U.S., European museums support British Museum stand on disputed Greek art
Dear Museum Security Network subscribers,
A few days ago I expressed my opinion about this matter ( which I rarely do), and I do appreciate your opinion about this! Do send your opinion. I am prepared to receive opposed views, but most certainly want to discuss this! Ton Cremers
U.S., European museums support British Museum stand on disputed Greek art
Thu Dec 12, 2:22 AM ET
By ROBERT BARR, Associated Press Writer
LONDON - Several of the world's leading museums defended the British Museum's right to keep ancient statues taken from the Parthenon 200 years ago, despite Greek demands for their return.
A letter signed by the directors of 18 museums, including the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said works acquired decades ago have become essential to the museums that house them.
"Objects acquired in earlier times must be viewed in the light of different sensitivities and values, reflective of that earlier era," the statement said.
The museum directors' statement was presented to the British Museum, which released it to The Sunday Times newspaper, Jonathan Williams, assistant to the museum's director, said Wednesday.
Though the statement did not mention the so-called Elgin Marbles, it was clearly a response to a dispute between the British Museum and Greece over the 17 figures and part of a frieze that decorated the Parthenon atop the Acropolis.
They 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. The pieces date from the 5th century B.C.
Athens is pressing for their return by 2004, when the city will host the Olympic Games (news - web sites).
The British Museum says the marbles were acquired legally from the Ottoman government that controlled Greece at the time.
Other signatories of the statement included the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia, the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence, Italy, and the Prado in Madrid, Spain.
Williams said the statement came out of meetings between the museum directors and that the British Museum didn't help write it.
The British Museum's director, Neil MacGregor, told Greek Culture Minister Evangelos Venizelos in November that the Elgin Marbles "are among a select group of key objects which are indispensable to the museum's core function ... (and) as such, cannot be lent to any museum, in Greece or elsewhere."
The museum directors' statement condemned illegal trafficking in artistic or archaeological objects, but said some art was acquired under different circumstances "not comparable with current ones."
It said museums also serve the interests of all nations.
"To narrow the focus of museums whose collections are diverse and multifaceted would therefore be a disservice to all visitors," the statement said.
Italy, meanwhile, promised Wednesday to return one piece of the marbles. Italian Culture Minister Giuliano Urbani said a fragment on display in Sicily would be loaned to Greece "on a long-term basis."
The fragment at the Salinas Regional Archaeological Museum in Palermo is part of the statue of Peitho, goddess of persuasion and seduction.
Following is the full text of Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums signed by the directors of 18 European and American art museums. The declaration, which was issued in London last weekend, was prompted by the growing world-wide chorus calling for the return of such treasures as the Elgin Marbles and the Pergamon Altar, both masterpieces of ancient Greek art housed in, respectively, the British Museum and the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. The Greek government has been lobbying for the return of the Elgin Marbles in time for the 2004 Olympics in Athens. The Turkish government is claiming the Pergamon Altar.
It is rare for museum directors to speak out as a group on an issue. In March, 2001, the Association of Art Museum Directors, representing museums in the United States, Canada and Mexico, issued a statement deploring the Taliban's destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan and other art objects in Afghanistan. And in 1998 the AAMD issued a set of guidelines for dealing with art confiscated by the Nazis during the Holocaust that has since turned up in museums. ------------------- ----
The international museum community shares the conviction that illegal traffic in archaeological, artistic, and ethnic objects must be firmly discouraged. We should, however, recognize that objects acquired in earlier times must be viewed in the light of different sensitivities and values, reflective of the earlier era. The objects and monumental works that were installed decades and even centuries ago in museums throughout Europe and America were acquired under conditions that are not comparable with current ones.
Over time, objects so acquired -- whether by purchase, gift, or partage -- have become part of the museums that have cared for them, and by extension, part of the heritage of the nations which house them. Today we are especially sensitive to the subject of a work's original context, but we should not lose sight of the fact that museums too provide a valid and valuable context for objects that were long ago displaced from their original source.
The universal admiration for ancient civilizations would not be so deeply established today were it not for the influence exercised by the artifacts of these cultures, widely available to an international public in major museums. Indeed, the sculpture of classical Greece, to take the one example, is an excellent illustration of this point and of the importance of public collecting. The centuries-long history of appreciation of Greek art began in antiquity, was renewed in Renaissance Italy, and subsequently spread throughout the world marked the significance of Greek sculpture for mankind as a whole and its enduring value for the contemporary world. Moreover, the distinctly Greek aesthetic of these works appears to all the more strongly as the result of their being seen and studied in direct proximity to products of other great civilizations.
