March 24, 2001
CONTENTS:
- Antiques for sale must have history logbook (paintings and antiques sold in Britain will be
required to have a logbook detailing their past history under Home Office plans to reduce the
trade in stolen goods)
- Re: Museum Lighting & CCTV (Jim Sanders)
- Re: Museum Lighting & CCTV (Ross Brand)
- Taliban unlock museum to show destroyed statues
- Emptiness On Display In Afghan Museum War, Taliban Edict Leave Few Artifacts
- The Art Newspaper; This week's top stories
- 5 Early Marilyn Monroe Photos Fail to Sell at Auction
- Thieves Find Their Own Digs ( U.S. act is used to crack down on lootersJ of Native
American sites. Criminals view ruins as quick money, not historic treasure troves)
Antiques for sale must have history logbook
By David Bamber, Home Affairs Correspondent
ALL paintings and antiques sold in Britain will be required to have a logbook detailing their past history under Home Office plans to reduce the trade in stolen goods. Ministers want purchasers to be able to check the previous ownership of works that they are buying in the same way that motorists do with records of secondhand cars. Details of sales will also be kept on a Home Office database in an attempt to crack down on rogue sellers. The police believe that the register will dramatically reduce the estimated £75 million annual market in stolen antiques and paintings. Charles Clarke, the Home Office minister, has met police, representatives from commercial art galleries and antiques dealers, and has drawn up an action plan. Mr Clarke wants the national database set up as soon as possible. He said: "We think this is a very serious area of crime. I've often felt we don't place enough priority, with the police and everyone else, on focusing on how we can work to deal with this." Under the plans, each antique or painting would have its own "logbook" and its provenance, past owners and recent history would be listed. The national database would also be updated every time the artwork is then sold. Although the full details have not been decided, it is likely that the names and addresses would be registered of anyone who sells any antique or painting for more than £10, and the same details of anyone who buys anything for more than £100. Legislation would be needed to make the register legally binding, but ministers hope to get a national database running on a voluntary basis within the next few months. Eventually all auction houses, antiques dealers and other outlets would be required to sign up to the scheme. Invaluable, an organisation that tracks down stolen antiques, is developing a kitemark that will be licensed to dealers who agree to check their sales catalogues against its stolen art database. This could be extended to the proposed national register. Mark Dalrymple, the chairman of the Council for the Prevention of Art Theft, which supports the establishment of the database, said: "One of the reasons why art and antiques are targeted by thieves is the ease with which they can be sold quickly, easily, for cash, almost anywhere in the world, especially in markets or fairs. Often no questions are asked as to who is selling, why and whether the seller has good title." He said that antiques dealers would also welcome the appointment of a named special officer in each police force who would devote their time to tracking down stolen antiques. Some forces have already chosen that path and Dc Norman Bailey has been appointed the designated officer for stolen antiques and art for Kent Police. He said: "Working on the principle of the national database for fingerprints, which the Home Office set up two years ago, a national register for antiques and art would be invaluable. The trade in stolen art is growing and we need to use every tactic to prevent it."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
From: Jim Sanders Subject: Re: Museum Lighting & CCTV
It seems to me that someone has to have a serious talk with the Head of Security and/or Facilities Manager at that museum about preservation of objects, and the fact that "security" for artworks includes protection from overexposure to light, maintenance of proper climate control, etc. Too many security folks get hung up on the "intruder" danger, and turn a blind eye to their responsibility to protect the collection from all dangers.
Here at the Worcester Art Museum, we have extensive CCTV coverage, as well as other intrusion detection systems. We never find in necessary to light entire galleries or other areas of the facility in order for our night guards and CCTV cameras to function. Very low- level night lights interspersed throughout the building serve us very well and pose no danger to the objects.
Jim Sanders
From: "Brand, Ross" RBrand@royalbcmuseum.bc.ca
Subject: Re: Museum Lighting & CCTV
David
During the Leonardo Da Vince Exhibit I was faced with the same problem. I came up with a relatively inexpensive solution that satisfied our conservation staff as well as our Security requirements.
