May 17, 2001

- RE: query: emergency medical response team
- Medical / Fire Protocols
- Antiquity for Sale (Italy Offers Ruins of Herculaneum to the Highest Bidder)
- Czech Republic's Stolen Art Web-Site & Museum Train Theft
- Lord Matthew Evans - A threat to UK collections
- Mughal treasures looted by Iraq from Kuwait displayed for first time at British Museum
- Dealer on trial over looted art
- Bacon estate action against ex-agents goes on

From: Gary Yee gyee@famsf.org
Subject:

RE: query: emergency medical response team

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco has one trained EMT on our security staff. We would like more, but no one has expressed interest in the training. However, all of our security staff have received First Aid & CPR training.
Presently we are in the process of acquiring AED (Automatic External Defibrillators) for each of our museums/worksites. Once exclusive to hospitals and ambulances, portable AEDs are multilingual, have a built in safety which prevents administering of the shock should it detect a pulse, and are very simple to use. The prices have dropped so that they are becoming affordable (around $4k).
Gary Yee
San Francisco Fine Arts Museums

From: "Corey Carlson" corey@dinosaurpoint.com
To: "Museum Security Network" securma@xs4all.nl
Subject:

Medical / Fire Protocols

Date sent: Wed, 16 May 2001 13:23:18 -0600
I am the Security/Safety Manager for "The North American Museum of Ancient Life" in Lehi, Utah. I am also putting together a medical and fire protocol for the security department and management to follow. I have had some information sent to me from various organizations with little being helpful. I am also interested in finding out if there are other museums out there that have these in place. Any information that could be helpful to me would be great.

Antiquity for Sale

Italy Offers Ruins of Herculaneum to the Highest Bidder

FOR SALE: Roman village buried intact by volcanic explosion 1,921 years ago; priceless artifacts included.
The ruins of Herculaneum, the fishing village that, like its sister city Pompeii, met a fiery death in the A.D. 79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius, is the latest in a series of historical and artistic treasures that Italy is offering for sale. Some international bids for the ancient city reportedly already have been received. The official "For Sale" notice went up after a recent meeting between Luisa Bossa, mayor of Ercolano, the modern city where the site is located, and Giovanna Melandri, Italy's Minister of Cultural Affairs. The sale is designed to comply with the Veltroni Law, under which state- owned companies and moneymaking entities are to be sold or transferred to private ownership. The proposed sales agreement for the archaeological park, which a year ago was added to the United Nations list of "World Historical Treasures of Humanity," includes the right of the new owner to excavate surrounding areas and take possession of any artifacts recovered. Mayor Bossa told reporters that the issue must not be allowed to linger undecided any longer. Because of uncertainty over the possible sale, no maintenance on the areas around Herculaneum has been undertaken for nearly two years, and the staff struggles with hardly enough funding to pay their own salaries.
http://www.discoveringarchaeology.com/

From: Jonathan Sazonoff saz@kwom.com
Subject:

From: Chris Stanley C.Stanley@nhm.ac.uk
Subject:

Lord Matthew Evans - A threat to UK collections

Selling off is selling out [London Evening Standard, Tuesday 15 May 2001]
by Brian Sewell
Matthew, Lord Evans, ennobled by New Labour more for what he is expected to do than for what he has so far done, is chairman of the body with which, little more than a year ago, this Government replaced the faltering Commission that played bumbling nanny to every museum and gallery that is not a national foundation. Its first incarnation as the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council was very brief and it swiftly had a second incarnation as Resource, one of those fashionable but empty and misleading titles to which industry and commerce now turn when it is opportune to reinvent themselves - Acupuncture for accountants and Resignation for delivery boys. Resource, the wry observer notes, is a word with many meanings, of which the second in the handiest of Oxford dictionaries is "a stock or reserve on which one can draw when necessary". Fresh from the laying-on of Prime Ministerial hands, the new chairman delivered a lecture outlining his vision of museums in the new century. He spoke of seismic social change, the biggest upheaval in cultural life since the Industrial Revolution and the inexorable march of technology; he hoped that people and services would come before collections and public access before the preservation of the things the public wants to see; he opined that museums should lend their treasures to the local pub, Velazquez's Rokeby Venus to The Bird in Hand, so to speak. This stale and foolish idea was his only practical proposal among the Blair-like wind and waffle. Now, after risking no more ridicule for a twelvemonth, Lord Evans has suddenly offered a second clever ruse - raising funds for museums by selling things deemed superfluous to their collections - and is "convinced that it has got to happen". This too is a stale and disreputable stratagem, one of Mrs Thatcher's favourites, first mooted by her government in the autumn of 1987. Such sales, her minister, Richard Luce, then argued, would clear clutter from basement stores, free curators from the burden of the second-rate, relieve conservators of the duty to care for things rarely exhibited, reduce costs and liabilities, generate funds that could be applied to such better purposes as education and visitor facilities and engineer the exchange of wretched possessions for fine and fashionable things. In March 1988 the idea was given its second wind by Mrs Thatcher's auditor general. He issued a report asserting that museums were crammed, jammed and overflowing with irrelevant possessions, deteriorating in condition, of which only a small proportion were ever exhibited and on which very large sums of money were wasted in housing and maintenance. He suggested that the need to maintain collections was in conflict with the need to meet costs, urged museums to demonstrate that they held no unnecessary objects, and proposed disposal as the solution "at the heart of these issues". Four months later Richard Luce published a consultative paper on this recommendation. The directors and trustees of the National, the Tate and National Portrait Galleries were united in their declaration against the proposal. The Museums and Galleries Commission, the government's very own quango, published a report damning it. Working artists, historians and critics saw it as a hideous menace to our cultural resource, that "stock or reserve on which one can draw when necessary". Confronted by such undivided opposition, even Mrs Thatcher turned and the proposal fell by the wayside. Disposal by sale has been tried, but we seem not to have learned the folly of it, though the most disastrous example is now notorious. In June 1958 the Lady Lever Gallery at Port Sunlight shed at Christie's 175 lots made up from its then most unfashionable pictures. It got rid of paintings and drawings by such high Victorian worthies as Lord Leighton, Burne- Jones and Millais, and, to make holding the sale worthwhile, included a fine still life of flowers by Fantin-Latour. The Fantin sold for some Ł9,000 and the remaining 174 pictures for another Ł9,000. Thirty years later, the Fantin reappeared at Christie's and Port Sunlight tried to buy it back. The gallery failed, for the bidding reached Ł950,000, a hundred times the price it had been happy to accept. As for the other pictures, by Leighton and his ilk, within 10 years of the sale these had begun to climb back into fashion and in fashion they are still, the subject of major exhibitions, doctoral theses, extravagant monographs and objects of lust among private collectors with millions in their pockets. The curator at Port Sunlight advanced arguments for disposal of which Lord Evans would approve, but the sale impoverished for ever the people of Merseyside and the North-West. Worse was to happen at the V&A in 1960: discouraged by the prices at the Port Sunlight sale, the museum's Board of Survey ordered the destruction of superfluous works of art, and a junior curator lit a bonfire on which were heaped Richard Redgrave's design for a mural in the House of Lords, his commissioned copies of Raphael's Roman frescoes, decorative designs for stained-glass windows by Burne-Jones and an unspecified quantity of Victorian material. In 1960 Redgrave's once considerable reputation was at its nadir; in 1968 his work was the subject of a rehabilitating exhibition at the very museum that had ordered the destruction of so much of it. There are no absolute measures in taste and scholarship, and that these are constantly shifting means the Port Sunlight case is not an isolated proof, for many provincial museums, including the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge, discarded decent pictures in the Sixties and now rue their loss. Deaccessioning, as it is called in America, has brought acute embarrassment to many a museum director when his discards have subsequently been identified as missing masterpieces. It is not the business of museums to respond to or reflect fickle popular taste, for they are, like libraries, the repositories of scholarship and must hold works for reference. No public collection should follow the pattern of the private collector, subject to impulse and the sudden change of interests. No national museum should see itself as a place of entertainment and court popularity at the cost of depriving future generations of the collections of the past. There is no place for the front-parlour mentality in the administration of museums; they are not well-ordered cupboards with everything spring-cleaned and proudly on display; they are resources, reserves from which, in the context of a particular exhibition, a picture too bad or dull to be permanently on view may be retrieved to be briefly a thing of striking interest and historical particularity. No museum should be pruned of its duplicate prints or porcelain or armour, for it is in the comparison of things so similar that at a glance they seem the same, that we learn connoisseurship and begin to recognise the differences. With 60,000 images in its possession and only 1,410 on view, the Tate is an obvious target for Lord Evans, though the sane man must see the superabundance as an enviable reserve. With grave dismay, however, we learn that in each department the Tate's curators have already been required to make inventories of possessions to be discarded if Evans the Terrible has his Orwellian way with the meaning of Resource.

