May 7, 2001

Coin Forgery and Museum Security / Invitation to Join Forgery List

Dear Museum Security Members,
I am writing about an area of interest to museum security when ancient coins are curated / stored / collected. Coin forgery. Many of you may not realise how advanced coin forgery has become in the last 15 years. Substitutions of forgeries for coins in museum collections, hoax salting of archeological sites, and for museums purchasing materials for collections the danger of purchasing forgeries, even from reputable sources, is very real. The coin forgery issue is intimately related to issues about cultural heritage protection (some nations have turned to the support of forgery efforts, for example, to sabatauge the illicit ancient coin trade). There is a new non commercial internet discussion group regarding issues of coin forgery, the CFDL, with 516 members internationally now. The CFDL is moderated and open to member on topic posts, and includes many experts, including materials scientists, coin collectors/dealers as well as numismatic scholars and museum staff members (also a lot of forgers and forgery dealers, as well as their counter parts in law enforcement). To join send an email to
CoinForgeryDiscussionList-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
The list includes the most complete book marks section on the topic for web sites, and a photo hosting area. Also the archives of the list are open to members and include much advanced information on how to detect and manufacture forgeries/copies which can not be found in any other source. We welcome your participation in this effort to better understand the art of forgery and its implications upon commerce, protection of cultural heritages, science, and criminalty in global and internet society.
Best Wishes,
Alan VanArsdale (paleobiologist UCSB)
CoinForgeryDiscussionList-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

Valuable art works are turning up missing

Authorities hunt for diverse pieces from Heidelberg collection, Cranbrook

Morris Richardson II / The Detroit News
By Craig Garrett / The Detroit News
REDFORD TOWNSHIP -- Federal and local authorities are investigating art thieves who target Michigan artists and public institutions, from Heidelberg artist Tyree Guyton to the prestigious Cranbrook Academy in Bloomfield Hills. Metro Detroit's supply of art work is being taken -- and vandalized -- from the homes and studios of local artists and collectors, churches, mansions, schools and public parks.
Registries for stolen art work are on the Internet from the FBI, Interpol and several international museum groups. Authorities register items such as paintings, drawings, sculptures, rugs, arms and armor, silver, furniture, tapestries, and jewelry. Some of the higher-profile recoveries in recent years include an Andrew Wyeth painting, stolen in 1967, to Greek and Roman antiquities stolen in 1990 from the Archeological Museum of Ancient Corinth in Greece. The Wyeth painting is valued at about $500,000, the 274 artifacts nearly $2 million.

Some of the Web sites are:

* The FBI at www.fbi.gov
* Interpol at www.interpol.int
* U.S. Customs at www.customs.ustreas.gov
* The International Council on Monuments and Sites at www.icomos.org

Some of the missing art work, such as a 300-pound bronze created for Cranbrook by the famed Swedish sculptor Carl Milles, is priceless. Other items are worth thousands, including recovered Guyton art work valued at nearly $50,000. The arrest of an Eastpointe man in April is considered one of the first big breaks in a spree covering nearly two years. The Ford Motor Co. engineer was caught in the back yard of a Redford artist, stealing a small bronze sculpture valued at about $5,000. Police searching through the man's car found a painting by Guyton, the offbeat artist who created the outdoor Heidelberg Project in an east side Detroit neighborhood. Once a novelty, Guyton's art work is being sold around the world and also is featured at the Detroit Institute of Arts. The Eastpointe man may be part of a theft ring because he befriended some of the victims, including Redford artist Sergio De Giusti and Guyton, police said. Detroit police also found a sizable collection of art work in the man's house that he couldn't account for -- nor afford. Guyton's spokeswoman said the Eastpointe man was a regular visitor to Heidelberg. Neighbors spotted him with several others cruising the neighborhood at the same time Guyton's work came up missing. However, the Eastpointe man isn't being charged because it couldn't be proven he stole anything other than the Redford bronze. Further, the Redford artist refused to prosecute. The News doesn't print the name of those not charged with a crime. "He tried to distance himself from criminality, but he wasn't being totally honest with me. It's so hard to prove," Detroit Police Detective Al Thomas said of the suspect. Metro Detroit art work has been ripped off at a regular clip for the last several years. Officials at a Detroit church reported a valuable bronze lamp stolen in 1999; a Wayne State University art instructor reported several metal sculptures stolen from near the downtown campus; and the famed sculptor Marshall Fredericks was robbed of bronze art work valued at nearly $50,000. Perhaps one of the more unusual thefts happened last year at Cranbrook. Thieves pulled a cumbersome bronze from its foundation on campus. Sculptor Carl Milles' Sun Glitter -- a sea nymph astride a dolphin -- had sat at the school for 71 years. "It was very disappointing for many people at Cranbrook. It was considered a hallmark," spokesman Frank Ruggirello said. Since so few of the thieves are caught, police have little idea where much of the stolen art work is going. Some items have surfaced at antique shops, and other art work is recovered when unwary buyers discover they've bought stolen goods, police said. FBI and international officials have taken to trolling the Internet for items being auctioned. The advent of on-line auction houses is blamed with some of thievery, officials said. The jump in personal wealth, and the ease and availability of many public art works are listed as other causes for the thefts. "It would be nice to know that he was so excited about my work that he robbed me," Redford sculptor De Giusti said of the Eastpointe suspect. "But I don't think that was the case. This whole thing has been kind of weird. My wife warned me about him." Art thieves are becoming "sophisticated and, I think, a lot of this stuff is being sold overseas," said Jenenne Whitfield, executive director of the Heidelberg Project, Guyton's brainchild. "This isn't random. You hear about this in the art community all the time." In the last two years, Guyton has lost to thieves about 25 paintings and sculptures crafted from car doors and household items.
http://detnews.com/

