April 24, 2001
CONTENTS:
- Jack Kevorkian Artworks Recovered
- German Museums To Find Nazi-Stolen Art
- The Met's archaic Greek, 5th-century B.C. bust of a young man fake
- Diana's Butler Accused of Theft
Jack Kevorkian Artworks Recovered
DANIELSON, Conn. (AP) - Six lithographs created by assisted-suicide advocate Jack Kevorkian have been recovered after being reported stolen from a Connecticut art museum. The prints, featuring cartoonish images of death, were to be the first exhibit at the new Danielson Art Museum. They have an estimated value of $30,000, said museum director Steven Tomeo. Tomeo said they had been removed by the landlord who was concerned because the prints were not insured and the subject matter could become controversial after publicity about the exhibit. The exhibit is not yet open, but the prints are being shown privately by appointment. Tomeo said nobody has complained yet about the works, which include one titled ``A Very Still Life,'' of a skull and a flower. The prints were reported stolen on Tuesday, the same day an article appeared in The Hartford Courant previewing the show. In it, curator Baird Jones noted that celebrity art shows sometimes incite defacement or theft. Kevorkian, 73, says he has attended more than 130 suicides. He is serving a 10- to 25-year prison sentence in Michigan for second-degree murder after being convicted in the 1998 death of a terminally ill man whose death he videotaped.
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From: Appraiserl@aol.com
Subject: Museums To Find Nazi-Stolen Art
Museums To Find Nazi-Stolen Art
By BURT HERMAN
The Associated Press
BERLIN (AP) - Germany's top culture official urged all German museums Tuesday to search their collections for artwork stolen from Jews by the Nazis, redoubling efforts to restore the art to the true owners. Despite a government push to return stolen artwork, including a Web site cataloguing works collectors believe were seized, only two pieces from federal collections have been returned to their rightful heirs since 1998. The government now is urging smaller museums and libraries to join the efforts to track down Nazi-stolen art. Julian Nida-Ruemelin, federal culture minister emphasized that Germany is far from the ``end phase in dealing with its Nazi past'' - as some had hoped would be the case with the close of the 20th century. ``Those commentators were mistaken,'' he said. ``The attention is larger than ever before.'' Although in many cases legal claims have expired, Nida-Ruemelin said moral guidelines must be established to restore artworks to their rightful owners. He suggested an ethics commission be formed to deal with that issue. Germany established the Web site, www.lostart.de, following a 1998 agreement at a Washington conference to intensify efforts to locate stolen art. That site now lists about 17,000 works of art the Nazis plundered from countries conquered during World War II that stand in public collections. Another 23,000 pieces are still being cataloged for the database. About 2,240 other works are also listed that were seized by U.S. troops at the end of the war and held in Munich. The government is now appealing to all of the more than 3,000 museums and 2,300 local libraries in Germany to check their collections for stolen art. ``The cities where Nazis committed these wrongs carry a special responsibility,'' said Stephan Articus, head of the German Council of Cities. A section of the Web site allowing inquiries from private citizens about art stolen from personal collections was only established in mid-February. Since then, about 280 users a day have used that section of the site.
On the Net:
http://www.lostart.de
http://www.comartrecovery.org/
The Met's Head Fake
Until several weeks ago, you could walk into the luminous Greco-Roman antiquities exhibition rooms of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and see three marble busts prominently arranged in a row along the central gallery.
