November 24, part II, 2000

Agency says museum took too long to ID Nazi loot

The U.S. Justice Department said it told the National Gallery of Art that four paintings, including Frans Snyders' "Still Life with Fruit and Game," may have been stolen by Nazis

NEW YORK (Reuters)
-- The U.S. Justice Department said on Wednesday that it told Washington's National Gallery of Art two years ago that four of its paintings might have been looted by the Nazis, and it wondered why the museum did not react more quickly. The department revealed its warning after the National Gallery claimed sole credit on Monday for discovering that one of the four flagged paintings, "Still Life With Fruit and Game" by the 17th-century Flemish artist Frans Snyders, had probably been looted from Jewish owners by the Nazis who occupied Paris during the Second World War. The gallery turned the 37-by-56-inch (95-by-143-centimeter) oil on canvas over to the heirs of a French family identified only as the Sterns. National Gallery officials responded on Wednesday that researching a painting's provenance, or origin, could be a complicated and lengthy business. They added that by comparing photographs of looted pictures with their own paintings, they had determined that two of the works cited by the Justice Department -- an 18th-century painting by Francois Boucher and a 17th-century one by Jan van Goyen -- had not been taken from victims of the Holocaust. Nancy Yeide, the National Gallery's head of curatorial records, added that the museum had found no evidence that the fourth painting on the Justice Department's list, a 17th-century landscape by Aert van der Neer, was Nazi booty.

Justice Department wants credit

Justice Department officials said that one of their trial attorneys, William Kenety, had come up with the four paintings brought to the National Gallery's attention by comparing titles of stolen artworks compiled by the U.S. Army after the war with names of works in the museum collection. "I think we should get some credit," said John Russell, a Justice Department spokesman. Eli Rosenbaum, director of the Office of Special Investigations, in which Kenety works, said he was pleased that the Snyders had been returned but added, "I'm somewhat disappointed it took two years from the time we notified them to accomplish that." Yeide said that aside from the Justice Department's research, the museum had no evidence that the Snyders had been stolen until a curator found it had been handled by Karl Haberstock, one of German leader Adolf Hitler's favorite art dealers. Only then did museum staffers examine their painting and discover that its stretcher -- the wooden frame supporting the canvas -- was marked "ST," the Nazi code for works plundered from the Stern family. Other paintings don't match Yeide said there was no reason to believe that the gallery's van der Neer, "Moonlit Landscape With Bridge," was stolen by the Nazis because -- unlike many looted works catalogued by the U.S. Army - - its provenance did not include the Goudstikker gallery.
Jacques Goudstikker was a prominent art dealer who left more than 1,200 paintings behind when he fled Amsterdam ahead of the Nazi invasion in 1940. Although the looted Boucher's title resembles that of the "Allegory of Painting" in the National Gallery, the Army photograph of it shows a main figure facing the other way and no putti, or cupids, National Gallery spokeswoman Deborah Ziska said. As for van Goyen's "View of Dordrecht From Dordtse Kil," Ziska said, the gallery's version lacks a sailboat on the left noted in the looted painting.