I installed motion activated CCTV cameras in the areas with light sensitive material. I also installed inexpensive motion detector lights. We were then able to turn out the lights in the exhibit at night. If anything moved the motion activated lights would go on. The cameras would register that as motion, the control desk would get an alarm and the video tape automatically was recording.
Kabul collection - Taliban unlock museum to show destroyed statues
Luke Harding in Islamabad
Journalists toured Afghanistan's national museum in Kabul yesterday to see the results of the Taliban's destruction of statues. Only pathetic fragments of the original collection of statues remained, including broken pottery and wooden engravings. A large Buddha - briefly displayed last August - had been pulverised, officials said. The museum was opened up for the first time since Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar ordered the destruction of all pre-Islamic statues three weeks ago. "You know what has happened to the statues. They have been destroyed," the museum chief, Naqibullah Ahmadyar, said. The lobby yesterday contained only a handful of exhibits including a limestone inscription in Greek dating back nearly 2,000 years. Western experts now fear that the Taliban are melting down Afghanistan's fabled Bactrian treasures - 20,000 gold objects about 2,000 years old. The Bactrians, who settled in northern Afghanistan, were a Greek dynasty founded by Alexander the Great.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
Emptiness On Display In Afghan Museum War, Taliban Edict Leave Few Artifacts
By Pamela Constable
KABUL, Afghanistan, March 22 -- Three weeks after decreeing that all statues in Afghanistan be destroyed, the country's ruling Taliban movement briefly opened the national museum for journalists, revealing a gloomy, nearly empty labyrinth of rooms virtually devoid of treasures. The museum, which has been shut for most of the past six years, once housed a priceless collection of artifacts, from Paleolithic pottery shards to Greek coins to Buddhist statues. Today there was little inside the shell-pocked, graffiti-scrawled structure except a giant inscribed marble bowl, a hastily arranged display of about 50 artifacts, and endless shelves of ceramic fragments labeled in French in a dank basement. After the Taliban, a radical Islamic group that controls most of Afghanistan, ordered on Feb. 26 that all pre-Islamic statues and idols in Afghanistan be demolished, authorities said they had destroyed a number of statues in the museum that were deemed idolatrous. The Taliban also wrecked two giant Buddha statues in the central Afghan province of Bamian two weeks ago. "Once the edict was declared, the work started. There was no place for sentimental feelings," said Ahmad Yar, the Taliban's museum director. Officials today provided no details or evidence of the destruction, however. Yar and other officials said the vast majority of items in the museum had been destroyed or looted before the Taliban regime took power in Kabul in 1996. Civil war among several Afghan factions in the early 1990s turned the city into a battlefield. The officials also said many valuable Islamic objects had been stored elsewhere for safekeeping. "We prepared this for you so you would understand we are not against culture," Yar said as he guided journalists around the building. "All objects that were against Islamic measures have been destroyed, but everything else we are keeping safely." Most rooms were locked and closed to view, however, and there was no sign of most of the museum's renowned possessions, which included graceful clay Buddhas from the 4th and 7th centuries, a carved glass Alexandria lighthouse from the 2nd century, a bronze statue of Hercules from the 1st century and goddess figurines from 3000 B.C. Officials had spent Wednesday preparing a display of sample objects, including ancient muskets, wooden mortars and pestles, carved wooden screens from Nuristan and a 2nd- century limestone wall piece covered with Greek symbols. The Bamian Room, which once housed an array of Buddhas, frescoes and sculptures from Afghanistan's Buddhist era (300 to 700 A.D.) is now an empty hall. Its ceiling was destroyed by rockets during the civil conflict of the early 1990s, and the walls are now scrawled with militaristic graffiti in the Pashto language. "The mujaheddin [freedom fighters] are the armies of God," reads one message. "He who humiliates them will be blinded." Another lists a number of Afghan factional warlords who fought over Kabul before the Taliban seized power. Their only aim, it says, was "to loot the country." The museum was shut by the Taliban in 1996 and remained closed until