Calls to repatriate objects that have belonged to museum collections for many years have become an important issue for museums. Although each case has to be judged individually, we should acknowledge that museums serve not just the citizens of one nation but the people of every nation. Museums are agents in the reinterpretation. Each object contributes to that process. To narrow the focus of museums whose collections are diverse and multifaceted would therefore be a disservice to all visitors.
Signed by the Directors of:
• The Art Institute of Chicago
• Bavarian State Museum, Munich (Alte Pinakothek, Neue Pinakothek)
• State Museums, Berlin
• Cleveland Museum of Art
• J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
• Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York
• Los Angeles County Museum of Art
• Louvre Museum, Paris
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
• The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
• The Museum of Modern Art, New York
• Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Florence
• Philadelphia Museum of Art
• Prado Museum, Madrid
• Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
• State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg
• Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid
• Whitney Museum of America, New York
Afghans' lost city plundered for illegal London art trade
THE high midday sun keeps the city’s secret safe, and for the untrained eye Kafir Kot (the Place of Unbelievers) as it is known to local tribesmen, is at first no more than a huge desert plateau, protected from the outside world by the encircling mountains at an altitude of nearly 4,000 metres (more than 12,000ft). But when the afternoon shadows lengthen, they throw the topography into relief, and the metropolis of an ancient Buddhist civilisation, with stupa shrines, pillars, monasteries and watchtowers, rises from the sand and rock. Lost for more than 1,500 years, the forgotten city stretches for 25 sq km across remote wilderness in Kharwar district in central Afghanistan. Between the second and fourth centuries it was home to hundreds of thousands of people. And but for the chance arrest in March of a group of men smuggling artefacts, which brought it to the attention of the authorities in Kabul, it would have remained forgotten still. By rights the site should be a hive of archaeological activity. Instead, it is the focus of Pakistani-based mafia cartels who run illegal excavation networks from Afghanistan to the hub of the illegal trade in archaeological artefacts — London. When they were arrested by the Afghan authorities, the smugglers, travelling towards the Pakistani border, had in their possession 24 Buddhist artefacts including statues. Under questioning, they revealed their source as Kafir Kot, leading to the most significant archaeological discovery in Afghanistan in recent times. However, the find’s importance is overshadowed by the scale of plundering. The illegal nationwide business is being described by the United Nations and Afghan authorities as the country’s largest and fastest-growing crime problem, with profits that can exceed those of the opium trade while at the same time erasing Afghanistan’s history. “It’s the worst of my country’s problems at the moment,” Sayed Raheen, the Minister for Culture and Information in Kabul, says. He jumps up from his desk, which is laden with ancient coins and seals, and jerks open a cupboard door. “For the criminals the profit margins are bigger than those of opium and it’s getting worse by the day. There are thousands of sites with priceless artefacts across the country, and we haven’t got the people to protect or examine them. More are found every week.” He takes a set of fossilised mammoth jaws and a 1,700-year-old vase from the cupboard. “Look!” he enthuses. “These were given to me last week by a group of workmen laying the foundations for a new building outside. History is everywhere here. I just can’t protect it all.” Afghanistan has long been considered among the world’s richest archaeological lands. “It was the crossroads of cultures from the moment Man began moving around the planet,” Jim Williams, head of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) in Afghanistan, said. “Man was travelling through Afghanistan almost before he was Man.” Yet the inaccessibilty of the country and its recent history have left many sites undiscovered and unprotected. The last significant survey of locations of archaeological importance, which registered 5,000 sites, was conducted in 1935. Kafir Kot, though vast, was not among them.
