Archaeologists wonder where Kabul museum's artefacts have wound up, if they still exist, writes Luke Harding in the Afghan capital. 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 1.5 million lives, it also swallowed up the country's history. The question now preoccupying archaeologists, four years after the Taliban swept into Kabul, is where the national museum's artefact are now. The answer is a compelling tale of smuggling, intrigue, venality and international art fraud. 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 Mujahideen 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 storeys 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," Masoodi says.
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 $US100,000 ($180,000). He defends the purchase, claiming that the sculpture is merely "in safe keeping" until peace returns to Afghanistan.
Other sources, however, suggest 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 $US1 million 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 sculptures.
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 Guardian http://www.smh.com.au/
Chinese Make a Bid for Own Antiquities Art * Looting, smuggling send their national treasures worldwide, but patriotism, money bring them home.
By TYLER MARSHALL, Times Staff Writer
HONG KONG--Nearly eight months after a contentious auction of Chinese cultural relics shook the world of Asian art, one fact seems clear: The rules for trading in this popular and prodigious area of antiquities are changing fast. Shock waves from last spring's public auction in Hong Kong of three Qing Dynasty bronze animal heads, which were looted by British and French forces 140 years ago from the Old Summer Palace near Beijing, have reverberated through the region. The incident angered Communist authorities in Beijing, who tried in vain to halt the sale. It also increased tension in the regime's uneasy relationship with the regional government here, which allowed the auction to go forward. The spectacle of a large Chinese state-owned commercial enterprise stepping in to pay $6 million--far over the expected price-- for the relics sent chills through Western museum directors and collectors of Chinese art. They feared that the purchase might be the start of a global offensive by Beijing to reclaim much of the vast trove of its antiquities sold, stolen or smuggled from the mainland over the years. The Poly Group, a former commercial arm of the People's Liberation Army that now deals in real estate, marketing and other areas, said it made the purchase out of a patriotic duty to return the treasures to the motherland. The world's two biggest auction houses--Sotheby's, which sold one of the heads, and Christie's, which sold the other two--were surprised and embarrassed by the controversy. While concerns here have eased about the possibility of a major Beijing reclamation campaign, gallery owners, dealers and other experts familiar with the world of Chinese antiquities believe last spring's incident brought several important developments into focus. Chief among them is the emergence of mainland buyers as players in the global market for Chinese antiquities. This comes nearly a generation after foot soldiers of China's Cultural Revolution destroyed thousands of precious artworks they saw as little more than symbols of a decadent imperial past. The Poly Group is seen as one--albeit unusual--example of this trend. Henry Howard-Sneyd, Sotheby's managing director for China and Southeast Asia, noted that dealers in Chinese artifacts have returned to their old haunts in Beijing's Liu Li Chang Street as domestic demand builds. There are also signs mainland Chinese buyers are venturing beyond their own borders, he said. "We're beginning to see elements of this outside China-- not just in Hong Kong, but elsewhere too," Howard-Sneyd noted.
On a Similar Path as Japan, South Korea He and others suggested China may be on a path very similar to that taken by Japan and South Korea during the post-World War II era, in which citizens became global buyers of their own cultural relics once economic development had generated the necessary wealth and currency regulations were lifted. Howard-Sneyd added: "There are individuals and companies with plenty of money. They now have whatever basic comforts they need and are beginning to cast around for things that can represent a higher pleasure." Indeed, the strong economic development of Hong Kong and, more recently, Taiwan, have spawned new communities of collectors who have helped generate a counter-flow of Chinese art back toward Asia. Another trend exemplified by the antiquities furor is what Beijing-based arts writer Bruce Doar calls "a mood for cultural restitution that's going on everywhere." With a growing number of nations pressing for the return of antiquities held in the West, the boundaries of political correctness are shifting in their favor. One reason the organizers