Bremen Basks In Return of Art Looted by Soviet Army

By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service Friday , November 24, 2000 ; Page A01
BREMEN, Germany -- Anne Roever-Kann, a curator at the Kunsthalle art museum here, opens a green portfolio box to reveal 101 drawings and prints stacked inside. With finger and thumb, she delicately flips through the collection until she comes to Albrecht Duerer's 1494 watercolor, "View of a Rock Castle by a River." "He had such an eye for simple, natural things," said Roever- Kann, pulling back a sheet of silk paper and unveiling the prized five-century-old picture by the great German artist of the Renaissance. "It's in super condition." And that is nothing short of astonishing. Fifty-five years ago, just after the end of World War II, a Soviet soldier picked up this Duerer and 100 other artworks, including prints by Goya, Manet and Toulouse-Lautrec, in the cellar of a castle northwest of Berlin. The art was spirited back to a provincial city in Russia where it lay under a sofa in a small apartment for decades. The return of the art to Bremen earlier this year was sweet victory for this river port city, which has doggedly pursued its looted art on the international black market and in the cellars of prestigious museums in the former Soviet Union. The 101 pieces are only a small portion of what Bremen lost, and a minuscule fraction of the millions of pieces looted by the Soviets during and immediately after World War II. But they are the first major return of stolen items to unified Germany from Russia since the two countries began negotiations on the issue after the collapse of communism. "This was a gesture of reconciliation," said Wolfgang Eichwede, a history professor at Bremen University and the city's leading stolen art sleuth, who hand-carried the 101 pieces back to Bremen on a flight from Russia. "It's the opening of a door that has long been shut." Germany has nurtured that opening with extreme patience. Its loans and investment bankroll much of Russia's faltering economy and it could apply financial pressure, but its diplomacy has been cautious. German officials say that threats would only inflame public opinion in Russia, where millions of people have firsthand memories of Nazi devastation. Just as Hitler, the failed painter, looted art from private and public collections across Europe--the National Gallery announced Monday it will return a looted painting that ended up in Washington- -the Soviet Union created officially empowered "trophy brigades" that pillaged countries captured by the advancing Red Army. In Soviet eyes, it was compensation for destruction wrought by the Nazis. Other art was stolen as personal booty by individual soldiers. These spoils of war--billions of dollars worth of paintings, prints, sculpture, religious icons, jewelry, gold artifacts and rare books--were shipped back to the Soviet Union where they disappeared into secret strongrooms for the duration of the Cold War or the homes of soldiers. Some art was returned to the former East Germany when it was a Soviet ally, but most has not been recovered. There is no full accounting of what was taken, although the German government has a growing database listing 3.5 million looted objects, according to Michael Franz, project leader of the Coordination Office of the Federal States for the Return of Cultural Property in Magdeburg. This year Franz's office began posting stolen works on the Internet at www.lostart.de. The campaign for its return has proceeded separately from efforts to return what the Nazis stole to rightful owners. Half a century later, that art continues to show up in Western museums. This year museums in Colorado and North Carolina returned pieces to the heirs of Holocaust victims. In September, the German city of Leipzig returned 81 pieces, mostly prints by Max Klinger, to a Jewish family in the United States. With the German art in Russia, however, the process has been complicated by official policy there that the art was legitimate reparations for Nazi plunder. The Russian parliament institutionalized the expropriation last year by passing a law making the booty the property of the Russian state, a law largely upheld by the Russian constitutional court despite protests that it violated international treaties. Still, in certain circumstances art can be returned: if it was privately looted by Soviet troops rather than the sanctioned trophy brigades, and if it belonged to a "victim of fascism" or a religious institution. Michael Naumann, the German government's state secretary for culture, said there are "vast areas" open for negotiation because of the law's exceptions, even though the German government does not accept the principle behind the Russian law. "The future will show how much leeway the law gives both governments," said Naumann, "but I'm optimistic that the Russians will be very flexible." The first tangible sign of such flexibility came in April when the Bremen prints, taped inside a thin cardboard box marked CCCP, the Cyrillic initials for the Soviet Union, were allowed to leave Russia. Bremen, a manufacturing city and inland port where the Germans built submarines, was heavily bombed during World War II. And the private Bremen Art Association, which owns the Kunsthalle, moved its collection to four storage points early in the war. The museum, created by the city's 19th century merchants, had one of the finest Duerer collections in the world before the war. About 50 oil paintings, 1,715 drawings and 3,000 prints were sealed inside a cellar at Karnzow Castle near Kyritz. An engineering brigade of Soviet troops reached the castle, owned by a Count Konigsmark, on May 5, 1945, and just before they pulled out on July 30, the trove in the cellar was discovered. The trophy brigades never reached Kyritz. But as the engineering troops departed, everyone helped themselves. The soldiers "decorated their trucks with nudes by Tiepolo, Rodin and other masters," according to Konstantin Akinsha and Grigorii Kozlov in their book, "Beautiful Loot," the seminal study of Soviet looting. Much of the work was scattered into private homes across the Soviet Union; history professor Eichwede said that in the last year he has seen Bremen prints on the walls of private apartments in Moscow. Some of it, however, was sold to private dealers abroad. In the last 10 years, the Kunsthalle has reacquired about 200 prints that appeared on the art market in the West, paying 10 to 15 percent of the estimated value to get them back, according to Roever-Kann. The price is low because the market for them is small: Most legitimate dealers won't touch the drawings, which have a Bremen stamp on the back that proves they were stolen. A private dealer in Moscow is currently trying to sell back 19 drawings to the Kunsthalle, including more works by Duerer, an approach the museum has so far rebuffed because it won't remove work from Russia without permission of the authorities. But anything already in the West it will attempt to acquire. And earlier this month Roever-Kann said she received a letter from Paris offering what it called a Duerer but which she believes is actually a Duerer-school drawing. Another 12 Bremen drawings, including a possible Rembrandt and a Poussin, are being held by U.S. Customs after they were seized in a sting operation in Manhattan three years ago when an Azerbaijani citizen, represented by a Japanese middleman, tried to sell them to Roever-Kann in a hotel on 42nd Street. After a lengthy court battle, the museum finally expects the prints back this year. "We want all of our art back," said Roever-Kann, acknowledging that the museum has often entered the black market to get what it wants. "We either reach an arrangement or the art disappears again." But the bulk of the collection is believed to be in Russia. For instance, one soldier in the engineering brigade, Viktor Baldin, collected 362 drawings and two paintings, some of which he acquired by trading watches and belts with soldiers who had turned them into makeshift posters. He put it all in a suitcase and took it home. Baldin, an architect and later a museum director, came to believe that the art should be returned to Bremen, and he wrote to a succession of Soviet leaders over the years urging them to do so. He was ignored and that part of the Bremen collection, known as the Baldin ensemble, is now in the State Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg. Another 150 to 200 drawings from Bremen are also in the Hermitage and the Puskin Museum in Moscow, according to Roever-Kann, and some were exhibited in the mid-1990s. The drawings returned this year to Bremen surfaced in March 1993, when authors Akinsha and Kozlov went to see a representative of the still unidentified soldier who picked them up in Karnzow Castle. They met the man in a provincial Russian city and he pulled out the prints from under a sofa where he had been keeping them. "The old man put the portfolio on a table and slowly opened it," flicking through the prints, according to the account in "Beautiful Loot." "I like this Watteau very much," the man said. "This Rembrandt isn't bad either." The prints were secretly handed over to the German Embassy in Moscow but sat there for several years until the two governments reached an understanding on their return, which included the simultaneous return from Germany of two artifacts from the missing Amber Room in Catherine's Palace in Tsarskoye; the pieces had been found in the possession of a son of a German soldier who served on the Soviet front. A Bremen merchant bought them to end a court case and speed their return to Russia. At a ceremony at the Kunsthalle this year, the cardboard package containing the 101 pieces was opened with scissors. "My hands were trembling," said Georg Abegg, head of the Bremen Art Association. "And when I first saw the Duerer, it was so emotional. It was home at last."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55000-2000Nov23.html