Then conflict started the looting. In 1992 in the midst of civil war, the city’s museum was destroyed and most of its artefacts stolen. Many arrived in London. Yet it was the advent of the Taleban that really accelerated both the illegal trade and destruction of the sites. In February 2001, just two days after a Unesco conference in Paris highlighted the problems facing Afghan heritage, Mullah Omar, the Taleban leader, announced an edict instructing his followers to destroy all Afghanistan’s statues. “They were just rubbish to the Taleban,” Mr Williams said. “Those small enough to be transported were sold, those too heavy to move were smashed.” Among the casualties were the 2,000-year-old Buddhas at Bamiyan, which were destroyed by the Taleban within days of Mullah Omar’s decree. It was not only the Taleban who were to blame. During the Soviet occupation, the Russians used one of the five ancient minarets at Herat for artillery practice, and more recently a British aid organisation built a road near the 1,000-year-old minaret at Jam, undermining the foundations by diverting tons of silt and rock to a bordering river bed. Since the Taleban’s overthrow, illegal trade and excavation has accelerated as access within Afghanistan has improved. Working under renegade foreign archaeologists, the Afghan diggers are paid less than 3 per cent of the Pakistani middleman’s valuation of the finds, Unesco officials say. The stolen items are transported to Pakistan, then to Britain, where they can be sold for vast sums. “London has long been the biggest market,” Mr Williams said. “The artefacts are sold here to private dealers. Some remain in Britain. Many are shipped abroad.” Scotland Yard first contacted Unesco about looted Afghan artefacts last year, but the specialisation and cost required to identify, source and return stolen items put the trade far down the list of British concerns. Law enforcers are more interested in heroin and its effects on the West. Destruction is continuing alongside the looting. In Kafir Kot, trails of smashed pottery spill from the tunnels honeycombing the site: the miners are more interested in gilded statues than pottery. In one tunnel, human bones — presumably from a Buddhist grave — tumbled from a breached underground wall. The thighs and feet of huge Buddhist statues, protruding in the miners’ tunnels, had been broken and without protection were being eroded by wind and sand.
Unesco, which has only six expatriate staff members in the country, and the Afghan Government, are overwhelmed by the scale of the problem. A Council for the Protection and Rehabilitation of Afghanistan’s Cultural Heritage was set up last week. Chaired by Prince Mirwais, one of King Zahir Shah’s sons, and with prominent members including Nancy Dupree, the grande dame of Afghanistan historians, professors and Unesco officials, it intends to protect the plundered sites by transforming them into open-air museums that will also become the focus of further archaeological and scientific work. However, funds and security have not been forthcoming. “I have to date received no significant assistance from anyone, anywhere,” Dr Raheen complains. “I need to flood these areas with trained professionals, but there aren’t many left in Afghanistan. Most of our professors were either killed in the war or they fled and are now old and ineffective.” So far most foreign interest has centred on the wrecked Bamiyan Buddhas. Unesco has organised three missions to the site and received a Japanese pledge of $750,000 (£480,000) to help to repair the damaged Bamiyan frescoes, secure the crumbling caves and examine the possibility of reconstructing the statues horizontally on the ground.
Meanwhile, across Afghanistan the robbery continues.
“Every day beautiful, priceless objects belonging not only to our nation but to the heritage of the world are disappearing into the hands of thieves and smugglers and behind us our history is disappearing,” Dr Raheen said.
DEBATE
Is it too late to save Afghanistan's archaeological heritage?
Send you e-mails to debate@thetimes.co.uk
From: "Tapp, Barbara" BTapp@BILLIAN.com To: "'Ton Cremers'" securma@xs4all.nl
Subject: RE: Honest fakes ???
Date sent: Wed, 11 Dec 2002 09:49:41 -0500
Thanks for your note. The reason we included this information in Art & Antiques is because it may affect collectors. Our mission is to inform our collector readers about any news in the art marketplace. This piece also serves as a caveat emptor, a warning for buyers to be careful about provenance.
Barbara Tapp
---------- From: Ton Cremers Sent: Wednesday, December 11, 2002 6:27 AM To: editor@artantiquesmag.com
Subject: Hones fakes ???
Honest Fakes
WARWICK, ENGLAND -- Former felon John Myatt is infamous for his forgeries. In fact, he spent four months in prison as the creative half of one of the 20th century's greatest art frauds. As the brush man for con artist extraordinaire John Drewe, Myatt copied works by Picasso, Raoul Dufy, Ben Nicholson, Georges Braque and many others--about 200 in all. The paintings made hundreds of thousands of dollars in the 1980s and '90s. After trading prisoner portraits for phone cards behind bars, Myatt is now knocking off more masterpieces and selling them under his own name in The Gallery in Warwick. "I sign all the pieces, 'John Myatt--Genuine Fakes,' " he says. The paintings, pulled off using house paint, are a smash. "He's sold out the show--80 paintings," says dealer Alan Elkin, who commissioned Edward Hopper's "New York Movie," 1939, from Myatt. And the scam may soon hit the silver screen: Michael Douglas plans to produce a movie about Drewe. Myatt has met with the producers and is ready to supply the art. "I can paint almost anything," he says.
