March 13, 2001
CONTENTS:
- 3°"Holy Mother whith Child" 16th century stolen
- Smuggled Dinosaur Eggs Seized in Russia
- Nazis, liens, looting ... plenty of hang-ups in paintings
- Plundering the Past (Why is the Taliban destroying the great Buddhas of Bamiyan? The
real reason for its war against Afghanistan’s rich pre-Islamic heritage may be more about
politics—and money—than religion, argues Newsweek’s Russian-language partner Itogi)
- More Buddhist Statues Destroyed
Date sent: Tue, 13 Mar 2001 17:44:43 +0100
From: Patrick Van Der Stichelen Patrickvds@pophost.eunet.be
Subject: 3°"Holy Mother whith Child" 16th century stolen
_________STOLEN ANTIQUES________________
3°"Holy Mother whith Child" 16th century stolen
Go to: http://www.antiques-world.com/stolen/Vierge/homeUK.html
Stolen between 20 and 25 February 2001,
in the church St-Pierre at Uccle Belgium.
« Holy Mother with Child. »
Oil on panel, 16th century.
H : 94 cm W : 73 cm
Reward under usual conditions
For any information :
+ 32 2 345 01 45
+ 32 2 544 10 85
Date sent: Mon, 12 Mar 2001 06:54:49 -0700
From: Dan Chure danchure@easilink.com
To: Museum Security Network securma@xs4all.nl
Subject: Smuggled Dinosaur Eggs Seized in Russia
Inside China Today (General News)
http://www.insidechina.com:80/news.php3?id=307085
Batch of Smuggled Dinosaur Eggs Seized on Beijing-Moscow Train MOSCOW, Mar 11, 2001 -- (Agence France Presse) A batch of smuggled dinosaur eggs valued at approximately one million dollars have been seized in Russia's Far East on a train bound from Beijing to Moscow, the Interfax news agency reported. Customs officials discovered 15 suspicious egg-shaped objects crammed in one of the train's restrooms, and sent them to the Buryat research center of Russia's Academy of Sciences after failing to identify their origin. Researchers managed to determine that the seized objects were a batch of dinosaur eggs some 150-170 million years old, but could not tell what species had laid the eggs. The eggs were most likely dug up in Mongolia's Gobi desert, where many similar finds were made in the 1970s, experts said. The eggs are to be sent to Moscow for further examination, the report said. ((c) 2001 Agence France Presse)
Nazis, liens, looting ... plenty of hang-ups in paintings
Terry Ingram
The recent focus on the return of art looted by the Nazis has again underlined one of the big downsides to art as an investment. Clear and absolute title can be established for very few of the artworks in the market-place. There is at least one gap in the history of any artwork with some age to it, and, because of the turnover of art on the frenetic modern-day market, there is sometimes also a hole in the provenance of art which does not have any age. The auction houses, which have accounted for an increasingly large share of the art business, either as wholesalers to the trade or retailers to the public, do not guarantee title and rarely identify vendors. The anonymity, they claim, is because vendors are concerned about theft, but it is just as likely to reflect the auction house's concern about keeping its sources of consignments to itself. If title were clearer a lot of art's attraction to many buyers would disappear, of course. The lack of central registries - like those for real estate - makes art less traceable for fugitives from justice. This was underlined when liquidators and creditors of failed companies were forced to pursue art to exotic foreign ports after the collapse of the 1980s boom. Art's portability and the difficulty of tracing and identifying it has a special appeal - and not necessarily just to corporate cheats. Small-time buyers may simply be trying to build up a nest egg and be anxious to maintain their privacy. It has hugely advantaged artists - at least in their primary sales - because they are selling works which do not appear in any public record. This is probably why a group of leading European artists is campaigning against a droit de suite (a percentage from the profit on the future resales of their work) when, theoretically, they should be supporting it. They want the better price a work can now obtain if it is sold free from future royalty demands on collectors who resell it. The attempts by public art galleries to fill in the gaps in the history of artworks that may have spent some of their lives in