November 18, 2000

Art thief's $1m career snuffed out

MICHAEL CHUGANI in Seattle and MARY ANN BENITEZ
An art thief who duped the Hong Kong branches of the world's top two auction houses into selling stolen antique Chinese snuff bottles worth more than $1 million is awaiting sentencing by a US court. Roland Yazhari, a frequent visitor to Hong Kong, stole the two 18th century antiques from Princeton University's art museum in 1994. In 1996, he got Sotheby's and Christie's auction houses to sell them within a month of each other after failing to dispose of them himself.
Museum curators at the renowned New Jersey university only discovered the theft in 1997, long after the Hong Kong auctions, which together fetched about $1.1 million, had been held.
The price of the Ch'ien Lung period snuff bottles has since soared - a similar one sold for more than $1.6 million at a Hong Kong auction earlier this month. Yazhari, a 35-year-old Iranian immigrant who settled in America with his family as a boy, was caught in an FBI sting in 1998 when hidden video cameras captured him stuffing another snuff bottle worth $585,000 from the same museum into his pocket.
A New Jersey federal grand jury indicted him for stealing major artwork and he was arrested within weeks in Portland, Oregon. He pleaded guilty to three counts of theft in an unpublicised court hearing two weeks ago and faces a maximum 30 years' jail when he appears before US District Court judge Garry King for sentencing in January.
Yazhari, who travelled the world posing as an art dealer - keeping flats in Hong Kong and other major cities - twice obtained permission to see the university museum's famed collection of 570 snuff bottles in March and September, 1994. He was the last person to view the antiques before the theft came to light.
FBI agents later learned the bottles had been auctioned in Hong Kong at Yazhari's request. When he approached the museum again in June 1998 to view the collection, suspicious curators tipped off the FBI, whose video cameras caught him stealing.
Portland's assistant US attorney Barry Sheldahl, who prosecuted the case, told the Post Yazhari had agreed to help track down a fourth stolen snuff bottle that he also sold. "We're trying to find out who he sold it to," Mr Sheldahl said. Defence lawyer Ruben Iniguez said he would ask the judge for probation rather than a prison term since Yazhari had already spent two months in jail after his arrest. "This gentleman has no prior record. This is out of character for him," he said. Yazhari is free on bail but must report regularly to a probation officer. Yazhari's act was so convincing that Xinhua quoted him in 1995 as a New York art gallery boss for a story on China's art auctions. Yazhari was in Beijing at the time and placed a bid during an auction.
Both snuff bottles auctioned in Hong Kong were bought by the same person, who has since returned them to Princeton University, and they will be featured in a book by the International Chinese Snuff Bottle Society. In Hong Kong, a Sotheby's spokesman said: 'Sotheby's cannot comment due to the fact it's an ongoing court case." A Christie's spokeswoman said she needed more information on the case before she could comment. Hong Kong police were not aware of the investigation. http://www.scmp.com/news/HongKong/Article/FullText_asp_ArticleID-20001118020622756.asp

Balancing the books at the museum

Creative management of Britain's artistic institutions is proving to be a taxing task for administrators, says Antony Thorncroft

For some of Britain's leading arts institutions, these are proving to be hard times. Nicholas Snowman, Glyndebourne's general director, has left the family- dominated opera house after less than two years in the job. At the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Michael Kaiser, the American who arrived at the same time to sort out a leadership and financial crisis there, is leaving soon for the well-funded Kennedy Centre in Washington, leaving no successor in place. At London's Victoria & Albert Museum Alan Borg, the director, has virtually thrown in his hand following a public statement from his trustees that they were seeking a replacement. At the British Museum, castigated by English Heritage for accepting the "wrong" stone for the portico of its new Great Court, skirmishing has started for a successor to Robert Anderson, the director, who leaves in 18 months' time. More:
http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=Article&cid=FT3Y05C9OFC&live=true&tagid=ZZZPB7GUA0C&subheading=UK

Porcelain treasures from the deep go on the auction block

(CNN) -- One-hundred-seventy-eight years ago, the Tek Sing set sail from China for Java, with more than 200 crew members, 1,600 passengers, and a heavy load of cargo on board. Several weeks into the journey, the oversized junk struck a reef and capsized, throwing most of the passengers overboard in what became one of the world's worst civilian maritime disasters. The South China Sea's dark waters closed over the vessel's victims and its cargo.
More:
http://www.cnn.com/2000/STYLE/arts/11/17/tek.sing.porcelain.auction/index.html