last summer. It was opened for several days in August but then shut again, reportedly after some conservative religious leaders objected to the displays of Buddhas and other pre-Islamic figures. Many pieces from the museum's original collection, much of which was excavated by French archaeologists in the 19th century, are believed to have been stolen and smuggled abroad for sale in the chaos of fighting during the 1990s. Others have made their way into museums in Europe and Asia. The museum first opened in 1919 and was fully inventoried in the 1970s, when thousands of items were catalogued. They included artifacts from a dozen separate cultures that once flourished in or passed through Afghanistan, especially during Buddhist, Bactrian, Mauriyan, Indo-Greek, Kushan and Islamic periods. Until recently, a preservation committee based in Pakistan and headed by Western diplomats had been working with Taliban officials to catalogue and restore archaeological artifacts and sites that were damaged by fighting. But committee members were unable to persuade Taliban officials last month to spare the Buddhas or other pre-Islamic statues. Taliban authorities said they intend to rebuild the museum and reopen it. They said they have recovered many objects from would-be smugglers and stored them in other locations.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
From: newsletter@theartnewspaper.com
Subject: The Art Newspaper; This week's top stories
The Art Newspaper.com
http://www.theartnewspaper.com
PAINTING STOLEN FROM THE HERMITAGE
St Petersburg. A painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme, (1824-1904), was stolen in broad daylight on 22 March from Russia's State Hermitage Museum. Police sealed off the museum at around 4pm after the painting, ‘Bath in the Harem’, was reported missing, and searched thousands of visitors and staff before they could leave, a process which continued into the evening. The museum said the painting had been cut out of its frame.
http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/article.asp?idart=5290 AUSTRALIA’S HISTORY: AN AUTHORISED VERSION
CANBERRA. The chopped, curved and slanting walls of the Antipodes’ newest museum, the National Museum of Australia, are faced with olive green, red, and yellow anodised aluminium. The panels carry gigantic braille bumps, but, curiously, no one agrees about what they say. One theory is that it is “G’dy” (the Crocodile Dundee-type greeting); the other, “Sorry” (the apology the prime minister was not prepared to make for sins committed against the Aborigines over the last two centuries or so since Captain Cook “discovered” the continent).
http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/article.asp?idart=5274 LA COLECCIÓN JUMEX OPENS IN MEXICO CITY
MEXICO CITY. Ingredients: one 32-year-old billionaire with unlimited passion for the very latest contemporary art and equally unlimited budget; one brand new exhibition space designed for the 200 works he has gathered in the last few years, located deep in the industrial compound of his family business; add hundreds of dealers, curators, artists and museum staff from every part of the globe and mix it together in the largest, poorest and most dangerous city available.
http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/article.asp?idart=5273 PHILLIPS TO SELL SOTHEBY’S BOARD MEMBER’S RENOIRS
NEW YORK. Another indication of Phillips’ determination to buy its way into the highly competitive top end of the auction market in New York comes this month Henry Kravis, the billionaire takeover titan, collector and a member of Sotheby's board, has pledged two Renoir paintings from his celebrated collection to the auction house.
http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/article.asp?idart=5272 CELLULOID DREAMS
MONTREAL. With the melodrama “Pollock” in cinemas and the painter Julian Schnabel (“Before Night Falls”) behind the camera, art oozes across media boundaries yet again. The International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA) is evidence that one doesn’t need stars (not living ones, at least) to make these films. FIFA, not to be confused with the international football federation, celebrated its 19th anniversary this March in Montreal with some 180 films. It is the only annual event of its kind.
http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/article.asp?idart=5271 DADDY MODERNISM
WASHINGTON. Alfred Stieglitz is best known as a photographer but he was also an early champion of modern European art in the United States. A comprehensive exhibition in Washington goes as far as to claim that he "remains the single most important figure in American art in the first half of the twentieth century."