RESCUE STUDIES FOR ANCIENT BELKIS / ZEUGMA CITY

Location of Zeugma
Ancient Zeugma City is located in Belkis Village 10 km east from Nizip / Gaziantep, by the River Euphrates. Importance of this settlement which demonstrates an uninterrupted in habiting since prehistorical ages, is that it is one of the two points allowing the easiest passage across the River Euphrates. "Zeugma" already stands for a term like "bridge head" or "passage location". The city is an important trade center of Hellenistic Era. After the region started to be ruled by Rome, importance of the city increased upon settlement of a military garrison called IV th Legion. Artistic activities increased and a cultural development is achieved in Zeugma parallel to progress in trade volume. The first scientific study which proved that Zeugma is the same place as modern Belkis, was published in 1917. The excavation studies in tah Ancient City was started in 1992 under the management of Gaziantep Museum Directorate of the Ministry of Culture, General Directorate of Monuments and Museums. French archeology team joined the studies from 1996. Number of villas found since 1992 reached 7. Over 1000 m� base mosaic have been found during the excavations performed up to now. During the studies in the region which will fall within the lake area, a Mars statue which is 1.55 m tall was found on May 03, 2000. Many frescos (wall) picture), mosaics, small objects [seals belonging to Rome administrative system, bronze coins, oil-lamps, marble statues] and ruins of architectural structures have been found during 1999 and 2000. Portable ones of those were moved to Gaziantep Museum Directorate.
More: http://www.kultur.gov.tr/english/haberler/zeugma.html