of last spring's auctions were caught off guard by Beijing's objection was the fact the bronze heads that triggered the controversy had all been sold previously at public auction--the tiger's head nine years ago in Hong Kong. Some believe the new heightened sensitivities will drive underground any transactions that carry even a whiff of potential controversy. "This is the way things are going," said Elizabeth Knight, publisher and editorial director of the respected Asian art magazine Orientations. "It's very touchy selling what some consider a national treasure." Knight believes if this occurs, art education and understanding will be the losers. "If these sales are forced underground, then there's less awareness, and if we don't understand a culture--either ours or others--where are we?" Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Hong Kong auctions was the Poly Group's decision to spend $6 million for the three bronze heads, which observers say reflects a new understanding among China's business leaders of the finer elements of free market capitalism: Corporate philanthropy combined with solid public relations can be as good for the bottom line as it is for the soul. In some ways, the sale was reminiscent of a Japanese insurance company's 1987 purchase of Vincent Van Gogh's "The Sunflowers" at auction for more than $39 million, though the latter transaction did not have a patriotic dimension. In an interview, the vice director of the Poly Group's art museum in Beijing, Ma Baoping, said the purchase was driven mainly by patriotism. "It's a question of the country's face and the nation's dignity," he said. "We'd have bought them even if they were more expensive." However, the group also was quick to exploit its purchases, sending them on tour around the country that included photo ops in front of company ads and storefronts. In the months since the Poly Group's aggressive purchase, fears have subsided that it constituted the beginning of a government-orchestrated effort to reclaim the most sensitive of the Chinese antiquities currently held outside the country, a figure estimated at about 1 million objects by the State Cultural Relics Bureau in Beijing. Media reports in Hong Kong referring to such a campaign generated a denial from Beijing. Several antiquities experts believe added confirmation came during the fall auctions in Hong Kong, when China failed to act as a Ming Dynasty porcelain jar, described by one critic as "an extremely important piece," was sold for a record $5.7 million. There is also little evidence of a crackdown on the brisk smuggling trade that brings mainland antiquities to Hong Kong, where they can be legally sold. Under the 1997 agreement that returned Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty, the former British colony enjoys considerable autonomy. Nowhere is this autonomy more visible than in the world of antiquities, where bronze and porcelain artifacts banned by law from leaving the mainland openly beckon foreign buyers from window displays of upscale galleries along Hong Kong's Hollywood Road. "There would be trouble smuggling out a terra-cotta warrior, but less conspicuous items still aren't hard to get through," said Warren I. Cohen, a China specialist at the University of Maryland's Baltimore County campus who has written on the trade in antiquities. Several reasons would appear to work against any crackdown soon. There are Chinese officials involved in the smuggling and reluctant to end a lucrative source of income. In addition, a huge volume of artifacts remains inside the country, reducing the urgency for any draconian action. Major economic development projects such as the Three Gorges Dam project are constantly turning up new archeological finds. Summed up Cohen: "China's [museum] curators are fighting to keep these [antiquities], but too many others are profiting ." * * * Times researcher Anthony Kuhn in Beijing contributed to this report.
LA Times
Gallery treasure has mystery past. Centrepiece of 2001 exhibit has gaps in ownership during Nazi years. Klimt work included in list posted on Web
Paul Gessell The Ottawa Citizen
The Gustav Klimt painting that is to be the centrepiece of the main exhibition next summer at the National Gallery of Canada appears on the newly compiled list of 110 gallery-owned artworks with mysterious gaps in their provenance from the Nazi era. The Klimt masterpiece, Hope I, 1903, and the other 109 works on the list are not necessarily suspected of being Nazi plunder unwittingly purchased by the National Gallery since the Second World War. Instead, their inclusion on the list released yesterday on the National Gallery Web site http://national.gallery.ca simply means there is a lack of knowledge about who actually owned the works during the period 1933-45. The artists on the list comprise a virtual who's who of European masters, including Picasso, Gainsborough, Matisse, Gauguin, Rodin, Brueghel and