests against looted Chinese Art at auction didn't take place in Hong Kong. Let's also ignore my understanding that Cultural Heritage Watch is preparing legislation to prevent Sotheby's and Christie's from entering the Chinese main land....

(Here Mr. Van Rijn is refering to a message from CHW, reproduced at the end of his reply to Sotheby;s. T.C.)

Sotheby's was not forced to return a stolen Byzantine Icon of St. John the Baptist to Cyprus. They didn't sell easy recognizable paintings from the Schloss Collection, stolen at the Holocaust Era. etc.
And let's then concentrate on the provenance question, what this Forum is all about.
During an undercover operation in '96, I consigned several antiquities to Sotheby's, London, under the code name Meyer. As there was no Mr. Meyer, apparently it was sufficient to consign these works of art to their premises by shipper. The auction was successful and payment was made to Mrs. v W. Accordingly I paid the tombaroli in cash, which was recorded by the police. As it served a higher purpose (a follow up took place), there was no urgency to go after the auction house at that time.
It didn't surprise me at all that it was so easy to consign questionable antiquities to Sotheby's.
If Mrs. Moulopoulos had checked these data, she probably would have responded differently to the Australian smuggle accusations:
-Quote-

With respect to the specific lots offered at Sotheby's in June, we
have no reason to believe that either of the parties that Mr. Van Rijn
mentions were ever owners of the items at issue. Our consignor was a
US dealer who has confirmed to us that the items were not purchased
from the parties Mr. Van Rijn mentions. None of our specialists saw
the consigned property in Australia at any time.

-Unquote-

Did Mrs. Moulopoulos really expect a different answer from the consignor? Or is it a self serving statement? On my web-site you can listen in explicit detail to Mr. Frank Bottaro and two of his Gallery Director's. All discussing the antiquities depicted in the Sotheby's catalogue. Especially discussing the way these antiquities were consigned through a third party to create a smoke screen. Would any major dealer in this sensitive area voluntarily incriminate himself?
What did surprise me, was the fact that my name and publication (Early Christian Works of Art,1981) was quoted as a provenance record related to several Faiyum portraits and mosaics sold in dec. '96 in London. One of the Faiyum portraits was even depicted on the cover of the catalogue (Lot number 83).
Taking in consideration my long feud and clashes with Sotheby's, starting in the early eighties with the Avar Treasure (see http://www.michelvanrijn.com), and their past and present comments, this even surprised me.

-Quote-

Finally, for your information, Mr. Van Rijn is a confessed forger and
is reported in the press to have been convicted of a felony.

-Unquote

Immediately I wrote to Sotheby's that these works of art were smuggled. Sotheby's ignored my letters and faxes.

-Quoting New Scotland Yard-

Mr. van Rijn has been responsible for 90% of the smuggled art works
around the world, before he changed his live 12 years ago.

-Unquote-

It was hard to understand for me not to be taken seriously. Even with the Yard's statement. Had all my smuggling been in vain? Let me try to put this in the right perspective. Would you sell antiquities from a confessed forger and convicted felon?
sincerely yours,
michel van rijn
PS. Luckily I lived the smuggling life; Thanks to my expertise in this field, I
was able to assist several police forces over the last 10 years. In this
respect, I like to mention the repatriating of stolen works of art to Cyprus in
addition of 40 million U.K. pounds. (1997)

Message from Cultural Heritage Watch:

From: "wyxhsz" hsuzhong@public2.east.cn.net
To: "Mr.Ton" securma@xs4all.nl

Subject: CHW reports on 28-08
Date sent: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 18:11:43 +0800
Culturalheritagewatch reports on 28-08-2000:

What Are We Doing Against the Two Auction Houses?

It is obvious that Sotheby's and Christie's have done a lots on the unethical trading of cultural heritage. All people should cooperate to fight against them. What is CHW doing now for the important task? One is to promote a rule in China to forbid them establishing their branches in the mainland. China is rewriting the law on the protection of cultural heritage. We are promoting to put a special article into the law. We believe we will be successful. Another action is to collect some pictures of Chinese cultural objects which were appeared in the auction catalogues, and their sources were unclear. We will put the pictures on our Website and ask the two houses the same question: Where do these cultural properties come from?