Striving to Break the Deadlock On Looted Art

By Kerstin Holm
MOSCOW. Ever since the Russian parliament passed a law legalizing its claim to works of art looted by Soviet troops toward the end of World War II, Russo-German negotiations on the return of such "works of art displaced by war" have virtually ground to halt -- after having first missed countless opportunities. Despite the apparent irreconcilability of triumphalist victors' justice on the one hand and the burden of an infamous past and emotional appeals to international law on the other, there have at least been a few "gestures of good will." These have invariably made use of the legal no-man's-land created by the exemption from the new Russian law of private war trophies and property belonging to religious communities. Two mosaics from the famous Amber Room of Catherine the Great's palace near St. Petersburg that turned up in Germany last year have now been given back to Russia and will eventually be returned to their original location, which is currently being reconstructed with the financial backing of a German gas importer. As if in response to this gesture, Russia last year issued an export license for 101 drawings and engravings from the Bremen Kunsthalle, which a war veteran had handed over to the German Embassy in Moscow several years previously. Now, the focus of attention is on the stained-glass windows of the Church of St. Mary in the eastern German city Frankfurt (Oder), which are currently in storage at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. Although the last remaining legal and political obstacles to the return of these windows are said to have been removed, the handover itself has yet to be choreographed. Yet Hermitage Director Mikhail Piotrovski has so far refused to be pinned down on either the date or indeed any other details of this pas de deux. His only concern is that the time- ravaged windows -- they are assumed to have been completed around 1370 -- first be restored and shown to the Russian public in a proper exhibition. What makes these windows so important to the history of art is their depiction of the life of the Antichrist in a closed cycle parodying that of the life of Jesus. Piotrovski is now considering exhibiting and returning only certain sections of the cycle to start with. The Hermitage has already started work on this project, he says, and it is now up to the Germans to become involved, if only to maintain a sense of "balance" in the eyes of the Russian public. Meanwhile, an international conference on looted art held at Moscow's Library for Foreign Literature and chaired by its director, Yekaterina Genieva, recently made yet another attempt to break the deadlock. Instead of dispatching its usual experts and officials, the Germans sent a team of lawyers who, while suppressing their frustration over Russia's very un-European take on jurisprudence, tried hard to find alternative ways out of the dilemma, including Russo-German exhibitions covered by state guarantees of return and even a revival of the old idea of a Russo-German foundation. Hungary also sent an official delegation to Moscow, especially as the conference happened to coincide with an exhibition of valuable old books looted from the Szaroszpatak Library, which have been in storage in Nizhny Novgorod since the end of the war. Although the Hungarians tried yet again to persuade the Russians of the historical and cultural significance of the reformed college and its collection of books -- which is in any case largely useless to the Russians -- their appeals apparently fell on deaf ears. Moscow claims the Hungarian military stole countless Russian works of art during its Russian campaign and accuses democratic Hungary of having failed to pass laws that would commit it to finding these and handing them over. There were a few independent voices to be heard on the Russian side too. Kulishev, formerly a ministerial councilor and now a specialist in looted art stolen from persecuted Jews, complained that by requiring Jews formerly resident in Germany, as the "enemy state," to file claims within a much shorter time limit than Jews elsewhere, the Russian law put German Jews at an unfair disadvantage relative to those from countries that had sided with the Allies. One Russian lawyer encouraged all claimants of looted art now in Russian hands to take legal action -- not just the victims of National Socialism, but also the German government, which in his view could appeal both to the Russo-German treaties signed between 1990 and 1992 and to the Russian constitution, which gives international law precedence over national law. As chief custodian at the Ministry of Culture and a prime example of a new type of Russian bureaucrat, Yuri Titov responded to the various arguments raised with ever new versions of a centralist raison d'etat, which effectively snared all attempts at dialogue like an invisible net. Titov even told Genieva, who has earned widespread acclaim for her efforts to make Russian society more receptive to foreign culture, that the high-level contacts and pilot projects she had been pursuing independent of his bureaucratic machinery would henceforth require the ministry's blessing. The change in style Titov represents became all the more apparent when he was followed at the rostrum by the historian and retired Soviet- era diplomat Igor Maximychev, a member of the old guard. Maximychev argued that the atrocities committed by German aggressors on Russian soil automatically disqualified Germany from any form of legal redress. He