March 21, 2001

- query: acceptance of a gift of three electric carts
- AFRICAN HERITAGE LOST TO ART DEALERS
- Ancient Afghanistan, smuggled in pieces
- Fighting for Her Past
( The niece of one of artist Gustav Klimt's friends and subjects is seeking a famous portrait and other works.
Austria says the art, seized by the Nazis, belongs there)
- Christie’s to shutter division that auctioned low-priced art

Send reply to: "Michael Sullivan" msullivn@slam.org
Subject:

query: acceptance of a gift of three electric carts

Dear Ton,
Please consider posting the following questionaire. The MSN has the widest audience with the focus I need for this project.
From: Michael Sullivan, Superintendent of Protection at The Saint Louis Art Museum in Saint Louis, Missouri, USA
Please respond to: msullivn@slam.org or phone (314) 655-5245 or FAX (314) 721-6172. Many Thanks.
We are considering the acceptance of a gift of three electric carts, the type used by the handicapped instead of wheelchairs. We are asking for information from other institutions who have experience loaning these vehicles to their visitors.

Thank you very much for taking the time to participate. Please allow me the opportunity to return the favor sometime.
Mike Sullivan

From: chictrib@tribune22.su-colo.bbnplanet.com
To: securma@xs4all.nl
Subject:

AFRICAN HERITAGE LOST TO ART DEALERS

AFRICAN HERITAGE LOST TO ART DEALERS
By Paul Salopek

Adama said he felt ashamed for selling what he called his "secret things." Hauled from a dark, locked room behind his mud-walled curio shop in this dusty little village, a small fortune in looted artifacts lay arrayed on his dirt floor. There were ancient Tellem figurines plucked from nearby burial caves. There were clay pots dating back, he claimed, 1,000 years, to when the surrounding brittle grasslands of the Sahel were a lush forest. And, pathetically, there were even fiber loincloths that appeared to come from the dead of his own people, the Dogon. "It makes me sad, selling our past," Adama said, offering up the last dregs of this continent's vanishing cultural and artistic heritage. He pointed to a funerary statuette that would have fetched more than $1,000 at an African fine art gallery in New York or Paris. "Make you a deal," he said hopefully, asking $100. Adama's regrets may seem as cheap as his age-old wares, but his illicit trade comes at a wrenchingly high cost for Africa: The continent's priceless art objects, many of them irreplaceable artifacts centuries old, are being sucked inexorably into a high-dollar antiquities market that first took off in the wake of the 1980s fine art boom. The rape of Africa's art and artifacts is hardly a secret and is as old as looting itself. Local grave robbers have pillaged Egyptian tombs since time immemorial, and Napoleon's armies in North Africa sparked a century-long frenzy of collecting that stocked the greatest museums of Europe. Yet in recent years, the trend has accelerated, fueled by the burgeoning American and European economies and a growing interest in authentic ethnic art. Ancient soapstone sculptures, for instance, have been snapped up in war-ravaged Sierra Leone. Rare ceramics from vanished African empires are being plundered wholesale from archeological sites in drought-stricken Niger, one of the poorest nations in the world. And even Nigeria's hapless museums have been cleaned out by corrupt officials willing to hawk history for a few dollars. "Big-money collecting has threatened archeology worldwide, but Africa is just incredibly vulnerable," said Susan Keech McIntosh, an archeologist from Rice University in Houston who sits on a presidential committee that advises the U.S. government on regulating the antiquities trade.

Destroyed by looters

"You've got dealers equipping African farmers with shovels and dismantling sites cubic meter by cubic meter," McIntosh said. "All we end up knowing about African civilizations is their art, because all the other aspects of their culture are gone, destroyed by the looting." Mali is a special case, she said, both because of the fabled beauty of its artifacts and the heartbreaking rate at which its ancient art has disappeared into the luggage of unscrupulous collectors, especially from Europe. A vastand landlocked nation that straddles the transition zone between the Sahara and wetter savannas, Mali fostered several artmaking civilizations whose history stretches back more than two millenniums. Sub-Saharan Africa's oldest known urban culture, the Mali Empire, took root and flourished on the lush inland delta of the Niger River about 1,000 years ago. Hundreds of exquisite terra-cotta sculptures from that era have been spirited out of Mali by international art dealers in recent years; one figurine, a clay ram that may be a fake, fetched $275,000 at a Sotheby's auction in New York in 1991. Mali's National Museum, by contrast, owns only a few dozen such pieces. Another art hot spot, the rugged Bandiagara Cliffs where the animist Dogon tribe bury their dead in caves, also has been hammered by collectors. Virtually every one of the tribe's old, ornately carved granary doors has been bought up and carted away to African art galleries in Europe and the United States. Local elders have resorted to defacing what few original carvings remain in their villages to keep them from being stolen. Meanwhile, even more ancient art in the Dogon area--headrests and statuettes left in high, inaccessible caves by the Tellem, a people who vanished mysteriously in the 16th Century-- are being mined for money. Dogon youths hang from ropes to plunder the artifacts. "Little by little, it is all being taken away," said Mombalon dit Gol-fils Dolo, a Dogon tourist guide. "It is not our fault. We are poor. Our millet harvest failed this year." Indeed, aware of the irresistible lure of outsiders offering pocketfuls of cash in exchange for its dwindling art treasures, the Malian government has launched a unique education campaign to encourage villagers to protect their past. President Alpha Oumar Konare, a trained archeologist, has ordered that cultural missions be established in all of Mali's smaller towns to promote a sense of pride and ownership in the country's artifacts. Volunteers patrol some of the richer sites, such as the pottery- littered fields surrounding the medieval mud city of Djenne.

