November 29, 2000

- More on looted NOK statues from Nigeria (plus information about the Unesco publication SOURCES)
- Security Policies (Frank Petersen)
- Nabokov Museum To Monitor Intellectual Property
- Art slump: Streeton passed in (Sotheby's victim of the collapsing Australian art market)
- SFMOMA Loses Fight Over Patron's Picasso

More on looted NOK statues from Nigeria.

Last week I informed the Museum Security Mailinglist about illicitly excavated and exported NOK statues presently in the Louvre museu, Paris. In newspaper reports the source of these statues supposedly was a Belgium dealer.
Michel van Rijn ( http://www.michelvanrijn.com/) has been able to trace this dealer via a Le Monde contact: Comte de Grune's son, who used to be with Sotheby's but now looks after the family business given the "grand age" of his father, was indeed involved in the deal leading to the sale of one of the Nok's pieces to the Louvre.
Mr. Van Rijn also was the one who discovered possibly looted NOK statues at the European fine Art fair in Maastricht, The Netherlands (TEFAF). These statues were offered for sale by another Belgium dealer: Deletaille.

The following report: Out of Africa, gives insight in the consequences of the trade in looted African antiquities.

Ton Cremers

Out of Africa

"The looting of archaeological items and the destruction of archaeological sites in Africa are a cause of irreparable damage to African history and hence to the history of humankind. Whole sections of our history have been wiped out and can never be reconstituted." The introduction to the Red List of African archaeological and ethnological objects, published by the International Council of Museums (ICOM), should be sounding alarm bells everywhere. Unfortunately the trafficking in such goods is booming and Africa is being bled dry of its cultural heritage. In Mali and Burkina Faso, ICOM reports, "all the archaeological sites are systematically looted." This means that despite the large numbers of objects now available on the art market very little is known about the cultures which produced them. And their exact provenance and date will remain forever unknown. Items from the Côte d'Ivoire for example, "are identified as such only by chance discoveries made during illegal excavations and left in the Abidjan museum. Nothing is known about the societies that made these objects, and the current extent of looting gives every reason to fear that everything will be destroyed," reports ICOM. Those responsible are not only looting national treasures, they are violating that which is sacred to Africa's peoples. In the Wajir area of northern Kenya, collectors are contracting locals to dig up cemented graves for rare and unique antiques, antiques even the Kenya Museums had never encountered before. When George Abungu, the director of Kenya's National Museums last visited Wajir he found the excavated remains of the dead scattered over the ground. "And the Vigan-gus, the grave yards of the Mijikenda tribe at the Kenyan Coast, are no lon-ger found in that area, but easily found in museums all over Europe and Ame-rica," he adds. While unprotected archaeological sites are easy targets, Africa's museums have also suffered heavy losses in raids by often heavily armed bandits, who're ready to assault and even kill any guards who dare to oppose them. This is especially true in those countries hit by political turmoil. Nigeria's museums, for example, have been hit by "violence and robbery on a massive scale", reports ICOM. "The headquarters of the traffickers is reputed to be Bamako, the capital of Mali," says Professor Folarin Shyllon from the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. "There is also a thriving business in Cotonou (Benin Republic). Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire are staging posts from where goods are sent to Paris or sold to local dealers who ship them to the US and European art capitals." Objects from Uganda, Congo Brazzaville and Kenya are smuggled out of Kenya from the port of Mombasa, often concealed in containers transporting coffee. Dr Abungu accuses financially powerful collectors, diplomats, and museums in Europe and America for promoting the trafficking by promising what seem to be fabulous sums to impoverished African communities and unscrupulous local middlemen. However, he adds, African govern-ments are also very much to blame for the trade. They have not considered protection, conservation or preservation of cultural heritage a priority. Stopping, or even diminishing such traffic will require a massive effort: to make local populations aware of what is happening, to sensitise them to the need to conserve or preserve their heritage, and to provide them with alternative ways to make a decent living. However, dealers and collectors also need to make an effort. They need to be more vigilant, honest and aware of the terrible impact the loss of such objects can have on their traditional owners ... and their children, who may well only have access to their cultural heritage if they can afford a trip to Europe or the United States.
Wandera Ojanji in Nairobi with Sue Williams From:
http://www.unescosources.org/

UNESCO SOURCES

Is the monthly information magazine of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
Free subscription can be obtained for professionals, associations, NGOs, IGOs and other organizations working in UNESCO's fields of competence by writing to UNESCO SOURCES Subscriptions 31 rue François-Bonvin 75732 Paris cedex 15, France tel. (33) 01 45 68 45 37 fax (33) 01 45 68 56 54.
At: http://www.unescosources.org/info/subscribe.php is an on line subscribe form.

An Ongoing Crusade

UNESCO's convention against the illicit traffic of cultural property marks 30 years of struggle against an industry that is stripping countries of their cultural heritage.