011 44 192 649 5506. www.aeart.co.uk.
It is very weird that people in the art world are willing to do business with this fraud and that Art and Antiques Magazine advertises this show!
Ton Cremers
Museum Security Network
Date sent: Wed, 11 Dec 2002 08:37:38 -0800 To: securma@xs4all.nl From: Cheryl Maslin cmaslin@uclink.berkeley.edu
Subject: RE: Honest fakes ???
Having just completed a Master's thesis in Museum Studies on the psychological motives behind the making of fakes and forgeries, I have found that the selling of fakes, especially those branded as such, is actually very harmful to society at large. It damages the foundation of knowledge of who we are in fact as a people; It promotes self-deception/delusion not only among the maker(s), but also the dealer and buyer; And, perhaps most importantly, it undermines local economies when fakes are purchased above authentic works by artists who would otherwise recycle their earnings back into their communities, creating a stable foundation in which many people interact inquisitively, rather than react through violence every day. Among the repercussions is an economic racism that ultimately attacks all people regardless of their respective heritage and gender, and exasperates segregation between those few with too much money and those far too many people with too little means in which to survive, let alone thrive.
The business of dealing art is supposed to be based upon the dissemination of the quality work of persons who have expressed a unique perspective of life experience; if the work is fake, simply, it is inferior. The dealer is in violation of the mission of the business and should be subject to loss of license. As to the imprisonment of Myatt and other such forgers, it would seem prudent that they be treated for their own neurosis as to why they are incapable of creating work that honestly reflects their own life experiences rather than falsifying someone else's life and culture.
Cheryl Maslin
(Stolen twice? First from Benin, now out of a car in Wandsworth.. I do hope descendants of the African king stole it back! TC)
Sculpture stolen
The carved head of an African king was stolen from a car in Wandsworth last Tuesday
, December 3.
The two foot sculpture, which dates from the 19th century, depicts an African Benin monarch, and has protruding eyes, carved beads coming up to the figure's mouth and a hollow top to its head. It was stolen from a car on West Hill Road between 2am and 5pm. Anyone with information is asked to call 020 8874 2982.
Greece Affirms Limits to Elgin Marbles Claim
By CELESTINE BOHLEN
Greece's case for the return of the so-called Elgin Marbles — fragments of the Parthenon frieze now housed in the British Museum — has nothing to do with claims for the repatriation of other cultural assets, Evangelos Venizelos, the Greek culture minister, said yesterday. He was responding to a recent statement signed by 18 museum directors representing most of the major museums of the United States and Europe (except those in Britain and most of those in Italy). The statement affirmed the museums' right to hold on to artworks that have long been in their collections. "We do not intend to claim other fragments of friezes on display in other museums and which are not linked with programs like the one we have for the Acropolis Museum and the Parthenon," Mr. Venizelos said in a statement that linked Greece's current campaign for the return of the Parthenon frieze to the 2004 Summer Olympic Games to be held in Athens. This claim is different, he argued. "The Parthenon Marbles are part of a standing monument," he explained. He added that a special museum was being built to house what Greek officials hope will be a display of all the surviving remnants of the original fifth- century B.C. frieze. (Some are now in Athens.) Lord Elgin removed a part of the frieze in 1801, when he was ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, and sold it to the British Museum in 1811. The museums' statement, which never mentioned the Parthenon Marbles, was meant as a collective defense of collections that were put together in another era, before countries like Greece became more protective of their cultural patrimony. The statement argued that museums, as the guardians of artifacts from civilizations around the world, had become international institutions with missions that transcended national boundaries. Andrew Hamilton, a spokesman for the British Museum, said that Neil MacGregor, the museum's director, purposely did not sign the statement so as not to detract from its larger purpose. "It was felt this initiative would be more valuable as a movement by museums in Europe and the United States that have not yet made their position on restitution clear," Mr. Hamilton said. But the Greek government, which has been lobbying the British Museum for the return of the marbles for more than two decades, has argued that a combined display of the Parthenon's frieze would not challenge the roles and functions of major museums. "On the contrary," Mr. Venizelos said, it "affirms them." As construction of the new Athens museum proceeds, the Greeks have been pressing their case with increasing intensity. The subject was raised last month at a meeting between Prime Minister Costas Simitis of Greece and Britain's prime minister, Tony Blair. But the British government and the British Museum, a national institution, have not budged. "Neil MacGregor has made clear our position," Mr. Hamilton said, "which is that the British Museum is the best place for the marbles, and they are part of a select group of objects that are the core of the museum's collection, which cannot be loaned." The Italian government has taken a different stance, and this week returned to Greece a small piece of the Parthenon frieze, depicting the foot of the goddess Peitho. A gift of a British diplomat in the 19th century, it had been in a museum in Palermo, Sicily. Mr. Venizelos, who received the fragment on Wednesday, said its return was a gesture of "great symbolic significance."