Hard to control

"We have stopped the artifact drain near town, but the looters just move to more remote diggings," said Dalla Gadjigo, the young assistant director of the cultural mission in Djenne. "We do what we can, but the Belgians have more than 800 archeological sites to pick from in this region." Belgium and Switzerland support huge African art markets because neither country signed a 1970 United Nations convention that prohibits the trafficking of antiquities. The United States signed the treaty and banned the importation of Malian artifacts in 1993. Many experts point out, however, that art dealers simply change the acquisition data on their artifacts to predate the treaty, making sales legal. "It's too late to stop this material from leaving Africa because most of it is already out; it's done, it's over," said Douglas Dawson, a respected African and Asian art dealer in Chicago who often brokers sales to museums. "Why does it appeal to private collectors? Because people want to tap into somebody else's history, meaning, authenticity--values that are often absent in our own society." Dawson noted that so few real African antiquities remain on the continent where they were created that international demand has ignited an exploding market in fakes. According to the January issue of Archaeology Magazine, as many as 80 percent of the terra cottas now coming out of Mali are forgeries. "We're being flooded with junk African art," Dawson said. In his own way, Adama, the regretful back-room dealer from dusty Sanga village, had to agree. "The new objects are not the same," he said, waving a hand over his looted inventory from Africa's fading past. "The fakes are made only for money. The old things were made for different reasons, reasons we no longer understand. That's what makes them special."

Ancient Afghanistan, smuggled in pieces

By Scott Baldauf (baldaufs@csps.com)
Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
PESHAWAR, PAKISTAN

Across the border in Afghanistan, the Taliban government has destroyed every Buddha it can get its hands on, images it considers idolatrous. Demolition of the massive standing Buddhas of Bamiyan, confirmed by dramatic photographs last week, sent a shock wave through academic and religious circles as these icons of the Afghan Buddhist civilization were consigned to dust.
But in Naseer Ahmed's shop in Peshawar's antiques market, relics are still trickling in and finding refuge. Like the displaced Afghans who bring them, Afghanistan's endangered Buddhist and Hellenic statues are coming to Pakistan for shelter and safety - and to be sold.
Opening a false door in his show room and walking into a dark, musty chamber, Mr. Ahmed says, "you come into my museum." A Greek terra cotta head is one recent arrival that could date back to the invasion of Alexander the Great. Others are altarpieces that tell the life story of Buddha. "You want big Buddha, small Buddha, it's no problem; but take to your country, it's a big problem at airport," says Ahmed.
TREASURE TROVE:
With the strict Taliban regime’s destruction of Afghanistan’s Buddhas, Pakistan’s shops are transit and holding points for remaining artifacts.
ALYSSA BANTA