Germany or Nazi-occupied territories is part of a continuing program by art museums to establish the provenances of all the works in their collections. The attention this has received has provided many opportunities for sound bites by politicians or gallery directors offering to give back works that can be proved to have been looted, as if there were any moral alternative. A cache of paintings by the Macchiaoli, or Italian Impressionists, which was found to been innocently taken to New Zealand as a result of the war was seized by the Italian authorities while on loan in 1998. The National Gallery of Australia, however, appears to have established that the Malevich painting which cost $1 million in the 1980s was not among a substantial number appropriated by an art dealer to the family and sold without its permission. However, the likelihood of Australia being a haven of art looted by the Nazis appears remote. Australia was never a market for the German Expressionist masters whose genius was so admired by the avant-garde collectors of the 1930s who were the targets of Nazi persecution. The Australian artist and critic Lionel Lindsay railed on against modern art being the plot of Jewish art dealers and, judging by the majority of works that went into private and public collections in the pre- and post-war periods, his message was heard. The first serious taste in Australia of the modern art against which Lindsay protested was through the so-called 1939 Herald Exhibition, which travelled Australia before being safely locked up here for the rest of the war. Apart from the exhibition's backer, Melbourne Herald chief Sir Keith Murdoch, and the politician-statesman Doc H.V.Evatt, few Australians took advantage of the opportunities to buy presented by this exhibition. Doc and his wife Alice bought Modigliani's Portrait of Morgan Russell and Keith purchased Signac's Les Andelys. Resold for £31,000 in London in 1965, the Modigliani has since been back on the market at between $US8 million ($15.5 million) and $US10 million, while the Signac, sold in London for £200,000 in the early 1980s, would be worth at least £2 million ($5.7 million) today. These were very conservative purchases - by the two most enlightened collectors in Australia of their day - from an exhibition catalogue which included seven Cezannes. "Degenerate art", as enemies of the modern dubbed it, was not the only art to be expropriated or confiscated and sold by the Nazis. The National Gallery of Victoria has listed several Old Master paintings with gaps in their histories alongside Impressionist works such as Paul Sérusier's 1908 Boys on a Riverbank. But while such paintings were also confiscated from their owners and sold off, there is no evidence to suggest that any of the holdings in Australian public collections were among them. A greater worry for the Australian collector is the question of title over the huge volume of Australian paintings that has gone through the market in the past 25 years. With the decline of leasing, collectors are less likely to be caught out buying financially encumbered (as opposed to stolen) art - a major problem in the late 1980s. But with paintings sometimes changing hands three or four times a year, the complications arising from the discovery that a work had been stolen or was subject to some kind of lien could have awkward knock-on effects for a whole series of buyers. In the sellers' market that has predominated over the past two art booms, buyers have not had the muscle to demand that auction houses provide adequate provenances. Apart from the fact that buyers do not know if their purchases have, for example, hung on the walls of a serial killer, the history of the work adds to the painting's interest - if only as a conversation piece.
http://afr.com/personalfinance/
Plundering the Past
Why is the Taliban destroying the great Buddhas of Bamiyan? The real reason for its war
against Afghanistan’s rich pre-Islamic heritage may be more about politics—and
money—than religion, argues Newsweek’s Russian-language partner Itogi
By Yevgeny Pakhomov and Dmitry Sabov
ITOGI-NEWSWEEK
March 12 — The destruction of the 1,500-year-old Buddhas of Bamiyan began four years ago, when a little-known Taliban commander declared that “not a single pagan idol must remain in the territory of Afghanistan.”