Man held in riddle of missing Enigma

By Sandra Laville
POLICE investigating the theft of the German wartime Enigma cipher machine have arrested a man. The Ł100,000 machine was stolen on April 1 from the museum at Bletchley Park, Bucks, which commemorates the work of Britain's Second World War codebreakers. Thames Valley Police said yesterday that the man, 57, from Derby, was being held in custody. Police have received letters from a man who threatened to destroy the rare machine if he was not paid Ł25,000 and given immunity from prosecution. He claimed that he was a middle man acting for someone called "The Master" who, he said, had innocently paid Ł25,000 for the machine. All the letters included a codeword known only to the writer, the police and Christine Large, the chief executive of the Bletchley Park Trust, increasing the suspicion that the theft was carried out from the inside. The machine, a G312, was a variant of that used by the Abwehr, German military intelligence, and had been loaned to the trust which runs Bletchley Park by GCHQ, Cheltenham. It was in a box the size of a typewriter and disappeared during an open day. Thames Valley Police were assisted by Special Branch in the hunt for the thief. The machine was recovered last month when it was mailed to Jeremy Paxman, the BBC presenter.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

Details unveiled for `glowing lantern' addition to Nelson Atkins Museum of Art

By STEVE PAUL - The Kansas City Star
At a time when new art museums and additions are blossoming all over the world, principals of the Nelson- Atkins Museum of Art expansion think theirs will be the most distinctive of the bunch.
And although the price tag for the museum expansion has gotten higher, the Nelson's capital fund-raising campaign has exceeded its initial target and is fast approaching $200 million, officials announced at a press conference Tuesday before making a dinner presentation to more than 500 donors.
Architect Steven Holl unveiled details of the "glowing- lantern" conception that last year won him the job of designing the addition that will make the Nelson more than 50 percent bigger. The expansion is expected to be completed by 2005.
Holl said he expected the five frosted-glass structures, which will sit atop more than 140,000 square feet of new exhibition halls and other facilities on the east side of the Nelson, to enhance and respect the original 1933 building and the surrounding landscape in an enviable way. "This is an exemplary museum addition," Holl said.
More:
http://www.kcstar.com/item/pages/printer.pat,fyi/3774eb3f.b14,.html

Lost treasures of Kabul

Afghanistan's national museum used to house one of the world's most precious collections. Today it stands empty - its windows blown out, its contents pillaged. So where are the missing artefacts? Luke Harding unearths a compelling tale of intrigue, smuggling and greed