Vuillard. The gallery did not provide a figure for the works' monetary value but it would easily be in the millions of dollars. A smaller list of only 15 works of questionable provenance was also released yesterday by the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. That list included works by Chagall, Degas, Miro, Monet and Picasso. The galleries are hoping the Web site lists will help people in their search for missing art looted by the Nazis. The two institutions may add to their lists when the provenance of other works becomes questionable. Many of the works in the two lists were obtained through donations from prominent Canadian philanthropic families, including the Tannenbaums and Lynch-Stauntons. The Klimt painting, Hope I, is one of the gallery's most cherished jewels. The picture of a nude, pregnant woman is one of the most famous paintings by the turn-of-the-century Austrian symbolist artist, whose most celebrated works have been estimated at values from $15 million to $60 million. Much of the history of the ownership of Hope I is steeped in mystery. It was created in 1903 and was soon branded obscene by some of the Austrian establishment. The model's red pubic hair, rather than the overall nudity, seemed to be the shocker. The model is generally believed to be a Klimt favourite named Herma. According to legend, Klimt believed Herma's backside was prettier than all his other models' faces. By 1905, Hope I was in the hands of a private Viennese collector, Fritz Warndorfer, who kept the painting hidden in an altar-like cabinet, showing the work only to friends. Ownership changed hands at least three times before the National Gallery acquired the painting from Galleria Galatea in Turin, Italy, in 1962. The dates for the earlier transactions are vague. Most importantly, there are questions about the ownership throughout most of the Second World War, leaving open the possibility the work, like some other Klimt paintings, passed through Nazi hands. At least five of Klimt's paintings, which are currently owned by the Austrian government, are the subject of litigation from the heirs of the works' original Viennese owner, Adele Bloch- Bauer. Descendants of the Jewish Bloch-Bauer family claim the works were seized by the Nazis during the war without the family ever being compensated. The Austrian government claims the works were bequeathed to the state by Adele Bloch-Bauer. The National Gallery's main exhibition next year is the first ever North American retrospective of Klimt. The exhibition is titled Gustav Klimt (1862-1918): Modernism in the Making. It is to contain 35 paintings and 90 drawings and is to run from June 15 to Sept. 16, the time of year the gallery traditionally draws the biggest crowds. Hope I is the only Klimt painting owned by the National Gallery, although it recently purchased a few preparatory drawings for Klimt paintings. Colin Bailey, the gallery's former chief curator, is organizing the exhibition despite having left already for a different job in New York. He claimed in two Citizen interviews this past year that none of the works in the exhibition were suspected of being Nazi plunder. Many of the key works are being loaned from Austrian museums and private collections. Mr. Bailey has described Hope I as the centrepiece of the exhibition. Without it, there likely would have been no show. Institutions are more apt to lend out precious works of one particular artist if the receiving institution already owns works by that artist. Hope I will, incidentally, be reunited for the first time in decades, with Hope II, a painting done in 1907-08 of another pregnant woman. Having gaps in the provenance of paintings is not unusual, especially during times of cataclysmic upheavals like the Second World War. But that period has become especially troublesome for art museums around the world because of the Nazis' delight in looting art from wealthy Jewish families. After the war, much of this art was not returned to original owners, but found its way into the hands of dealers operating in the mainstream marketplace. The National Gallery is known to have had dealings with some shady characters, including Martin Fabiani, a Parisian dealer who was arrested by the Allies after the war and was fined for dealing in "enemy property." Fabiani helped the gallery acquire works by Cezanne, Renoir and Degas. None of these works appear on the list of 110 works of questionable provenance. As well, the gallery had dealings with Anthony Blunt, the Queen's long-time personal art adviser, a dealer in art of questionable origins and a Soviet double agent. Two paintings acquired by the National Gallery with his help are on the list of 110. They are St. John the Baptist, a mid-17th century work by Spanish painter Jusepe Leonardo, and Augustus and Cleopatra, a 17th century work sometimes attributed to an artist named Nicholas Poussin but listed by the gallery as an "unknown Italian."
