October 17, 2000
CONTENTS:
- RE: invisibile ink (Tom Dixon)
- Art Museum settles suit over a stolen Matisse
- Vilnius conference urges speedier restitution of Nazi-looted cultural property
- National Workshop on UNESCO Instruments Protecting the Movable Cultural Heritage, to be held in Hanoi, 21 to 23 November 2000
From: Tom Dixon tom.dixon@ngv.vic.gov.au
Subject: RE: invisibile ink
Steve Keller points out that invisible ink systems, most of which are viewed in ultraviolet light, have come and gone from the art market for many years. They have not been popular with museums for the most part for a number of reasons, only one of which is "conservation concerns", a phrase I grow to resent more and more- I'd prefer just to say concerns about the long term potential for damage by a material.
Museum practice has evolved over several centuries many systems for marking collections. Collections may contain prints and drawings collected in the 19th and early 20th centuries which have ink stamp pad logos stamped on their verso which, in some cases, have bled through the paper and now disfigure the image on the front. This is an obvious case of a system which was ill advised. Yet such marks have no doubt prevented some of these items from being lost. A visually more sympathic pencil marking might have been removed and the item pilfered- so whose to say? In Asian scroll paintings, the tradition is to stamp the collectors seal on the front of the item, where it is plainly visible and becomes part of the history of the scroll. The issue is finding a balance among function (identifying the item as your property), aethetics (not having it interfere with the appearance of the item), stability or longevity (it stays where you put it for as long as you need it), reversibility (you can remove it if it starts to deteriorate dangerously or if you need to for some other reason), irreversibility (no one else can remove it), and very long term chemical stability (it doesn't break down into nasty components that attack your work of art). A pretty tall order. Conservators use a number of methods to determine long term chemical stability of anything in the museum environment- including the objects themselves. Some of these are practical tests such as The Oddy Test in which samples of materials such as carpet, wrapping materials, foam or paper packing materials are put in test tubes containing copper, silver and lead wires under specific temperature and humidity conditions and corrosion or lack thereof is observed. This is a good "ready reckoner" approach to short to medium term stability and interactivity of materials, but is most useful in selecting a better product of a certain type- for example, you need foam padding for packing an object so you test samples of a number of available foams and pick the best performing one for your project. With regards to testing new inks for marking objects, the testing might initially involve simple pH testing to determine if the product is acidic. Then we would want to look at the formula and see what chemicals are present and evaluate what they might do in the long term. I'd also be interested in doing fading tests to determine how long the fluroescence lasts- I'd be surprised if it was more than a decade or two. But I think the real issue of the invisible ink products has been more one of practicality in a museum setting- and the question of what does it achieve for us. Our collection is around 65,000 items ranging in value from pennies to many 10s of millions of dollars (Rembrandt paintings, etc) and in size from tiny to it just barely fits in the doors- and a few outdoor sculptures that don't fit in the doors. Everything is marked with an accession number and items have labels where practical.
We need our visible accession numbers for the daily job of moving things around display and storage-and it is hard to balance the need to have an additional invisible marking with the enormous job of putting it on everything- which would take years. In the event of theft of something, presumably the thief will remove the visible marking- however it is likely that traces of it would remain and could be found using infra red imaging or other techniques. So, at least in our context, what's the point of a second system? From one museum conservator's point of view, I just don't see a general use for invisible ink. My advice to private collectors as well as museums large and small would be to appropriately mark your collection, and have in a safe place an accurate record of each item- measurements, a good image, a detailed condition notes (for example, knowing there is a tiny chip in the paint located 2" from the right side and 8" from the top will help identify it if it is recovered). In the case of art objects, this will do more than an invisible marking is likely to.
Thomas Dixon
Chief Conservator
National Gallery of Victoria
Melbourne Australia
Art Museum settles suit over a stolen Matisse
N.Y. gallery offering a replacement for $2 million work seized by Nazis
By REGINA HACKETT
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER ART CRITIC
The Seattle Art Museum's struggle with the darker side of art history ended yesterday with an out-of-court settlement that will reimburse it for the loss of Henri Matisse's "Odalisque."
The museum last year returned the 1928 oil painting, worth $2 million, to the heirs of French art dealer Paul Rosenberg after museum research showed the painting had been stolen by the Nazis during World War II.
Seattle collector Prentice Bloedel bought the painting in 1954 from New York's Knoedler & Company gallery and left it to the museum in 1991. There it stayed, frequently on view, until 1997, when Bloedel's grandson, New York artist Bing Wright, saw a copy of Hector Feliciano's 1995 book, "The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World's Greatest Works of Art."
Wright immediately recognized "Odalisque," listed as missing in the book, as the painting that hung over his grandparents' fireplace during his childhood. He notified the Rosenberg heirs, and his mother, art collector Virginia Wright, notified the museum.
After the museum returned the painting, it sued Knoedler, saying the gallery sold the Matisse under false pretenses.