http://www.nytimes.com/
Italian loan puts marbles pressure on British Museum
Fiachra Gibbons, arts correspondent Friday December 13, 2002 The Guardian
Italy yesterday put further pressure on the British Museum to hand back the Elgin Marbles to Greece by returning a fragment of the contested 4th century BC frieze they themselves looted. The choice of a piece of a statue of Peitho, the goddess of persuasion and seduction, on a long-term loan back to Athens could not have been more diplomatically powerful. A similar deal offered to Britain last month in an attempt to get the marbles back in time for the 2004 Olympics was rebuffed. It comes after three days of manoeuvring on the marbles, which culminated in a declaration by a group of the greatest museums in the world that artefacts of universal importance, like the Parthenon frieze and the British Museum's similarly controversial collection of Benin bronzes, should not be repatriated. The Greeks suspect the statement, made at a conference in Munich in October, was engineered by the British Museum, which then stepped back from signing the agreement in what they called a "classic" diplomatic ruse to appear reasonable. The British Museum last night denied acting perfidiously. "We did not sign because we did not want the statement centred on the claims on the Elgin Marbles," a spokesman said. "The statement was purely in support of the universal museums concept." The British Committee for the Restitution of the Parthenon Marbles was dismissive of the declaration by the museums, which included the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Hermitage in St Petersburg, and the Berlin Museum. "Such unilateral, absolute 'declarations' are not sustainable in the modern world," it insisted. "Declarations of this kind should be the outcome of discussion and consultation beyond the small circle of self-styled 'universal' museums." It claimed the director of the British Museum recently rebuffed an approach by the Greek government proposing cultural collaboration of a new kind in the display of the Parthenon sculptures.
"The proposal was not, strictly speaking, a request for 'return' or 'restitution', but rather a suggestion that the two museums and the two governments concerned enter into a voluntary agreement for joint care of these antiquities in the Acropolis Museum in Athens. "It was also a request for the reunification of a divided entity - the sculptures of the Parthenon. The principle of seeking to reunite divided antiquities has been accepted by many eminent museums over recent years," the committee claimed in a statement. In another twist to the saga, the historian Ellis Tinios has claimed that the statues, carved by Pheidias on the top of the Parthenon, were saved from a worse fate by Lord Elgin when he removed them in 1801. Those parts of the frieze that remained in Greek hands were in a far worse state now than those in London, he claimed in an article in The Art. "Destruction would have continued unabated for several more decades and far less sculpture would survive in readable form today if Elgin had not acted," Tinios argued. "His cure may have been drastic, but it worked. Those pieces Elgin removed from the Parthenon were not only spared piecemeal damage and destruction in the last decades of Ottoman administration of Athens, but also the risks occasioned by the two sieges of the Acropolis that occurred in 1822 and 1827 during the Greek war of independence.
"The material removed to London was also spared the devastation that befell all the sculptures that remained exposed on the Acropolis: dissolution in the polluted atmosphere of Athens."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
Stolen treasures stay in museums
By David Harding, Metro 11 December 2002
Some of the world's leading museums have declared they will never return ancient artefacts to their countries of origin. The heads of 18 institutions in Europe and the US signed a statement amid calls to give up objects pillaged decades or centuries ago. The move was seen by those campaigning for the return of artefacts as an admission of guilt and a bid to 'defend the indefensible'. The Louvre in Paris, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam were among those which made the declaration. They said their collections helped people understand early civilisations by providing access to archaeological, artistic and ethnic objects. The British Museum in London, which is under pressure to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece, abstained because it did not want to 'court further controversy'. A spokeswoman said: 'There are a lot of different ways things have come into the museum. Most have been bequeathed.' There is a similar row over the Benin Bronzes, held at London's Museum of Mankind and in Berlin. Bernard Moffatt, of the Celtic League which is campaigning for the repatriation of the Gold Mole Cape from the British Museum, said: 'These artefacts belong to the countries they came from. 'The argument used to be there was nowhere to house these artefacts where they belong. But that is a load of rubbish.'
http://www.thisislondon.com/
Long-lost historic painting is seized
A long-lost art treasure depicting Germany's last leader before Hitler took power has been seized by Dyfed Powys police at an auction house. Detectives stepped in to block the sale of the historic portrait after they were alerted to its existence by the German government.