THE COMMANDER’S UNIT had just driven out the mujahedin—guerrillas led by Ahmed Shah Massoud—from the valley housing the relics, and Taliban tanks began firing on them shortly afterward. The cliffside sculptures got a reprieve, however, when Taliban leader Muhammad Omar issued a special edict last year decreeing that the Bamiyan Buddhas were protected and their destruction was prohibited.” But on Feb. 26 Mullah Omar issued an edict calling for the destruction of the idols. Why did the secretive leader of the “fighters for Islam,” change his mind? The first reason, agree most diplomats who study Afghanistan, is the regime’s persistent desire to achieve international recognition. So far the Taliban has been recognized by only three countries—Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The West, especially the U.S., refuses to recognize the country’s new rulers until they extradite Osama bin Laden, who is suspected of organizing terror attacks against American targets. Some three months ago, the United Nations tightened sanctions against the Taliban to pressurize it to stop harboring the international fugitive. For Mullah Omar, who had spared the statues in the hope of improving relations with the West, the increased pressure indicated he had nothing left to lose. His response to the rest of the world: If you want the monuments to survive, then recognize us as we are. The second reason was a desire to punish the Hazaras. This ethnic group, which considers itself Afghanistan’s oldest and prides itself on its cultural heritage, makes up the majority in the Bamiyan Valley. The Hazaras did not welcome the Taliban, who are mostly Pushtuns, and in February armed units of Hazaras expelled pro-Taliban students from the town of Bamiyan. The town was recaptured after four days of bloody fighting, with the “liberation” accompanied by ethnic violence against the Hazaras. Although it appears to the world that the destruction of the Buddhas is only the beginning of a ruthless war by the Taliban against Afghanistan’s bountiful pre-Islamic culture, in reality the barbaric plundering and destruction of monuments in the war-torn country are nearing their conclusion. Some historical background: the territory of present-day Afghanistan was in the middle of the Great Silk Road, meeting point of the classical and Buddhist civilizations. During the first centuries A.D. their interaction gave rise to the unique culture of Gandhara (the ancient name for part of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia), which left behind statues of Buddhas produced in the Greek sculptural tradition—the giant figures in Bamiyan are even garbed in ancient togas—bas-reliefs decorated with variations on the theme of Atlases supporting the heavens, and many other works. After the king of Afghanistan allowed French scholars to conduct regular digs in the 1920s, that country, in the words of Pierre Cambon, curator of the Afghan collection at the Guimet Museum in Paris, “replaced the missing link in world archeology.” Besides works by masters of old Gandhara, discoveries were made of the world’s oldest collections of ivories brought from India, the first items made from glass to reach here from Alexandria, a unique collection of Chinese vases from the Han dynasty, and objects of Parthian and Persian art. Until the Najibullah regime fell in 1992, many of these exhibits were at the Kabul Museum of Antiquities. When the mujahedin who occupied Kabul began fighting each other, the museum was raided several times by those who called themselves fighters for the faith. First all the gold items were removed, then—when buyers of antiquities appeared in Afghanistan from Europe and the U.S.—the mujahedin realized that the foreigners were also ready to pay big money for the old pots and stones. Museums and cultural landmarks began to be plundered throughout Afghanistan. In addition, a boom in independent excavations began in the country. The spoils went through the Khyber Pass to the Pakistani city of Peshawar, which turned into a center of underground trafficking in Afghan antiquities. Prices are reported to have been sharply inflated by tourists from Japan, where interest in Buddhist culture is very high. According to Robert Kluyver of the Society for the Preservation of Afghanistan’s Cultural Heritage, Japanese collectors are prepared to pay up to $1 million for a bas-relief depicting Buddha. After occupying Kabul in 1996, Taliban supporters declared that those guilty of museum thefts and unauthorized excavations would have their hands chopped off.
Museum personnel were instructed to resume operations and to compile a list of the exhibits that remained. Former field commander Qudratullah Jamal, now minister of culture of the Islamic Emirate, proclaimed: “We are educated people...We know that education is the mother of any civilization. We are well aware of the value of our country’s historical heritage.” Yet an Itogi correspondent who visited Peshawar last year saw evidence that trafficking in Afghan antiquities is still flourishing. Foreigners who tour Buddhist monuments near Peshawar are offered “ancient terra cotta statuettes” from Gandhara at a “low price.” And antique-shop dealers show visitors old coins or sabers from the age of the Great Moguls in richly-decorated scabbards—all apparently museum-quality items. There is no reason to believe that the plundering has stopped. According to one report in Britain’s The Guardian newspaper, a well-known London collector was offered “a figure newly excavated in Afghanistan.” a few months after the Kabul Museum opened. The photograph sent to the collector showed one of the most famous exhibits from the museum: an ivory panel depicting a dancer that was discovered in the 1930s by French archeologists. The damage to the Buddhas may therefore be attributable to more than diplomatic and ethnic factors. The selling off of Afghanistan’s cultural heritage could have a profit- making motive too.