"We can't specify a dollar amount," said SAM Director Mimi Gates, "but we are being reimbursed for our legal fees, research and travel costs as well as the loss of the painting."
Knoedler has forgiven a $143,000 fine that U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik ordered the museum to pay the gallery in September for failing to show proof of legal ownership in a timely way, said Gates.
The museum has 30 days to select "one or more" works of art from the Knoedler Gallery's holdings. If the museum isn't satisfied with any of the art works on offer, it can insist on a financial reimbursement, which it will use to buy a "significant addition to the museum's collection," said Gates.
She wouldn't say if the replacement art work would equal the value of the Matisse, although Gates suggested it wouldn't.
"We are satisfied with this settlement," she said, "and so is Knoedler." Ann Freedman, director of Knoedler, New York's oldest gallery, said the museum will probably be offered works from the New York School of the 1940s and 1950s, known as Abstract Expressionism, rather than paintings from Matisse's era of post-impressionism.
Knoedler represents artists such as Helen Frankenthaler, David Smith, Robert Motherwell and Milton Avery, as well more recent artists.
Vilnius conference urges speedier restitution of Nazi-looted cultural property
By Marilyn Henry
NEW YORK - An international conference on Nazi-looted cultural property ended last week in Vilnius with a vague declaration that governments must do more to identify and restore plundered art, but without resolving the fate of heirless Jewish artworks.
"The Vilnius Forum asks all governments to undertake every reasonable effort to achieve the restitution of cultural assets looted during the Holocaust era," said a conference declaration adopted by officials from 37 countries, including Israel, as well as Jewish organizations and art experts. The forum was unable to settle the ownership of heirless Jewish cultural property. Its declaration recognized the "previous Jewish ownership of such cultural assets" and the "urgent need to work on ways to achieve a just and fair solution to the issue of Nazi-looted art and cultural property where owners, or heirs of former Jewish owners, individuals or legal persons, cannot be identified." However, it also said, "There is no universal model for this issue." There are numerous instances in which heirless, formerly Jewish-owned art is considered part of the "national heritage" of the country where the Nazi victims once lived.
The Israeli delegation said Holocaust-era art, books, paintings, sculpture, and Judaica should be returned to their rightful owners or heirs. If these properties are heirless, "it should be established that the Jewish people and its representatives will become the natural heirs, both in their right to claim, and in their right to ultimately own that property." That issue was deferred for subsequent meetings of "experts." The four-day Vilnius forum was the fourth international, governmental event on Holocaust-related issues since the "Nazi gold" conference in London in December 1997. In 1998, the international conference, meeting at the US State Department, adopted the "Washington principles," a nonbinding pledge by 40 nations to identify and restore looted cultural property. The Vilnius conference essentially affirmed the need to abide by those principles.
At the 1998 conference, Russia agreed to return art looted by the Nazis to Holocaust victims. Then-Undersecretary of State Stuart Eizenstat called that Russian announcement "a real breakthrough." It was only law May, however, that Russia established the legal framework to return victim art, and it said it lacked the funds to document the art.
The art in Russia is the so-called "trophy art" taken by the Red Army as reparations at the end of World War II. It is not clear how much is "Jewish art." German and other European institutions have decades-long claims to recover some of it. However, the Russian law that entitles Nazi victims to claim art also nationalizes the trophy art. Major auctions houses have been eyeing the art in Russia for years, anticipating that a significant portion of the valuable collections, now in the Hermitage and Pushkin museums, ultimately will go on the market, sources said.
Eizenstat announced in Vilnius that the auction house Christie's proposed that a private, nonprofit organization would raise funds, evaluate research proposals and make grants to help create a special register of displaced cultural objects in Russia. Edgar Bronfman and Ronald Lauder would provide $500,000 to initiate the project, said Eizenstat, now deputy Treasury secretary.
National Workshop on UNESCO Instruments Protecting the Movable Cultural Heritage, to be held in Hanoi, 21 to 23 November 2000
UNESCO ¨C Viet Nam
23 Cao Ba Quat
HANOI, Viet Nam
Telephone : + (84 4) 747 0275/6
Fax : + (84 4) 747 0274
Mobile : 09123 0407
Email unescovietnam@netnam.vn
durand@un.org.vn
The Socialist Republic of Vietnam in cooperation with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and Viet Nam Ministry of Culture and Information, is organizing a National Workshop on UNESCO Instruments Protecting the Movable Cultural Heritage, to be held in Hanoi, 21 to 23 November 2000.
The Workshop is aimed at introducing Vietnamese experts and officials to the different conventions that protect cultural heritage. Through presentations by international and national experts on the illicit traffic conventions and the international cooperation of museums against illicit traffic, the implementation of protection techniques such as Object ID, the enforcement action at the national level, and a presentation on the data-bases of stolen cultural property, workshop participants will incorporate the information and examples of past and current experience into a draft report and recommendations to be considered by the Vietnamese authorities involved in the protection of cultural heritage.
Rosamaria Durand
UNESCO Representative in Viet Nam