December 10, 2000
CONTENTS:
- Renoir among 17 works of art stolen
- Celebrity chef arrested after art theft
- New Perception Of Indian History Rises From Ashes Relics found after Sequoia fire
- Fake antiquities litter top museums
Renoir among 17 works of art stolen
A total of 17 famous paintings worth hundreds of million yen were stolen from the Ikebukuro branch of Tobu Department Store Co. and a Tokyo home over a short period in mid-August, it was learned Saturday. On the night of Aug. 14, the resident of Setagaya Ward came home to find that six paintings had been stolen, including an oil painting by French impressionist Pierre Auguste Renoir, which alone is worth 170 million yen, two works by Marc Chagall and a painting by Japanese artist Ikuo Hirayama. The theft was reported to police. Media reports said a Tokyo gallery owner later received an offer from an unidentified caller trying to sell the missing Renoir. The next day, a Tobu employee discovered that 11 paintings worth 73 million yen were missing from an unlocked storage room on the sixth floor of the store during an inventory. The works, including a painting by the late Kaii Higashiyama, were in the room during the previous inventory check in February. Employees were routinely allowed to enter the room, which is close to the floor used for exhibitions and sales of paintings, Tobu officials said.
The Japan Times: Dec. 10, 2000
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?nn20001210a7.htm
Celebrity chef arrested after art theft
By: JOHN LEE
FINANCIALLY stricken celebrity chef Conrad Gallagher has been arrested and questioned in connection with the theft of expensive artwork. Gardaí arrested Gallagher, 29, after a complaint was made by the hotel from which he leases his exclusive Peacock Alley restaurant premises, Ireland on Sunday has learned. It is believed that more than £9,000 worth of paintings disappeared from the restaurant and the Fitzwilliam Hotel is seeking their whereabouts. Gallagher, of Killiney Hill, Dublin was arrested and questioned at Dublin's Harcourt Street garda station on Thursday. Gardaí say he cooperated fully and a file is being prepared for the Director of Public Prosecutions. Gallagher has recently been at the centre of highly publicised court appearances in the wake of the collapse of his restaurant empire and may soon be forced to sell his £700,000 Killiney home. "We arrested Gallagher on Thursday afternoon and took him to Harcourt Street station," said a senior garda source. "He was arrested on foot of a complaint about missing artwork. He was released without charge and the DPP will handle it from here on in," he said. Gardaí revealed that the paintings had previously been in the possession of Gallagher but when his financial problems started to overcome him, he sold them to the Fitzwilliam Hotel for a sum believed to have been more than £9,000. They remained on the wall of the restaurant but recently the paintings were found to be missing. Gallagher was unavailable for comment yesterday.
http://www.irelandonsunday.com/current/news/article.tmpl$showpage?ps=318536613615510
New Perception Of Indian History Rises From Ashes
Relics found after Sequoia fire
Scott Gold, Los Angeles Times
Friday, December 8, 2000
Dome Land Wilderness Area, Calif. -- A serendipitous opportunity created by the summer's devastating fire in the Sequoia National Forest has led to the discovery of hundreds of American Indian relics, prompting archaeologists to refine the conventional history of American Indians in Central and Southern California. Much of the 80,000-acre fire that blew through this rugged stretch of pinon pines and sagebrush in July and August raged in protected federal wilderness. There, development and mechanized travel are banned, making it more difficult for archaeologists to gain access for digs. During the blaze, however, bulldozers had to build fire roads. Construction of roads is one of the few events that can open these areas to archaeologists - - and what was a disaster became, for them, a rare opportunity.
So, amid towering flames and thick smoke, archaeologists strapped on yellow hard hats and set off on foot in front of the bulldozers. On one cliff side, they discovered an elaborate pictograph adorned with stars, a diagram that may depict a celebration of the solstice. In a patch of scorched woods they came upon a full-service kitchen of sorts: a series of grinding areas carved into granite boulders. "We weren't expecting to find anything of this magnitude," said Loreen J. Lomax, a U.S. Forest Service archaeologist leading the mountain expedition. Fire can be a useful archaeological tool, experts say. It is not uncommon for flames to clear vegetation obscuring artifacts. Last summer's extensive fires in Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado exposed hundreds of archaeological sites. A fire in Six Rivers National Forest near Eureka two summers ago led to the discovery of river rocks that were used to extract fibers from fern stalks -- an important step in basket weaving, said Ken Wilson, a U.S. Forest Service archaeologist and the president of the Society for California Archaeology. But rarely do such finds fill in as many historical gaps as those discovered after the fire that ravaged the Dome Land Wilderness. "This is an opportunity, especially because a lot of history was written with the present-day cultural bias," Wilson said. "This is about refining history, and there is still so much to learn." The major benefit of the fire, it seems, is the surprising archaeological discovery, which is revealing a slice of California history in a stark reminder that the general understanding of the West's first settlers is still tenuous and incomplete. So far, archaeologists have documented more than 400 sites in the fire area containing American Indian relics, some of them more than 3,000 years old, Lomax said. Worried that looters will disturb the sites, Forest Service officials decline to say where the artifacts have been found. An early analysis of the new finds, she said, suggests that there were about 1,700 members of the Tubatulabal and Kawaiisu bands in the area before cattle ranchers, miners and Basque sheepherders moved in and, from the late 1700s to the mid-1800s, began pushing the Indians out. Many historical accounts described the American Indians who lived in the area at the time as unsophisticated survivalists -- hunting-and-gathering clans that scrounged for a meager existence. Lomax asserts that her finds point to a far richer community, one touched by extensive trade and travel, interaction with many other American Indian bands, kinship and spirituality. Lomax and her team have found hundreds of pieces of obsidian, much of it carved into tools such as scrapers to clean animal hides. Obsidian is a volcanic rock that cannot be found naturally in Sequoia National Forest, Lomax said, indicating other bands traveled hundreds of miles to trade hunks of obsidian for items such as the Tubatulabals' renowned wicker baskets. Historically, the American Indians in the region have been described as lacking spirituality, Lomax said. But she has discovered a series of paintings on the sides of large rocks that suggest otherwise. Rather than depicting hunts and animals, many of them seem to depict the heavens -- swirling suns and dotted stars, even one that is believed to be some sort of calendar. "