Afghanistan's Taliban rulers prohibit anyone from transporting, possessing, or selling religious idols. Pakistan's customs department also restricts their transport into the country, regarding them as stolen goods. But as the hammers and explosives of Afghanistan's religious rulers continue to do their work on their country's historical legacy, the trickle of antiquities may become a flood. Many statues may end up in the hands of people who have little idea of their importance.
"This region, from Peshawar to Bamiyan, played a vital role in the development of Buddhism," says Fidaullah Sehrai, an archaeologist and former director of the Peshawar Museum, and a specialist in the art of the Afghan Buddhist, or Gandhara, culture, which combines Asian and Greco-Roman influences. "It was here that Buddhism was transferred to China, Korea, Japan, along the old Silk Route," says Mr. Sehrai. "It was here that the image of Buddha becomes an important source of worship, and where the mass production of statues begins. And it was here that Tantric Buddhism takes the form of Buddhism that is still practiced in Tibet.
"It is significant, because it is on the crossroads of cultures," he adds. "This is the history of the people of Afghanistan, and it should be maintained as a colorful example of pre- Islamic Afghan culture."
In the US, Taliban officials have said that the destruction was angrily ordered after international aid offers were made specifically to save statues, instead of ease Afghanistan's famine. As photographs pour in from various parts of Afghanistan - the final destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, rubble in Ghazni where a reclining Buddha used to be - it is clear that this pre-Islamic history is disappearing day by day, statue by statue.
It's a situation that puts Afghan historical experts into a quandary. On one hand, removing a relic from its historical surroundings destroys its archaeological value. On the other hand, leaving the statues in Afghanistan guarantees their destruction.
But for the traders of Peshawar's antiques market, such lofty concerns are somewhat beside the point. There are more earthly matters of supply and demand. Prices for a genuine hunk of Greek or Buddhist history have been dropping rapidly, as fewer Japanese and European customers arrive, kept away by Pakistan's trade sanctions and the unresolved issue of accused terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.
As a result, the market in antiquities has flipped. Authentic Buddhist idols, brought in cheaply by refugees, sell for less than the mass-produced statues from the factories of the nearby city of Taxila.
"There are more Buddhas coming out of Afghanistan, but we don't have space to store them," says Nadir Khan, owner of a coin shop in Peshawar, who occasionally deals in Buddhas. "But the influx of these statues is not very much because the Taliban have imposed restrictions. It's very difficult to take them out of the country."
Ironically, the destruction of Buddhas in Afghanistan has not raised the price of those Buddhas that survived, because of the lack of buyers. "The prices have gone down, because foreigners are not coming these days," says Mr. Khan, who is nonetheless trying to train himself on how to distinguish real statues from fake ones.
"With these coins, I have books I can read to find out how old it is, where it is from, and how much it's worth," he says. "But with statues, I ask an expert. Is it better if one is sitting or standing?"
While nearly every antique shop in Peshawar has old, or at least old-looking Buddhas to sell, some shopkeepers actually voice support for the Taliban's idol-smashing.
"As a Muslim, I support the Taliban," says a shopkeeper named Salar, who has a safe full of Buddha heads and figurines. "They are doing a good job."
But an antiques dealer named Ghaznavi decries both the Taliban's destruction of Buddhist relics and their removal from his native country of Afghanistan.
"Being an Afghan, I will not encourage anyone to go and take a Buddha," he says, standing in a shop filled with Iranian, Afghan, Greek, and Saracenic artifacts. "Those statues, they belong to my country, and to my history. If I get an ancient piece, I would rather preserve it than sell it."
"But I'm a businessman," he says, stroking his beard, "and if my family gets hungry, I have no choice."
http://www.csmonitor.com/

For further information:

Afghanistan Cultural Heritage Crisis UNESCO
http://www.unesco.org/opi/eng/unescopress/2001/afghanistan.shtml

The pillage of Kabul Museum
http://www.rawa.org/museum.html

Why the Buddha bashing? The News, Pakistan
http://www.jang.com.pk/thenews/mar2001-daily/15-03-2001/oped/o5.htm

Afghanistan, One Day in Bamiyan Postcards From Hell
http://www.ciriello.com/46bamiyan

The Buddhas of Bamiyan
http://www.purabudaya.com/resources/bamiyan/bamiyan.htm

Afghan News Network
http://www.myafghan.com/

Taleban.com - Islamic Movement of Afghanistan
http://www.taleban.com/

Fighting for Her Past

Paintings: The niece of one of artist Gustav Klimt's friends and subjects is seeking a famous portrait and other works. Austria says the art, seized by the Nazis, belongs there.