http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/article.asp?idart=5270 LONG LIVE BRITISH INDIA
MAYBE decades of neglect, India is now taking active measures to preserve its 18th- and 19th-century built heritage. Indian and British speakers discussed the challenges and some of the successful efforts to conserve one of the most neglected periods of South Asian architecture at a recent seminar in London organised by the Georgian Group, a British conservation society.
http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/article.asp?idart=5250 TEFAF, MAASTRICHT: FINE ART, FABULOUS FAIR
MAASTRICHT. Where in the world can you see long and good-humoured queues waiting to get into an art fair—at 3 o'clock on a weekday afternoon? The answer is Maastricht, the small town best known for its European treaties. Situated in a sliver of Holland between Belgium and Germany, the locality also hosts, once a year, the most spectacular show the art market ever puts on.
http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/article.asp?idart=5230
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5 Early Marilyn Monroe Photos Fail to Sell at Auction
By FRED ALVAREZ, Times Staff Writer
World famous photographs of Marilyn Monroe went on the auction block in Hollywood on Thursday but failed to attract the minimum bid. The early nudes will remain in the hands of Ventura photographer Tom Kelley, whose father shot them in 1949 and helped rocket Monroe to stardom. Five bidders offered to pay a total of $840,000 for the five images, but that did not meet an undisclosed minimum price set for the photos, said Gary Saal, Kelley's Northern California agent. The bidding was held simultaneously at an auction organized by Butterfields in Hollywood and online by its parent company, EBay. Saal said that he will discuss options with his client and that the photographs might be offered at auction again soon.
more:
http://www.latimes.com/communities/news/los_angeles_metro/20010323/t000025186.html
see also an earlier MSN report: http://www.museum-security.org/01/045.html#3
Auction of Marilyn Monroe pinups causes concerns among dealers
Thieves Find Their Own Digs
( U.S. act is used to crack down on looters of Native American sites. Criminals view ruins as quick money, not historic treasure troves)
By JULIE CART, Times Staff Writer
BLANDING, Utah--As he raced his white Ford pickup south from Moab toward the red sandstone canyons here, Rudy Mauldin kicked himself for not thinking of it before. That morning, he and his partner, fellow Bureau of Land Management special agent Bart Fitzgerald, had turned the case over and over with another investigator. What were they missing? They knew that priceless artifacts had been looted from a remote Indian grave site. They knew that a burial blanket had been stripped off the remains of an infant and the skull tossed on a trash heap. They had a suspect but no link to the crime. Then they remembered the backfill, the pile of dirt left by the digger. They sped back to the crime scene at Horse Rock Ruin. As sunlight began to retreat from the remote canyon, they found their tiny but mighty evidence: a cigarette butt. After a crime lab extracted DNA from the filter tip, Mauldin and Fitzgerald got their man-- perhaps the most notorious archeological thief in American history. The 1995 prosecution of Earl K. Shumway was a watershed for the little-known Archeological Resources Protection Act, a federal law enacted in 1979. His case would be the first in which DNA evidence led to a conviction for antiquities theft. And it resulted in the longest sentence ever for such a crime--five years. More ARPA crimes are prosecuted in Utah than anywhere else in the nation. Native Americans are fed up with thieves rooting around in their ancestors' graves, and authorities liken the acts to looting the National Archives. "You look at what these people do and it just makes you sick," said Assistant U.S. Atty. Wayne Dance, who has won more felony convictions in ARPA cases than anyone. "I view this crime to be highly important to society, because of the irreplaceable nature of the loss." Tracking Thieves at Remote Crime Scenes