Chris J Stanley BSc PhD MIMM CGeol F.Min.Soc. FGS, Deputy Head of Department of
Mineralogy Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, LONDON SW7 5BD,UK Tel. +44
(0)20 7942 5627 Fax. +44 (0)20 7942 5537 Museum web site at: http://www.nhm.ac.uk
Personal Web site at: http://www.nhm.ac.uk/mineralogy/stanley/stanley.htm

Mughal treasures looted by Iraq from Kuwait displayed for first time at British Museum

By Louise Jury Media Correspondent
A PRICELESS collection of 17th century Indian jewels is to go on display for the first time since they were looted from the National Museum of Kuwait by invading Iraqis in 1991. The dazzling array of rubies, emeralds, sapphires and gold, which had been loaned to the museum by the Kuwaiti royal family, was retrieved only after intense international pressure was brought to bear on Iraq.
full story: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=72721

Dealer on trial over looted art

FROM CHARLES BREMNER IN PARIS
A BRITISH art dealer living in New York went on trial near Paris yesterday on charges of possessing a 17th-century Dutch masterpiece that had been stolen from a French family on the orders of Hitler during the Second World War. In a case that could set a precedent for the European art world, Adam Williams, 48, faces a maximum of five years in jail and a heavy fine if convicted of receiving the Frans Hals painting, which he bought at Christie’s in London in 1989. Since the French authorities opened their prosecution in 1990 Mr Williams has insisted that he acted in good faith when he acquired Portrait of the Pastor Adrianus Tegularius for Ł120,000. The authorities seized the work, which came from the looted Schloss collection, when Mr Williams showed it at a Paris art fair in 1990. The dealer, then working for the Newhouse Galleries, New York, had displayed its provenance as part of the collection assembled in prewar years by Adolphe Schloss, a Jewish commodities merchant from Alsace. A member of the Schloss family spotted the work and triggered the case. The initial prosecution was dropped but the case was reopened in 1999. Under cross-examination Mr Williams said he had supposed when he bought the painting from Christie’s that it had been one of those restored to the Schloss family after the war. But the prosecution said that Mr Williams could have been under no illusion about the painting’s past because it had been listed in an official catalogue of art that had disappeared after confiscation by the Nazis.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/

Bacon estate action against ex-agents goes on

Maev Kennedy
The Guardian
Years of legal argument over the tangled affairs of Francis Bacon lie ahead after a judge refused to block a legal action by the artist's estate against his former agents. The life of the man acknowledged as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, which was ended by a heart attack in 1992, was notoriously chaotic, and his afterlife is proving to be just as bumpy. The stakes are enormous. The assets in dispute could be worth up to Ł100m. In his life time Bacon was one of a handful of British painters whose works broke the Ł1m price tag. Since his death his reputation and prices have continued to soar. Last week in New York a world record was set at Sotheby's, where just under Ł6m was paid for a triptych. His estate is suing the galleries that promoted his work for 34 years, Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd and Marlborough International Fine Art, which is based in Liechtenstein, alleging "undue influence" over the painter.
full story:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4187431,00.html