also rejected a priori any mention of the crimes committed by Soviet forces of occupation, thereby rendering any comparisons or indeed any discussion at all of this subject strictly taboo. The team of German lawyers responded to Maximychev's tirade with the shamefaced consternation and murmurs of appeasement of those who cannot understand why their own efforts at self-improvement have not induced their adversary to follow suit and take a more self-critical view too. Unlike Maximychev, who experienced the war firsthand, Titov obviously felt free to adopt a more sugary and engaging tone. According to his version of the official Russian line, the legalization of "compensatory restitution" constituted an important step toward Russia's eventual compliance with international law. Whether or not it is recognized as such will depend largely on the extent to which good will is able to prevail over national obduracy, he said. In a de facto denial that the Soviets had tried to placate their guilty conscience by keeping the looted art under wraps, Titov said everyone had known of the existence of these depots. He also cautioned the Germans not to be so emotional, which was ironic, given that the rather wooden legal scholars representing Germany had invariably preferred polite silence to invective, while many of the Russians, including Maximychev, had pulled out all the melodramatic stops. Titov's next move was to appeal to the cause of international friendship and cooperation and to claim that the conference participants had vowed to love each other and show respect for each other and to take a creative approach to what problems there were between them -- words that never crossed the lips of any of those present. Apparently in an attempt to sound European, he then went on to praise what returns had already been accomplished as evidence of the success of "people's diplomacy." Kazimierz Woycicki of the Institute for Germany and Northern Europe in the Polish city of Szczecin adopted a standpoint that appeared to mark a geographical limit to the process of European rapprochement. The people of Poland, he said, had just been through the painful experience of having to acknowledge that they had not only been victims of World War II, but perpetrators too, as when they expelled ethnic Germans and Ukrainians from Polish territory. While both the Russians and others were right to recall the unprecedented nature of Germany's war crimes, he said, they should not forget that Germany's willingness to acknowledge its historic guilt and face the past head on was equally unprecedented and could serve as a model for other nations too. Russia's perception of itself as victim and liberator is even more of a sacred cow today than it was 10 years ago. This doubtless has to do with the failed process of democratization and the fact that this sacred cow goes at least some way toward compensating the Russians for the appalling material privations a majority of the population is still having to suffer. Sounding almost desperate, Genieva reminded those present that Nikolai Nikandrov's laudable attempt to catalog the works of art Russia had lost during the war would have to remain a largely symbolic undertaking not only because it had been started too late and was hopelessly under-funded, but also because the files documenting the art thefts committed by the Soviet Army were still under lock and key. Genieva's own efforts to return some books still in storage in her own library to their original home in the German city of Gotha as a means of raising urgently needed funds for Russia's cash-strapped libraries are being closely monitored by the central authorities. One Russian lawyer expressed his contempt for the fact that the reconstruction of the Amber Room was being funded by a private German sponsor and called for more publicly funded projects. The Germans' argument that European dialogue requires less state-level and more individual involvement does not go down well in Russia. When a librarian from the Chuvashish Cheboksary reported on the large number of private individuals who wanted to return their war trophies not to the authorities, but directly to the Germans, Titov instantly called her to order. The tone was friendly, but there was no mistaking the message. He then went on to appeal to his compatriots' loyalty and to urge them to leave the job of returning looted art to the ambling efforts of his own ministry. Spontaneous actions on the part of private individuals can only jeopardize these efforts, he said.
http://www.faz.com/

Greeks Seek Return of Elgin Marbles

ATHENS, Greece (AP) - Holding olive branches and torches, some 400 students and teachers marched to the British Embassy on Monday, demanding the return of sculptures removed from the Parthenon 200 years ago, the official Athens News Agency said. They asked to speak to the British ambassador, but the mission was closed due to a British holiday. Municipal officials joined in the march.
Known as the Elgin Marbles, the sculptures that decorated the Parthenon atop the Acropolis were removed by Lord Elgin, Britain's ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, and have been housed in the British Museum in London since the early 19th century. Athens is pressing for their return by 2004, when the city will host the Olympic Games, and is planning to build a museum in the center of the capital to house them. The collection has been the subject of a decades-long diplomatic dispute between Britain and Greece.
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/