The smallest of the heads was an archaic Greek, 5th-century B.C. bust of a young man, and it had only recently appeared there. Bathed in natural light and perched on a pedestal against the wall, the head, on closer inspection, looked surprisingly more coarse-grained than its neighbors: an ugly duckling among swans. If you wanted to know how it managed to find itself next to two of the Met's oldest prizes, you would have been disappointed. The tiny information plaque revealed little, relating only its historical origins and that it was on loan from an anonymous donor. What the plaque didn't tell you is that a number of art world insiders think it's a fake. Museums don't have to disclose where or how they acquired a piece. The casual visitor wouldn't have guessed that the authenticity of this unassuming object was the subject of a fierce behind-the-scenes dispute. Nor would you know why the Met, without comment or fanfare--and after some six months of display--suddenly removed the bust from view within the last two weeks. Why won't the Metropolitan Museum of Art provide hard evidence to back up its claim that the bust is authentic? Indeed, the story has remained hidden, in large part because important antiquities experts who doubt the bust's authenticity have refused to come out publicly for fear of being sued by the owner, said to be a powerful Paris-based dealer. What concerns the experts who question the bust's authenticity, however, is not only that the piece could be a fake. The added concern is, when a piece on loan is displayed at a museum such as the Met, it acquires an air of credibility. Not only does it raise the piece's value for when it comes off loan and is sold, but the museum is also providing an extraordinary level of free promotion. These experts want to know why, if the museum was so confident the bust was genuine, did it take the piece down so quickly and refuse to provide evidence to back up its claims? In a telephone interview with Forbes.com, Met spokesman Harold Holzer immediately knew which head was being questioned and denied all allegations that it was a fake. He also stated that the curator in charge had certified its authenticity. While it is hardly surprising Holzer would defend the museum's position--given the harm that even a whiff of scandal would cause--the Met has discouraged debate and rebuffed questions with rote responses in support of the bust's authenticity. Yet the allegations and their implications are serious and deserve notice. While such controversies arise with some frequency in the art and museum world, it's not often that the debate remains so subterranean. Usually, as part of the debate, evidence in support of authenticity is fully aired. The answer to such questions as to why a piece is authentic, what tests have been done to prove it, where the museum got it and how dependable the source is, are readily furnished. In this case, the Met has not provided any such details, citing the fact the piece was only on loan. The head would have most likely gone unnoticed had a freelance journalist for The New York Times Sunday Magazine not stumbled upon it in the course of reseraching a cover story about art world forgery. That article, entitled "A Crisis of Fakes," appeared on March 18, but no mention of the head was made. According to the author, Peter Landesman, his editors cut it from the story when his leading source refused to be quoted publicly. But one of Landesman's collaborators wasn't so timid. When he learned that the Met's Greek head was being omitted from the Times article, veteran Dutch dealer Michel Van Rijn published the allegations on his Web site, www.michelvanrijn.com. Van Rijn knows the identity of Landesman's source and has revealed it to Forbes.com along with corroborating material such as e-mail exchanges and secretly recorded tapes. The material also confirms that other experts share Van Rijn's doubts. Those experts, who also still refuse to go public, are weighty names in the antiquities field. They include a top New York dealer and academic who is a world-renowned authority on fakes and a top classical antiquities museum curator, among others. Van Rijn, however, is a colorful and controversial figure in the art world, a self-confessed "art pirate" and "poacher-turned-gamekeeper." To many, Van Rijn's might be thought a dubious and controversial source on such matters. Over the years, he has had several scuffles with the law enforcement bureaus of numerous countries and knows a great deal about the seamy side of the art business at all levels, including antiquities. His Web site is notorious for its flamboyant accusations and "outing" of skullduggery among museums, dealers and smugglers. He also makes no bones about leaking information to police around the world. On his Web site, and in his 1993 autobiography, Hot Art, Cold Cash, published by Little, Brown, Van Rijn openly acknowledges some of the scams he has pulled, including the notorious Avar treasure that he commissioned from a famous faker in Athens and sold through Sotheby's (nyse: BID - news - people) in the 1980s. The Avars were a lost tribe of barbarians from the Dark Ages similar to the Mongols who were partly responsible for destroying the Roman Empire. Nobody had ever seen any objects from that provenance, but Van Rijn tricked a slew of experts and scientific testers and lured Peter Wilson, then the head of Sotheby's, into backing his story. At the same time, Van Rijn has also pulled off some high-profile legitimate sales, such as the $14.5 million Leonardo drawing of "The Virgin Of The Rocks," which he sold to a Japanese museum in the 1980s. Though Van Rijn continues to deal, to the chagrin and mystification of many ex-friends and colleagues, he now busies himself with burning his own bridges by working extensively with the art crimes division of Italy's elite police corps, the Carabinieri, as well as through revelations on his Web site. As Van Rijn tells it, he knew about the marble bust because he had already seen it. It was while masquerading as a client on behalf of the Carabinieri that he claims he first came across the soon-to-be-controversial bust with the forger at a workshop in southern Italy. At a certain point in the Van Rijn-Landesman collaboration, the journalist asked him for data specifically on fake antiquities to broaden out the Times magazine story, leads which Van