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/12/08/MN156509.DTL
Fake antiquities litter top museums
Peter Watson
Questionable history: a Sumerian statuette is among items in collections such as those at the British Museum that Muscarella says are fake. MORE than 1,000 fake antiquities have been exposed in the collections of the world's leading museums, including the British Museum and the Ashmolean in Oxford. Many of the fakes, which range from Assyrian bronzes to 4,000-year-old Sumerian figurines in lapis lazuli, have passed unsuspected through auction houses such as Sotheby's and Christie's. The forgeries, 1,250 in all, have been identified by the archeologist Oscar White Muscarella, a recognised authority on forgery who is on the staff of the ancient Near Eastern art department at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. More than 10 years in the making, his survey and catalogue of fakes, The Lie Became Great: The Forgery of Ancient Near Eastern Cultures, will be published in Holland tomorrow. < The catalogue is set to ignite controversy in the antiquities world because Muscarella claims that the large number of forgeries he has identified are the tip of the iceberg. Having excavated in Turkey and Iran, his expertise is concentrated in the ancient civilisations of the Middle East. He reports that of the objects sent to the Oxford Thermoluminescence Laboratory, set up specifically to determine the age of so-called ancient objects, 40% are fake; half the antiquities brought to Sotheby's to be sold are fake, and are turned away; that the art market is awash with "scores" of forged Sasanian (Persian, 3rd century AD) artefacts and "hundreds" of north Syrian cylinder seals, and that 25,000 forgeries of ancient art enter the market every year. He has used his knowledge of sites, stylistic mistakes in fakes and similarity with other forgeries to catalogue the 1,250 phoney exhibits in museums. Some of the fakes that Muscarella includes in his catalogue are already acknowledged as such by the museums concerned. But the vast majority are not and until now nobody had any idea how common fakes are in even the most respected museums, though Muscarella also identifies well-known dealers in London and New York who have traded in fakes, and attacks a number of eminent British, French and German scholars for their part in this traffic. Among British collections, Muscarella identifies 16 fakes in the British Museum, 21 in the Ashmolean and 12 in the Burrell Collection in Glasgow.
Disputed Cycladic stone figure of a harp player The Louvre in Paris, says Muscarella, holds 37 fakes, including an Assyrian royal marble head that was used to promote the museum in the Paris Metro. The Metropolitan in New York has no fewer than 45 forgeries. These include a Cycladic stone figure of a harp player, dated to 2700BC, that until recently was on the cover of a brochure advertising the museum. Few museums are immune from Muscarella's investigations. In Europe alone he has identified fakes in the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge, and museums in Amsterdam, Berlin, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Geneva, Prague and Brussels. There are forgeries in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington and the museums of Boston and Los Angeles.Elsewhere fakes proliferate in Jerusalem, Tehran and Japan. He recognised one bronze bowl in Teheran as a copy of a similar item in his own museum. In another case he realised that a stone vessel offered for sale at auction in 1993 was a copy of an example excavated in Iraq and illustrated in a German archeological journal published as long ago as 1962. Muscarella claims that in some cases museum staff are well aware of which objects in their collections are fake but they keep quiet out of embarrassment, scholarly rivalry or a desire not to offend rich trustees who donated the items. He goes so far as to argue that there is in fact a "forgery culture" in the antiquities world. This is created by the heavy overlap between plundered antiquities and forged artefacts. By definition, plundered antiquities contain no provenance, no history of when and where they were discovered. This creates a clandestine world, says Muscarella, where corrupt dealers, scholars and museum officials collude to dupe the public and trustees alike. It also means that scholarship suffers and makes it much easier for fakes to pose as unprovenanced objects. Many curators of ancient art in museums are, he says, much less well educated than scholars in universities "and know and care little about scholarship, let alone archaeology". Muscarella identifies 24 categories of antiquities that are known only from unprovenanced sources and therefore, he claims, may be fake in their entirety. Among the forgeries he says he has found in the British Museum are a Median (6th to 7th-century BC Persian) plaque depicting a winged lion, framed by bands of gold, which is still on exhibition in the Iranian gallery, and a Sumerian statuette of a figure with a sheep-wool skirt on display in the Mesopotamia room. Dr John Curtis, the museum's curator for the ancient Near East, said the museum had concerns about the plaque but had given it the benefit of the doubt. He believed the Sumerian statuette was genuine. "I think it is true that historical models have sometimes been built using objects which are not authentic or where the exact provenance of them is not proven. There is a lesson to be learnt from that," he said. In the Ashmolean, the alleged fakes include a bronze Mesopotamian lion mask, a bronze belt from Luristan, in western Iran, showing heraldic, goat-like animals, allegedly dated to the first millennium BC, and a striped human-like form, dated as fifth millennium BC, supposedly from Hacilar, an ancient fortified settlement in Turkey. Roger Moorey, the museum's keeper of antiquities, said: "This is a crusade by Muscarella. There are forgeries in every museum. When we know there are forgeries we identify them as such. We never conceal the fact." The Lie Became Great: The Forgery of Ancient Near Eastern Cultures, by Oscar White Muscarella, is published tomorrow by Styx Publications, Groningen, Holland.
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/