photographs of Examples of the Art Works founded with the excavations

http://www.kultur.gov.tr/english/haberler/zeugma-ornek.html

Speaking through art, Athens hopes to regain its marbles

By MICHAEL HOWARD
ATHENS
Thursday 23 November 2000
At first glance, the exquisite figures that greet passengers on their descent into the cool interior of the new Acropolis underground station in Athens look like the real thing: Helios rushes out of the sea on a chariot pulled by four horses; next to him, Dionysus, the god of good times, reclines on a rock. Then come the seated goddesses Demeter and Kore and the fine upstanding figure of Artemis the hunter. But these larger-than-life gods and goddesses, which once adorned the east pediment of the Parthenon and now stare out from a wall in an underground station, were not carved in white Pentelic marble by the fifth-century BC sculptor Phidias, but made from gypsum and polyurethane. They are modern-day replicas of the Parthenon Marbles - known as the Elgin Marbles - now housed in the British Museum. The original sculptures have been a bone of contention between Britain and Greece since they were removed from the Acropolis at the beginning of the 19th century by Lord Elgin. Together with the two marble friezes depicting scenes from the Panathenaic procession - the originals of which are also in the British Museum - which run along the station's platforms, the replicas are probably the world's most elegant examples of agitprop art. "This is a silent protest that speaks for us all," said Triantafyllia Lagoudakou, head of the metro's art committee. "This subway station sends a message to the thousands of commuters and tourists who will use this station every day: The Parthenon Marbles should be returned to their homeland." The station, which opened for business yesterday, is one of five new underground stations in the Greek capital that are doubling as mini museums, displaying a selection of the 30,000 ancient objects unearthed during a decade of excavations for the metro network. Each station has a cutaway wall, framed behind thick glass, showing the actual strata through which the archaeologists dug. At the Acropolis station, more than 80 other relics, including toys, oil lamps, and wine pitchers, are also on display. "This proves that Greece is able to look after its own heritage and antiquities and present them in an imaginative and creative way," said George Ieromninon, the architect responsible for designing the metro network's artistic displays. "We're bringing art to the the people. And the idea that we won't look after our marbles is a thing of the past." Greece's alleged inability to properly conserve the marbles in heavily polluted Athens has been one of the main arguments used by opponents of return. The British Museum also claims the marbles were removed legally, and that it would take an act of parliament to hand them back. But research by the historian William St Clair has questioned the British Museum's stewardship of the masterpieces. In his book Lord Elgin The Marbles, St Clair claimed the marbles were badly damaged during a botched cleaning operation during the 1930s. The historian also charged the British Museum hierarchy with a cover-up, hiding the affair from parliament and academics. The revelations forced the museum to admit last December that the botched cleaning operation had happened, but it denied causing the marbles serious damage. The new Acropolis station stands next to the empty site of a museum Greece plans to house the Elgin Marbles by 2004, when the city is to host the Olympic Games. The building of a new Acropolis museum has become central to any discussion about returning the marbles to Greece. "It's my number one priority," said the culture minister, Theodorus Pangalos. But the British government remains firmly opposed to returning the marbles. For the Greeks, it is a battle for hearts and minds. Mrs Lagoudakou said: "We've tried diplomacy, we've tried political pressure, we've tried conferences, and demonstrations. Now we're letting the art speak for itself." -
GUARDIAN
http://www.theage.com.au/news/20001123/A12559-2000Nov22.html Museum Security Network chapter dedicated to the Parthenon Marbles

Restoration of 'Moses' gets online audience

Michelangelo carved the Renaissance masterpiece, "Moses," between 1514 and 1516
By Paul Sussman
CNN.com Europe writer
LONDON, England (CNN) -- Perhaps the only thing more boring than watching paint dry is watching transparent cleaning fluid doing the same. At first glance, therefore, http://www.progettomose.com, a new Italian Web site allowing users to log on 24 hours a day to watch cleaners remove grime from a large piece of marble is not something to immediately stir the imagination. When you realize that the piece of marble is in fact Michelangelo's "Moses," however, one of the great masterpieces of Renaissance art, the whole thing becomes rather more interesting.
More, plus photograph