Some of the other major works on the National Gallery's list: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/
Artist claims 'ancient' icon is 1940s fake
Maurice Chittenden
A BRITISH artist has challenged the authenticity of one of the world's greatest ancient art treasures. The figurine of a harp player has been dated to 2700BC, but John Craxton says he met the man who carved it in 1947. The figure, valued at least £2m, has icon status at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which says discolouration left by paint proves its age. But Craxton, a member of the Royal Academy who has paintings in the Tate Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery and the government picture collection, says the sculptor was a Greek shepherd named Angelos Koutsoupis. He is said to have faked the piece in the 1940s and submerged it in a river for six months until it became encrusted in limescale to "age" it. Koutsoupis told Craxton the figurine was commissioned by an antiquities dealer called Zoumboulaki, who sent him photographs of a figure of a harp player from the national museum in Athens. This carving had lost its forearms and hands; they were added for the fake. The Metropolitan has confirmed to The Sunday Times that its piece was acquired from Zoumboulaki in 1947, although it had it on loan two years earlier. Doubts about its authenticity were raised in The Sunday Times three weeks ago. Oscar White Muscarella, an archeologist on the staff of the Metropolitan, named it as a probable forgery. Craxton, who is honorary British consul in Crete, where he lives, is the first to offer evidence of how it was faked. When he was a guest of the Greek navy, his ship called at the island of Ios. Craxton says he was approached by Koutsoupis's son: "He took me up to this simple village with no electricity and introduced me to his father. Because of his simplicity and his natural talent, the old man was able to produce these figures so well. "He gave me a fake torso. I showed this to Henry Moore, who became so enthusiastic I didn't have the heart to tell him it was fake." Craxton, 77, added: "Up to now I have stayed silent. I preferred to salute in silence a truly remarkable man." Muscarella said: "I have always felt uneasy about the piece. For a start, the harp is not an ancient harp." But Harold Holzer, vice-president for communications at the Metropolitan, said the museum still believed the harpist was genuine. He said: "We have sound technical evidence evidence for believing the harpist to be genuine - but I am not prepared to share that with you because it could be helpful to fakers."
Sunday Times, London
Thieves hold £20m paintings to ransom
FROM ROGER BOYES
ART thieves who snatched two Renoirs and a Rembrandt in a pre-Christmas theft from a Stockholm gallery demanded a ransom of several million pounds yesterday for the safe return of the paintings. The daring robbery - the thieves made their getaway in a speedboat from Sweden's waterfront National Museum - has triggered a debate about the security of Old Masters in under-funded state galleries. Superintendent Leif Jennekvist, of Sweden's equivalent of Scotland Yard, said he had been in contact with a go-between who was demanding a large ransom for the works, a 1630 self-portrait by Rembrandt and A Young Parisienne and Conversation by the French Impressionist Renoir. Together they are valued at about £20 million and the ransom is thought to be about a fifth of this sum. All three paintings are world famous and Swedish art experts were emphasising yesterday that they could not be resold on the open market. "An absurd crime," said one specialist quoted in the Swedish press. Robert Dietrich, of Hiscox, the art insurance group, speculated that such paintings could be used as part of a Mafia transaction. "The cliche of a Dr No figure who orders paintings to be stolen so that he can secretly admire them has never been confirmed," he said. "Often such works are used as a means of payment in Mafia circles." Certainly to steal the paintings for a ransom is to miscalculate the economics of state museums in Europe. The three paintings were not insured by the National Museum, which has more than 15,000 paintings and sculptures, because like many other state museums and galleries it cannot afford the extremely high premiums. Paintings that are insured immediately become the property of the insurance company once they have been stolen, so there is no sense in trying to hold a museum to ransom. Only negotiations with the insurer could bring results and they are notoriously hard bargainers. "We will not pay a single crown," said Superintendent Jennekvist in Expressen, a Stockholm newspaper. "It is not our task to deal with stolen art and our attitude is that we do not negotiate about this with criminals." A more precise analysis came from Torsten Gunnarsson, director of the National Museum, who said bluntly: "We do not have any money for a ransom." The thieves may be hoping that the Government recognises the paintings as national treasures and quietly authorises a payment in the hope of recovering them unharmed. There is, however, no national outcry in Sweden about the theft, only a fascination as to how it was so smoothly executed. Three masked and armed men speaking Swedish with foreign accents burst into the museum shortly before closing time on December 22. One man with an automatic weapon kept all the security guards under control on the ground floor while his two accomplices removed the three paintings. Before they made their escape by speedboat they threw a net full of spikes on the road in front of the museum to immobilise police cars. They also detonated two car bombs in the area to confuse the police emergency switchboard. There has since been no trace of the gang, although five photographs of the paintings have been sent to the police to show that the works are undamaged. Nobody was hurt in the raid, which thus falls into the romantic mould of fictional art theft as an apparently cultured and victimless crime. As a result public anger in Sweden is not so much directed at the thieves as at the museum management. The lot of the Swedish National Museum is shared by museums across Europe. As Herr Dietrich said yesterday: "As soon as professionals are at work no object is completely safe. That applies above all to robberies such as the latest case where guns are used."