Diggers roam rugged areas of the Southwest in search of prehistoric baskets, pots and even bones to sell. Experts estimate that more than 80% of the Native American archeological sites, some dating back 17 centuries, have been looted. The bulk of the crimes takes place in a 100-mile-long, north-south corridor stretching from Arches National Park and Moab in the north, south past the dusty Utah towns of Monticello and Blanding and through to Bluff, on the edge of the Navajo Reservation near the Arizona border. It falls to U.S. Park Service and Forest Service employees and BLM agents to find the remote crime scenes, cull clues from sand and rock and then track the thieves into rural bars, across Internet auction sites and into swank art galleries, where an Anasazi pot might bring as much as $250,000. On a recent tour of damaged archeological sites, Mauldin and BLM archeologist Kathy Huppe bumped down a dirt road in Manti-La Sal National Forest--prime looting landscape. Mauldin, a wiry former rodeo cowboy, has spent his career chasing diggers here. Any lawman looking for looters inevitably crosses paths with Shumway, now 42, who once bragged to authorities that he had been robbing graves since he was 3 years old. His father worked the family's hardscrabble uranium mines, and little Earl often would tag along, poking into caves and burial mounds on public lands. They took what they found and considered it theirs. That sense of entitlement, investigators say, stems from the belief that there is a surfeit of artifacts here. Modern archeologists often catalog sites but don't immediately excavate them, which can lead the public to wrongly conclude that they are not historically important. There also is the sheer volume of objects to be found here with little effort--pot sherds, arrowheads, cave walls crowded with pictograms and petroglyphs. In Utah's San Juan County alone, there are an estimated 20,000 known archeological sites on BLM land. More than 90% have been looted. In the Four Corners area, "if you walk 20 feet and not find something, you are not looking," Huppe said. With the market for Southwest art and artifacts at an all-time high, the temptation here is to view Indian ruins less as scientific and historic treasure troves than as next month's rent. San Juan is Utah's poorest county, its most remote and its least populous. With only 1.7 people per square mile, it's not difficult to dig--even using heavy equipment--and remain unnoticed. And they have been doing it for generations. In the 1920s, the University of Utah paid Blanding residents $2 for every Anasazi pot they could bring to the school's museum. The ante has been upped since then. In a looting case from 1984, Shumway pleaded guilty to digging up more than $2 million worth of rare baskets. But that haul was the exception, for the economic model skews mightily to the other end of the distribution chain. Diggers may get paid a few hundred dollars for a rare basket that will realize many thousands for a dealer in Munich or Tokyo. (While such artifacts are sought by collectors in the United States, they generally bring higher prices in Europe and Asia.) The extent of the problem is matched by the scale of the area in which the looting takes place. The Archeological Resources Protection Act applies to looting on public or Indian land. For states in the interior West, public land can encompass up to 80% of the state. "We are effective where we can be, but we are outnumbered and outspent" by looters, said Utah's BLM agent-in-charge Keith Aller, who supervises three agents and 13 uniformed rangers responsible for crimes on 22 million acres of BLM land in Utah. And the hunted often are better equipped than the hunters. Shumway has hired helicopters to drop him into some remote sites, while other looters often employ high-tech climbing equipment and rappel over the sides of cliffs to access alcoves and caves. Site locations are for sale on the Internet, complete with Global Positioning System coordinates and sophisticated topographical maps. The methods diggers employ to retrieve the fragile artifacts are not always subtle. In some cases, sites are devastated by bulldozers, backhoes and trenching machines that smash through material that may only be hundreds of years old to get to the more valuable, deeply buried, prehistoric layers. Professionals haul masonry saws into national parks and remove entire walls of rock art. One such case came to light last Thanksgiving: A boulder weighing several hundred pounds etched with prehistoric petroglyphs was hauled away from Utah state trust lands. While looters are responsible for most of the damage to archeological sites, there also is a large amount of inadvertent loss inflicted by families on weekend outings and by well- meaning hobbyists. "The three scariest words for an archeologist in Utah are 'Boy Scout troop,' " Huppe said. The youths' crude excavations can destroy a 1,600-year-old pristine archeological site in an hour. Repairing the damage is expensive: The rule of thumb is that the cost for an archeologist to move a meter of dirt is $5,000. Agents Left With 'a Real Dang Puzzle'