http://www.msnbc.com/
More Buddhist Statues Destroyed
By KATHY GANNON, Associated Press Writer
GHAZNI, Afghanistan (AP) - At least two weeks before Afghanistan's supreme ruler ordered all statues in the country destroyed, zealous Taliban soldiers wielding pickaxes hacked an ancient Buddhist complex to rubble, scrawling graffiti on the walls, a Taliban guard said. ``We confront the idols of non-Muslims and destroy them,'' read one message etched in a wall in Pashtu, the language of Afghanistan's majority Pashtun ethnic group. Arriving packed aboard four pickup trucks, the soldiers spent several days swarming over the complex, built in tiers up the side of a hill from the second to seventh centuries, said Mullah Saeed Jan, a Taliban guard at the site. An ancient baked clay statue of Buddha, beheaded decades ago, was hacked into small pieces, among the relics destroyed at the complex at Ghazni, 120 miles southwest of the Afghan capital, Kabul. ``The Buddha was here, but we have smashed it,'' Jan said Tuesday, wrapped in a dirty brown blanket to protect against the cold wind sweeping the arid plains. Jan said he knew little of the international outrage over the Taliban's destruction of its pre- Islamic heritage, including two towering statues of Buddha in central Afghanistan. ``I don't know what the world thinks, but it is in Shariat (Islamic law), so what can we do?'' he said. The destruction at the Ghazni complex came at least two weeks before the Taliban's reclusive leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, issued his order to destroy all statues, decreeing them idolatrous and offensive to Islam. Taliban soldiers using explosives last week demolished two towering statues of Buddha hewn from a cliff face in central Bamiyan in the third and fifth centuries. The taller of the two, at 170 feet, was believed to be the world's tallest standing Buddha, while the other measured 120 feet. The Taliban have refused to allow anyone to go to Bamiyan. On Tuesday, Jan displayed bits of clay that used to be part of a Buddha statue kept inside a chamber sealed with wooden slats. In another chamber, all that had remained of one ancient statue, the feet, were pounded into rubble and even the altar was demolished. ``I don't know. They have gone completely mad, I think,'' said Nancy Dupree, a historian and Afghan expert, who has chronicled the history, culture and traditions of Afghanistan. A founding member of the Society for the Preservation of Afghanistan's Cultural Heritage, Dupree said the Ghazni ruins were a rich mix of Buddhist and Hindu traditions. ``This was toward the end of Buddhism in the area and the coming of Hinduism into Afghanistan,'' she explained. Some of the chambers contained Hindu statues, long since lost, destroyed or sold. Smack in the middle of the ancient trade route between China and central Asia, Afghanistan's history is a rich blend of cultures and religions. ``There's an unbroken cultural history of 50,000 years,'' said Carla Grissmann, who spent several years inventorying the thousands of artifacts, most of Buddhist in origin, at the Kabul Museum. The Taliban's Foreign Minster Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil said Sunday they had all been destroyed. For Afghans, Ghazni is considered an Islamic cultural mecca because religious leaders are buried there, Jan said. Some of those leaders shared the same version of Islam that is followed by today's Taliban. Take Afghanistan's 12th-century ruler, Sultan Mahmood Ghaznavi, who rampaged across most of northern India converting Hindus to Islam and smashing Hindu statues. He is said to have taken Hindu statues and put them at the entrance to a mosque in Ghazni so the Muslim faithful could use them as stepping stones. Afghanistan still has a relatively large Hindu and Sikh population, although hundreds fled between 1992 and 1996 when warring Islamic factions, who threw out the communists, destroyed much of Kabul. The Taliban took control in 1996 and have allowed Hindus and Sikhs to practice their religions. A Sikh temple in Karte Parwan neighborhood is a giant marble hall where the soft melodies of Indian music can be heard. Despite the Taliban's ban on music, they have not interfered with music played by other religions. ``At the moment, we have no difficulties. But no one can guarantee the future,'' said a Hindu resident of Kabul, who identified himself only as Makan. ``We don't want to talk politics,'' said a nervous Andar Singh, a Sikh. ``Everything for the moment is calm and normal.'' An estimated 450 worshippers come daily to a Sikh temple in Kabul, while in Jalalabad, there are 520 Sikh worshippers, Singh said. Dupree clings to the hope that some of the statues may have been brought to Pakistan to be sold, despite the Taliban's repeated denials that any artifact was sold. ``It is as wrong to sell as it is to have'' the statues, said Mullah Mohammed Hassan, deputy administrator of Kabul.
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/