Friday November 17, 2000
http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,398808,00.html
There is not much left to see inside Kabul museum these days, even if you manage to get inside the normally locked front door. There is a giant Islamic bowl, a limestone inscription written in Greek, and a rather fetching statue in the lobby of King Kanishka, who ruled Afghanistan in the 2nd century AD. Kanishka's head and torso were lopped off long ago. But his pantaloons and enormous royal feet have survived, improbably, down the centuries. Almost everything else from the collection has gone: the ivory panels of frolicking half-naked courtesans, the recumbent Buddhas, and the Greek coins. Not only did Afghanistan's civil war claim 1.5m lives, it also swallowed up the country's history. But the question now preoccupying archaeologists, four years after the Taliban swept into Kabul, is where the artefacts are now. The answer is a compelling tale of smuggling, intrigue, venality and international art fraud. The collection was unique. It reflected Afghanistan's rich history, and its strategic position on the Silk Road between China and Rome. To their credit, the Soviet troops who invaded Kabul in 1979 took nothing away, even repainting some of the exhibition rooms. But in 1992, three years after they left, the museum found itself on the front line, as rival Afghan Mujaheddin factions fought for control of the city.
The museum repeatedly changed hands among different groups, who plundered as they went. By the time the museum staff managed to get access to the building in late 1994, the collection had disappeared. Some of it had been destroyed. But most of it, it later emerged, had been looted in the early days of the fighting. A series of vans had rolled up at night outside the museum's side door. The two-tonne Buddhist reliefs, for example, were lifted off their iron hooks, piled in the back, and hidden under a series of mattresses. They were then driven across the Pakistan border, via the Khyber Pass, to the frontier town of Peshawar, which is the centre of the illegal trade in Afghan antiquities. From there they were sold in Peshawar's many antique bazaars. The buyers included wealthy Japanese collectors, Afghan warlords and Pakistan's home minister. With the arrival of the Taliban, whose practices include the amputation of limbs of thieves in Kabul's football stadium, the looting stopped. The museum staff returned. In between selling potatoes in Kabul's markets to make ends meet, they began to compile a list of the few fragments that had survived. "It is really very sad," says Omara Khan Masoodi, the deputy director. "But there was nothing we could do. It was unpreventable." The upper stories took a direct hit from a rocket in May 1993 and the museum's facade was perforated by shellfire. The lion sculpture outside the entrance lost its head. "Not only has our history been destroyed, but our society and culture as well," says Masoodi.
The exhibits, it seemed, had gone for good. But two years ago a London antiques dealer based in Bond Street received a mysterious phone call. A Pakistani businessman wanted to know if he was interested in buying some "newly excavated" figures from Afghanistan. The dealer, who does not want to be named, had a look at photos of the objects. "I recognised them immediately as some of the Begram ivories," he says. The ivories were the museum's star exhibits - a series of exquisite Indian panels nearly 2,000 years old, dug up by French archaeologists in the 1930s from the capital of what was once King Kanishka's flourishing empire. The dealer bought the pieces. Then he donated them to a Paris museum specialising in Asian art, the Guimet. But the best ivories were still missing.
As photos of the vanished exhibits began to circulate among museums around the world, attention was shifting away from Peshawar to other cities in Pakistan. In Quetta, close to the Afghan border, rumours began circulating that a cultivated Afghan leader now living in exile, Pir Ahmed Gailani, had accumulated his own trove of Buddhist antiquities. An elderly archaeology professor, allowed to look round his living room, hinted that some of the missing treasures were now in Gailani's hands. The professor refused to elaborate. Like Peshawar, Quetta is a classic Pakistani smuggling town, controlled by fiercely tribal Pathans (one of whom was arrested last week after trying to sell a 2,600-year-old Persian mummy on the black market). Drugs also travel through Quetta to the Makran, Pakistan's lawless southern coast, from where they are whisked away by boat.
The trail also led to the ousted government of Benazir Bhutto, who lost power in 1996 and is now in self- imposed exile in London. Ms Bhutto's minister for the interior, Nasirullah Khan Babar, has admitted buying one of the Begram ivories for $100,000. He defends the purchase, claiming that the sculpture is merely "in safe keeping" until peace returns to Afghanistan. Other sources, however, suggest that he has many other things hidden in his basement. They also allege he may have been involved in a plot to sell the ivories back to Afghanistan.
Over in Tokyo, meanwhile, a wealthy private collector is said to have bought several reliefs belonging to the museum from the Gandharan school, a Greek-influenced Buddhist dynasty. "There are a lot of Japanese buyers. The prices are completely unreasonable. They go up to $1m for a Buddhist schist [panel]," says Robert Kluyver of the Society for the Preservation of Afghanistan's Cultural Heritage. Back in Kabul, western scholars have been trying to persuade the Taliban to solve another mystery. In 1989, Afghanistan's president Najibullah had moved 20 tin trunks, possibly containing the museum's celebrated Bactrian treasures, out of the building for safekeeping. Some went into the vaults of the presidential palace. The trunks fared better than he did. When the Taliban took Kabul in September 1996, they hanged and castrated Najibullah. But the trunks survived. The Taliban, however, now refuses to open them. No one is sure whether the 1st-century relics, which include 20,000 gold objects, are still there. More trunks are sitting in the Taliban's ministry of information and culture. "We were told this summer that the seals are intact.
But nobody wants the responsibility of opening them," says a foreign expert, who is trying to retrieve the museum's collection. Part of the problem is the Taliban's hostile attitude towards Afghanistan's non-Islamic heritage. As a movement, it does not accept the portrayal of any living form, whether human or animal. Two years ago the Taliban seized from a rival faction the remote Bamiyan valley, home to two colossal Buddha statues carved into a sandstone cliff-face in the 2nd century AD. A Taliban commander then blew up the head of the smaller Buddha with explosives, and fired rockets at the groin and dress of the larger Buddha. The attack damaged frescos that had withstood an assault from Genghis Khan. The commander later returned to dump two burning tyres on the larger Buddha's lip. Hardline elements within the Taliban are equally opposed to Kabul museum showing Buddhist sculp tures. In August the museum was symbolically reopened for three days.
Afterwards, everything was packed away again. Merely to get inside requires Taliban permission. There are signs, though, that this attitude may be softening. Three months ago Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban's secretive leader, issued a decree saying the Bamiyan statues should be protected not destroyed. He also released another edict forbidding illegal archaeological excavation, a practice rife during Afghanistan's chaotic war years when Peshawar antiques dealers would despatch gangs to dig among the ruins.
In the face of continuing diplomatic isolation, the Taliban has recently decided to try to persuade foreign tourists to come back to Afghanistan. "We would like international visitors to see our war-torn country," said Abdul Rahman Hotaki, the Taliban's deputy culture minister, last month. The Taliban realises the tourists will return only if there is something left to see, not least in the national museum. Elsewhere in the country, restoration work is being carried out on Afghanistan's crumbling attractions. Over in Herat, an ancient city of learning and culture close to the Iranian border, efforts are being made to stop the remaining five giant minarets of a medieval mosque from toppling over. The 15th-century Musallah complex was one of the wonders of the age, and was described by Byron as "the most beautiful example of colour in architecture ever devised".
Most of the lapis lazuli tiles have fallen off. Rockets have punched holes in several of the towers. But there are still patches of the dazzling blue of Byron's vision. It is the British, however, who are the true villains here. Fearing a Russian invasion, they demolished most of the old mosque buildings in 1885. The Taliban has other grievances against us, and last month demanded that the Queen hand back the Koh-i- Noor diamond. The diamond belonged to the Afghan royal family for almost two centuries, they argue. The real scoop would be to get the Begram ivories back. That seems a far-off prospect. "The ivories have an unearthly beauty which has never been duplicated," says one awed admirer.