Rijn furnished, though much of it fell out of the final version. (In its published form, the article primarily covered allegations of fake Old Master drawings at the Getty Museum.) In response to Landesman's request, Van Rijn sent him an e-mail detailing his allegations of three antiquities fakes--one in a German museum, one at the Getty and the bust at the Met. The e-mail is now visible for all to see on Van Rijn's Web site. It offered at that time a simple identifying description and where to see it. Landesman then called several highly prestigious experts and canvassed their opinions. It was his rooting around that brought attention to the hitherto innocuous Greek bust then on display at the Met and generated the controversy. Based on the experts' negative, albeit off-the-record, responses, he too doubted the object's authenticity. "From the experts I interviewed, I feel there must be serious doubts about the piece," says Landesman from his New York City home. According to Van Rijn, besides his own information about the bust's authenticity, the very fact that the bust was on display struck him as anomalous because "when there are so many treasures in the vaults of the Met, why show something of such low quality? It is of low enough quality that you wonder why they showed it. It was bound to raise eyebrows, so why take the risk?" Says Van Rijn: "The person who would make such a decision is the man in charge of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the Met, Carlos Picon. Only he knows why it went on display." The head curator of the department of Greek and Roman art at the museum since 1990, Picon is a highly respected authority on ancient and classical art. When contacted by telephone, Picon, unlike the Met's spokesman Holzer, claimed not to know which head was being called into question. "Which 5th-century archaic head?" he asked. "We have many of those here." When an offer was made to e-mail him a photo of the head, he insisted that it be sent to the press office. Previously, both he and the Met have asserted the bust's authenticity to Landesman, though they have furnished no technical details in support of their claim. Whether Van Rijn's scenario is accurate or mere wild speculation, he points to other similar instances of such doubtful activities at top museums. For several years during the 1980s, for example, the Getty Museum had a director of antiquities named Jiri Frel. A Czech, Frel eventually left his post under a cloud and fled the country, leaving behind him a trail of chicanery and dubious antiquities. While Van Rijn lacks hard evidence showing the complicity of anyone at the Met in such doings, he and others maintain the bust's display raises suspicions at the very least. With antiquities, as with other genres, complete authenticity or falsehood is often hard to prove. Ancient pieces can be made to look more ancient or might have been "improved" or faked in antiquity, or are simply anomalies that, though genuine, don't look quite right. In this case, the usual chorus of disagreement and debate has gone underground for fear of lawsuits. Both for this story and during research conducted for the Times story, the doubters were certain of their position, some instantly on viewing a photograph of the object. They certainly believed the piece to be of inferior quality and not worthy of being shown. "If the piece is that potentially controversial because it is so palpably inferior," says Van Rijn, "somebody is really sticking his neck out to put it on display. They would have to persuade the board or other superiors. They would have to justify it and create a consensus. Why did they go to that trouble? And why did they suddenly remove it?" Today, the spot where the Greek head had stood is conspicuously empty, its presence erased like the victim of a purge from a Stalinist photograph. The only thing that remains is controversy.
http://www.forbes.com/
Diana's Butler Accused of Theft
LONDON (AP) - A long-serving butler to Princess Diana pilfered glittering trinkets from her estate after her death, police said Tuesday - including a gem-studded model of an Arab sailing ship sent to Diana and Prince Charles as a wedding gift. London's Metropolitan Police on Tuesday charged Harold Brown, 48, with four counts of theft involving items from the estate of the princess, who died in August 1997. The stolen goods include a jewel daffodil motif, several pieces of jewelry and $1,700, as well as a model of a dhow, an Arab sailing vessel, that Diana and Prince Charles received as a wedding gift from the Emir of Bahrain in 1981. British press reports have valued the gem-studded model boat at as much as $1.4 million. According to the reports, police were alerted when it was put up for sale at a London art dealers last year. Police would not say where the items were stolen from. Brown currently works for the queen's sister, Princess Margaret, at Kensington Palace, where Diana also had an apartment. Buckingham Palace would not comment on Brown's employment status. ``These are charges with serious implications and we are therefore considering the matter,'' a palace spokesman said. The items were stolen between January 1997 and November 2000, police said. Over the last six months, police have arrested four men, including Brown, in connection with the missing goods. One was Paul Burrell, the trusted butler Diana called ``my rock'' because of his loyalty and discretion. Burrell, who also was chief fund-raiser of the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund, until the end of 1998, has maintained his innocence. Brown is the first of the four to be charged. The other three were released on bail but remain under investigation, a police spokeswoman said on customary condition of anonymity. Brown was released on bail and will appear at London's Bow Street Magistrates Court Wednesday. The maximum penalty for theft is seven years in jail. There have been a number of thefts from royal residences over the years. In 1994, police charged a former Buckingham Palace employee with stealing a $150,000 painting, silverware and a 19th-century rose bowl belonging to Queen Elizabeth II (news - web sites). Princess Diana, her boyfriend Dodi Fayed and their driver, Henri Paul, died on Aug. 31, 1997, when their Mercedes slammed into a pillar in a traffic tunnel in Paris.
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