Stealing history

They used to do it with their bare hands, sometimes using picks and spades. These days, people who steal archaeological treasures wield other tools. They break into tombs with explosives and cut the heads off wall statuettes with chainsaws. The remote 12th century Cambodian temple of Bantay Chhmar, near the Thai border, was "methodically" attacked at the end of 1998 with a pneumatic drill, says Christopher Pottier, an architect at the French School of the Far East who went there to investigate the damage.

Organised crime moves in

About $10 billion worth of art treasures are stolen and traded around the world every year, according to a French insurance group, Argos. That figure makes such thefts the planet's second biggest smuggling racket after drugs. France and Italy, which share the world's richest historic art heritage, are sadly neck-and-neck as targets, with a combined total of more than 12,000 robberies a year. For each country, this comes out at about one theft every hour.

A code of ethics for dealers in cultural property

How can conscientious buyers tell the difference between an object of doubtful origin and those whose sale is squeaky clean? By buying from a reputable dealer who is scrupulous to check the provenance of the works he or she deals in. To help the professionals stay on the straight and narrow, UNESCO has established the following international code of conduct for them.

From: Frank Petersen frankp@rom.on.ca
Subject:

Security Policies

A question for my colleagues, does your institution have an established security policy at the Board level, or is your mandate established at the division or department level, more in the form of a management practice? I would also be interested in opinions as to which approach is preferred.
Frank Petersen
Director of Security,
Royal Ontario Museum
telephone: 416-586-5508
fax: 416-586-5504
email: frankp@rom.on.ca

Museum To Monitor Intellectual Property

By Galina Stolyarova
STAFF WRITER
Battling Russia's image as a black hole with respect to intellectual property, the Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg is spear heading a long-term project launched this fall that could affect the work of hundreds of cultural organizations: monitoring copyright laws in arts and culture. Funded jointly by the Open Society Institute, the U.S. Consulate and a handful of others, and running through to the end of 2001, the initiative aims to spread awareness of the ins and outs of copyright throughout the Northwest region. More sinister than that, however, are claims that the publishing industry benefits financially from ignoring copyright and other contractual obligations.
More: http://www.times.spb.ru/current/news/n_1062.htm

Art slump: Streeton passed in

by Geoff Maslen
Sotheby's became a victim of the collapsing Australian art market last night when a $1 million painting by Sir Arthur Streeton failed to sell. The late multi-millionaire Robert Holmes a Court set a world auction record for an Australian painting in 1985 when he paid $800,000 for Settler's Camp at a Leonard Joel sale. But expected corporate interest in the painting did not materialise last night and it was passed in for $1.15 million, apparently without attracting a bid. Meanwhile, a world auction record of $564,625 was set for an Australian antiquarian book. Birds of New South Wales, the earliest natural history book printed in Australia, contains 18 hand- coloured plates by John Lewin. Successful bidder, Melbourne antiquarian book dealer Mr Peter Arnold, said he bought it on behalf of a private collector. Buyers showed reluctance to bid for many of the higher-priced works. Howard Arkley's A Large House with Fence - expected to sell for up to $500,000 - was passed in at $230,000. When Settler's Camp came on the market in 1985, it was the first time it had been seen in public since Streeton painted it almost 100 years before. It belongs to his early period when he produced some of his best landscapes. Holmes a Court's widow, Janet, decided to sell the painting because it did not fit in with the rest of the family's collection.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/0011/29/national/national20.html

SFMOMA Loses Fight Over Patron's Picasso

Jesse Hamlin, Chronicle Staff Writer
A judge has thrown out the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's lawsuit against the heirs of a longtime patron over the sale of a prized Picasso painting. The museum had claimed that the Madeleine Haas Russell Trust breached an oral contract to sell Picasso's 1932 masterpiece "Nu au fauteuil noir" to SFMOMA and patrons Charles and Helen Schwab for $44 million. Last week, San Francisco Superior Court Judge David Garcia ruled there was "no triable issue of material fact" in the museum's claim and granted the defendants' motion to dismiss the case. The museum will not appeal the ruling. The museum had originally sought $18 million in damages -- the amount it claimed it lost when Russell's heirs allegedly reneged on an oral agreement to sell "Nu au fauteuil noir" (Nude on a black armchair)," a famously erotic portrait of Picasso's voluptuous mistress, Marie-Therese Walter.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/11/28/DD50142.DTL

Row over painting settled

A row over a painting worth millions of pounds has been settled with the original owner agreeing she had lost her right to claim it was hers. The work, the first entirely abstract painting by American artist Jackson Pollock, painted in 1943, was given by him to his friends Herbert and Mercedes Matter as a wedding present, a High Court judge was told today. Mrs Matter, now 87 and widowed, claimed the painting had been stolen from her and her husband in 1945 or 1946. She had won a ruling at the Supreme Court in New York ordering that the person claiming ownership should be named - he turned out to be Robin Judah, a Briton living in Bermuda. More: http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_128732.html?nav_src=newsIndexHeadline