INVALUABLE, Collect and protect

http://www.invaluable.com/
Issue 139, August/September 2000

One year of Stolen Art CD-ROM

Hello,
One year ago, Interpol and Jouve were launching the Interpol "Stolen Works of Art" CD-ROM
Within one year, more than 2.500 items have been added to the database, which is now gathering more than 16.000 artworks of all kind and from all countries. Great improvements have also been made in order to facilitate the use of the CD-ROM.
The Interpol "Stolen Works of Art" CD-ROM is now used on a daily basis by museums such as the J.P Getty Museum, the Rijks Museum, and the Louvre. All around the world, many private companies and of course numerous police and customs forces are also using the CD-ROM in order check easily an object being sold or retrieved.

additional information is available at:
http://www.stolenart.net/

Recent theft alerts at:
http://museum-security.org/indexdefinitief.html (click the Riopelle painting)

Thank you very much for your help and concern in the fight against illegal artwork trafficking,
Best Regards
Lucie Heymann
Webmaster - Jouve-Diffusion.
B.P.2734 - 75027 Paris Cedex 01. FRANCE
Tél./Phone : +33 (0) 1 44 76 86 00
Fax : +33(0) 1 44 76 86 10
Mél/E-mail : lheymann@jouve.fr
Web : www.jouve-diffusion.com

DEALER TELLS ALL . . . WELL, SOME

A review of Richard Feigen's Tales from the Art Crypt

by Alice Goldfarb Marquis
Richard Feigen's adventures in the art trade deserve a book, bot not necessarily this one.
He has been in the business for more than four decades, with galleries in Chicago and New York, and a far-flung network of clients. He buys and sells all sorts of art, from works created in the Renaissance to those made the day before yesterday.
He knows a lot about how museums operate and what motivates collectors. In the subtitle of this book he promises tales about "the painters, the museums, the curators, the collectors, the auctions, the art." That's a tall order, too tall even for a well informed insider. And it's far too ambitious for an author who rambles, who digresses, and who loves to preach rip-snorting sermons on too many topics.
I liked this book's fearless mention of money, the delicious centerpiece of most art gossip, but a word considered too obscene for polite art conversations.
In a priceless chapter titled "Baksheesh," Feigen describes the byzantine complexity of his effort to sell a rare Persian manuscript to the Shah of Iran for $28.5 million. The effort failed and he lost a $3.5 million commission simply from not knowing whom to bribe.
I also liked Feigen's refreshing opinions, even when I disagreed. Who else would consider Jean Dubuffet the most important artist of the second half of the 20th century? And how many other people would deplore museums' neglect of Italian Baroque painters, for example Orazio Gentileschi and his daughter, Artemisia, the poster-girl for feminist art historians? Also admirable is his connoisseurship and his persistence in smoking out an unknown Poussin and a misattributed Domenichino, both now in his private collection.
The strength -- and also the weakness -- of this book is that it reads like an art war veteran's late night monologue over a Courvoisier V. S. O. P. : He is often a sprightly raconteur, but often, alas, he isn't.
Feigen shines when he describes his personal experiences with museums; for example, the sad story of his connection with the Barnes Foundation. But he lost me when he started haranguing museums about their supposed abandonment of connoisseurship and pandering to the public.
Feigen captivates when he describes his detective work in attributing a George Washington portrait at the White House. But his account of the dispersal of the Gertrude Stein collection has often been told.
Feigen is at his best when he demonstrates the successful art dealer's encyclopedic knowledge and consummate skill. This man appears to be aware of every item in every collection, private or public, everywhere in the world -- and he has the chutzpah to approach the biggest wigs.
As an art dealer, he is a legend, probably in a league with Bernard Berenson, Lord Duveen and Leo Castelli. But when he strays into analyzing the world economy, the sociology of Chicago, or how the arts should be funded, this man who is so alert to every nuance in a painting resorts to stark and simplistic black and white: the good guys vs. the villains.
The publisher of this book, the once-distinguished house of Alfred R. Knopf, has not served the author well. A good editor should have shaped this ramble around the block into a coherent book. A proofreader also should have caught the typos, for example, the artist John Trumbull printed as "Trumbell" on page 199. A scrupulous publisher would have provided this book with an index, if only from self-interest: how many of the hundreds of big names dropped in these pages would buy the book, if they saw themselves in the index? Perhaps this is a selling point for a searchable electronic version. Finally, this $30 book is shabbily produced: a simulated cloth and cardboard cover and a binding that broke after one reading.
Not much of a selling point for a book about excellent visual art.

From: "James Linza" linza@worldnet.att.net
Subject:

Re: Comment on Shelby White's nomination to the government's Cultural Property Advisory Committee

Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2000 08:34:03 -0400
Organization: Linza & Company
It light of the postings of the past year, thank you Ton for posting the
White issue.
James