The cost of investigating ARPA crimes, which often can take years to solve, also is astronomical. "You get to one of these old caves, where people have been tramping around for thousands of years, and you've got a real dang puzzle on your hands," Mauldin said in his slow, New Mexico drawl. "You find more evidence at your average murder scene." If the case begins with the retrieval of an artifact, Mauldin has to prove that it came from public land. If the case begins with a disturbed site, he has to determine when it was looted, who did it and attempt to find what was taken. In the wild cliffs and canyons around here, criminal tracks are easy to erase. Some looters put plastic bags over their shoes or wrap them in carpet to eliminate incriminating footprints. But investigators also are masters at improvising. Because shoe prints and handprints seldom stay put in shifting sands, Mauldin carries hair spray to preserve those he does find. Investigators search for identifying marks, even taking casts of shovel holes to look for notches that may come from the implement of a certain digger. In crime scenes that can stretch across miles of desert, even the most crafty criminal sometimes leaves a calling card. "Earl [Shumway] was known for drinking Mountain Dew at his sites. We found the cans all over the place and could tie him to scenes because of that," said Mauldin, who gets to know looters before he finds them by the trash they leave behind. "In one case, we're looking for a guy who eats pistachio nuts while he digs. We'll take anything to make a case," Mauldin said. Artifacts Need to Be Studied in Context
To scientists studying artifacts, location is everything. The bowls and baskets and sandals that thieves seek hold little interest for archeologists once they have been moved. Studied in its historical context, a weapon or tool tells a scientist a tale of how it was used, when and why. Once moved, an ancient bowl is simply a vessel existing in a vacuum. Southwest archeologists and anthropologists have been screaming into the wind for decades about looting. Their professional environment is akin to a scientist who comes to work to find someone has broken into his lab, overturned his experiments and stolen his notes. "It could make you crazy if you thought about it," Huppe said. To say nothing of the anger Native Americans feel. Shumway was beaten several years ago by Native American inmates while he was awaiting transport to prison. "Ownership is not a Hopi concept, so we don't understand the selling of artifacts," said tribal prosecutor Dorma Nevayakiewa, who handles the ARPA cases reported on the Arizona reservation. A ceremonial mask was the centerpiece of an unusual case in which an art dealer recruited two Hopi men to help him obtain a "friends" mask--believed to be a living thing and used in secret male ceremonies. For such an artifact to be taken out of a ceremonial kiva would be surprising, as such religious meeting rooms are sacred. But for a friends mask to turn up outside of Hopi land was unprecedented. The fact that Hopi men aided in the theft was devastating. The taboo against tribal members taking part in looting their own heritage is great: One of the Hopi suspects in the mask case committed suicide within a week of his arrest. But financial need often triumphs over taboo, and diggers overcome squeamishness to go where the big money lies--the graves. Native Americans buried their finest objects with the dead; those textiles that survive through several centuries are highly prized at art auctions. And infants typically were buried with their toys; such rare and tiny objects bring high prices on the open market. The demand for skulls and bones is more difficult to gauge, but buying and selling does take place. "If you think there is no market for human remains, you would be sadly mistaken," said John Farley, an Albuquerque-based special investigator for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Mauldin knows the market is the final determinant, regulating archeological looting in a way that law enforcement cannot. Digging will continue as long as there is a buyer for the artifacts. "It's the greatest treasure hunt in the world, that's how they see it," Mauldin said, gazing out from an alcove high up a canyon wall. "Look around. It's out here. And they'll keep looking for it. And we'll keep looking for them." Shumway, who did not show up after agreeing to an interview for this story, is still out there. After DNA connected him to the cigarette butt, Shumway pleaded guilty in the Horse Rock Ruin case to seven felony counts of stealing Anasazi artifacts and was sentenced to 6 1/2 years in federal prison. The sentence was reduced on appeal to 60 months. He is back living in the Moab area.
http://www.latimes.com/