By ANNE-MARIE O'CONNOR, Times Staff Writer

Adele Bloch-Bauer was a beautiful young society woman born into a wealthy Jewish family in an era that dictated that she not attend university, as she desired, but make a suitable marriage. She married a Czech sugar baron and sought her education where she could, as a renowned Vienna hostess of distinguished gatherings where Gustav Mahler mingled with fellow composer Richard Strauss and the fashionable artist Gustav Klimt--with whom she shared a special rapport. It was Klimt who captured her restless spirit, in a shimmery 1907 painting--arguably, Austrian art experts say, his most significant "gold" portrait--that was seized from Bloch- Bauer's husband by the Nazis. Now her niece, Maria Altmann, 85, is fighting to claim ownership of the celebrated "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I." The painting is one of six Klimts--a collection the family values at $150 million--that Altmann aims to recover through a federal lawsuit in Los Angeles. If they cannot be returned, she hopes to be compensated for their loss. The dispute, scheduled to come before a U.S. judge on April 30, is one of many that haunt European countries where Jewish citizens were dispossessed and deported to Nazi death camps. Austria maintains that Adele Bloch- Bauer willed the paintings to the Austrian Gallery. "It's not a Holocaust-related claim," said Peter Moser, the Austrian ambassador to the United States, during a visit last week to Los Angeles. "It should be tried in Austria." Los Angeles attorneys representing Austria are asking the judge to dismiss the case, saying the United States has no jurisdiction and that the Vienna government and the museum enjoy immunity under U.S. statute. Altmann's attorney, E. Randol Schoenberg, countered that, in some cases, a U.S. citizen has the right to sue a foreign state for property taken in violation of international law. Altmann contends that her aunt's will was a nonbinding request to her uncle, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer. She says the paintings were not donated after he died, as her aunt asked, but seized in the Nazi "Aryanization" of Jewish property after he fled in 1938. When he died, nearly penniless, seven years later, he had no intention of giving away the works, she said. To Altmann, the paintings are fragments of a life in Vienna that the Nazis destroyed, and a chapter of family history that opens with the relationship between Klimt and the wealthy patroness whose portrait he painted twice. "It's a very complicated story," Altmann began, on a hushed afternoon at her Cheviot Hills home. "Everything they say about my aunt having a wild affair with Klimt, this is all not completely true. I was 9 when she died. I asked my mother if [my aunt] had an affair with Klimt. My mother--she was very Victorian--said, 'How dare you say that? It was an intellectual friendship.' " Adele and Ferdinand Bloch- Bauer lived in an elegant Vienna palais. Their home was well known to artists and intellectuals in a city famed for a dazzling cultural life in which Jews played a central role. Klimt was a celebrated artist whose themes of eroticism and moral ambivalence had already aroused controversy. His mistresses were legend. Bloch-Bauer, then 25, was the kind of unconventional woman Klimt loved to paint. She was elegant, arrogant, intense. She smoked. Klimt's first portrait of her caused a sensation. Critics compared its metallic gold surface to Greek Orthodox icons. A newspaper called Bloch-Bauer "an idol in a golden shrine," Tobias G. Natter, who oversees the collection of 20th century art at the Austrian Gallery, said at a recent lecture at the UCLA Hammer Museum. Klimt gained greater recognition with "The Kiss," which depicts a man embracing a woman who, some speculate, was also Bloch-Bauer. Klimt would paint a second Bloch- Bauer portrait, but the first one retained its own cachet. "The picture suggests Adele Bloch-Bauer's restlessness, and also her denial of society's expectations," Natter said as the ghostly illuminated image of Bloch-Bauer loomed above him on the wall. In youthful photos, Altmann shares her aunt's striking beauty. Adele was her mother's sister, Ferdinand her father's brother. Her aunt remained childless, after three stillbirths. "She was not a maternal person. She was totally intellectual," Altmann said. "I was a little intimidated by her. She blossomed when she was with people who were learned, but a child was the last thing she was interested in. She was not what you would call a happy woman." Altmann's warm serenity contrasts with the glittering but cool characterizations of her glamorous aunt, though Altmann seems to share her stubborn passion for a cause. "They will delay, delay, delay, hoping I will die," Altmann, now a widow, said of the dispute. "But I will do them the pleasure of staying alive." Adele Bloch-Bauer was only 43 when she died of meningitis in 1925. Her will asked her husband to donate money to workers movements, libraries and orphans. "I ask my husband to leave my two portraits and the four landscapes of Gustav Klimt to the Austrian Gallery in Vienna," it said, according to the lawsuit. Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer was said to be deeply in love with his wife, and he put the six Klimts in a memorial room. He donated another Klimt to the Vienna museum in 1936. Austrian diplomats cite that as an implicit recognition of her will. "That's wishful thinking," Schoenberg said. By the 1930s, some Austrians openly resented the prominence of Vienna's Jews and embraced the Nazis when they marched into the country on March 12, 1938. Hitler, an Austrian native who had once been rejected by a Vienna arts academy, the next day declared the Anschluss, the "union," with Germany. Jewish intellectuals, such as Sigmund Freud, fled. "They say now that Austria was a victim of the Nazis. Believe me, there were no victims," Altmann said. "The women were throwing flowers, the church bells were ringing." Maria Altmann and her husband, Fritz, had just returned to Vienna from their honeymoon. The Gestapo evicted them from their apartment and sent Fritz to the concentration camp at Dachau to pressure his brother to hand over the lucrative accounts of his cashmere sweater factory. The Nazis took clothes, jewelry, furniture. They snatched away Adele Bloch-Bauer's diamond necklace, a wedding gift from her uncle, and gave it to Hitler's right-hand man, Hermann Goering. The Nazis took her father's Stradivari violin, a gift from another Vienna Jewish family, the Rothschilds. Her father died within a few months. Altmann's brother-in-law used the promise of his assets to free her husband, and a peasant helped the couple hike over the German border to Holland. The Altmanns moved to California. Bloch-Bauer was away at his castle in Czechoslovakia. The Nazis seized his Vienna palais, his valuable porcelain, furniture and paintings. "The Nazis took the paintings out of the house. They auctioned them off, whatever," Ambassador Moser agreed. "What did the Nazis want with chinaware? They wanted money, money, money. The Nazis wanted to get rid of the Jews, all of them. It was sheer looting and robbing." Bloch-Bauer fled to Switzerland when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia. Nazi commander Reinhardt Heydrich, an architect of Hitler's "Final Solution," moved into Bloch- Bauer's castle until exiled Czech resistance fighters assassinated him in 1942. In retaliation, the Nazis killed all male inhabitants over 16 in the nearby village of Lidice. Bloch- Bauer's sugar company, too, was "Aryanized," and one of his paintings, Altmann insists, wound up in the collection of Hitler himself. By the time Bloch-Bauer died in a Zurich hotel room in 1945, 65,000 Austrian Jews had been killed. His Vienna mansion became a German rail center and is now the Austrian railway headquarters. His will provided for his family and did not mention the museum, the lawsuit says. "If somebody comes and steals everything you enjoy, would you want them to take more after you die?" Altmann asked. Ambassador Moser said he was not sure exactly how the Klimts found their way to the Austrian Gallery, "where according to the last will of Mrs. Bloch-Bauer, they should end up anyway." The lawsuit says the Bloch-Bauer estate was liquidated by a Nazi lawyer, Eric Fuhrer, who was arrested after the war. Fuhrer transferred Klimt's first portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer to the Austrian Gallery in 1941 with a cover letter signed "Heil Hitler," the suit says. The suit says Fuhrer traded the celebrated portrait and another Klimt to the Austrian Gallery in exchange for the Klimt that Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer had donated in 1936. The donated Klimt was then sold to an out-of-wedlock son of Klimt who was a successful Nazi propaganda film director, then bequeathed to the museum after his death in 1961, the suit says. Altmann is claiming a Klimt portrait of a family friend--Amalie Zuckerkandl, who died with her daughter in a concentration camp--that is not mentioned in Adele Bloch-Bauer's will at all.
The suit says that in the 1980s, an art dealer gave it to the Austrian Gallery in exchange for an export permit. Moser said several Austrian Jewish families profess ownership. Attorney Schoenberg says he can prove his client's claim. In 1998, the Austrian parliament enacted a law providing for the recovery of art stolen from the Jews by the Nazis or donated under coercion after the war, and 1,000 artworks have been returned , officials say. "There's a very genuine effort underway to restore the pieces of art to the rightful owners in a dignified and swift manner," said Peter Launsky-Tieffenthal, the Austrian Consul General to Los Angeles. As for the Bloch-Bauer affair, "it's now a fight between lawyers," Moser said. "What we object to is, the situation is portrayed as condoning the Aryanization and the looting and robbing of Jews back in 1938. It has nothing to do with it," he said. "The whole thing happened in Austria, so why try it here?" Schoenberg, who is the grandson of another legendary Vienna native, composer Arnold Schoenberg, said he tried to sue in Austria. But Altmann and two other heirs would have had to pay a hefty deposit to cover legal costs that could have totaled $2 million. They filed suit in Los Angeles last August (A copy is posted at http://www.adele.at). The real, unspoken issue for Austria, Altmann contends, is not the will, but the immense notoriety of the Klimts--particularly the portrait of her aunt. "Of course they don't want to give it back," Altmann said. "It's one of the main attractions of the museum." "The other day, a woman came in and said, 'That's such a beautiful painting,' " Altmann said, standing before the reproduction on her wall. "I said, 'That's my aunt,' " she mused, her eyes lingering on Bloch-Bauer's thoughtful gaze. "She was a modern woman living in the world of yesterday."
http://www.latimes.com/

Christie’s to shutter division that auctioned low-priced art

Economic downturn may be hitting the art world
By Ken Bensinger
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
March 21 — Auctioneer Christie’s International PLC said it will fold its lower-price New York auction division into its main business, a sign that market woes may finally be hitting the art world. The company said the move will spur layoffs, but it wouldn’t disclose any numbers.
more:
http://www.msnbc.com/news/547468.asp?cp1=1