The picture of Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg was originally housed in the Reichstag in Berlin but disappeared at the end of the second world war.
Now an international investigation is under way to find the rightful owner of the portrait.
A spokesman for Dyfed Powys police said: "The portrait, which was going for auction, was seized by a British soldier during World War II and brought back to the UK.
"The present German government have laid claim to the portrait and inquiries are currently going on to ascertain its rightful owner.
"It is emphasised at this stage that there have been no criminal offences disclosed with regard to this portrait."
Ludwig Linden, of the German Embassy in London, said: "The suspicion is that this is looted art taken illegally from Germany.
"If that proves to be the case we still have legal right of property."
The canvas resurfaced at the Peter Francis auction house in Carmarthen last week and German officials were alerted after it was advertised on the Internet.
The identity of the seller has not been released.
http://www.shropshirestar.com/
Date sent: Thu, 12 Dec 2002 16:03:03 -0700 From: "Warren RUDER" WRUDER@heard.org To: securma@museum-security.org
Subject: Re: U.S., European museums support British Museum stand on
disputed Greek art
My comment is "perhaps it is time for a statement as to what the mission or goal of the Museum Security Network is." I am very interested in Museum Security but not politics. Thanks.
Prado's lost fish, missing for 28 years, finally surface
By Elizabeth Nash in Madrid 12 December 2002
An anonymous tip-off enabled Madrid's Prado museum to recover a painting missing for 28 years that surfaced for sale at an east Sussex auction gallery, Spain's flagship museum said yesterday. Still Life of Fish, by the 18th-century Spanish artist Bartolome Montalvo, had been on loan to a school in the southern city of Cordoba, where it disappeared in 1974. Nothing more was heard of it until a British antiques dealer in Marbella on the Costa del Sol offered the painting to Gorringes Auction Gallery in Lewes, east Sussex, last summer. He had bought it as part of a flat clearance from a Spanish woman in June. "The dealer is among our regular suppliers and we catalogued the work and put it in our auction catalogue," Philip Taylor, senior partner of Gorringes, said yesterday. "But, to be honest, we didn't think it was a very inspiring painting and wouldn't have expected it to raise more than a few hundred pounds." The oil painting on wood was not signed, and Gorringes described it in the auction catalogue as "Spanish School". But it had inventory numbers and marks identifying it as part of Spain's royal collection, on which the Prado was founded in 1819. Jose Luis Diez, a curator at the Prado, was told the painting was up for auction in Britain, a museum spokeswoman said yesterday. Police were alerted and the work was immediately withdrawn. "There's so much stolen art around these days, I'm delighted this was spotted in time, otherwise it would have disappeared for another few decades," Mr Taylor said. "It's not so surprising that the painting has come to light after such a long time; it's had time to change hands and cover its tracks. It's more unusual for a painting to reappear after only a few years." The woman who sold the painting to the Marbella dealer turned out to have worked as a caretaker at the Cordoba school. "In 1974, because construction work was being done at the school, she took the picture and kept it at her home until the sale," Spanish police said. The authorities have not filed charges against the caretaker. Once told the painting belonged to the Spanish state, the British antiques dealer surrendered any claim to the work, which was seized by British police at Spain's request. The painting has been handed over to Spanish police and will be returned to the Prado.
Montalvo is a relatively unknown artist who painted landscapes and still-lifes. His recovered work Bodegon de Pesca forms part of the Prado's vast dispersed holdings. More than 4,500 paintings and artworks owned by the museum are distributed to public institutions throughout Spain. The so-called dispersed Prado contains artworks "not of the top category" among its huge and priceless collection of some 20,000 works. With some 10,000 pieces stored in vaults and only 1,500 on show in Madrid, dispersal enables more treasures to be publicly displayed. Plans were in train to establish a permanent control commission to ensure the safety of the museum's dispersed holdings, the Prado's director, Miguel Zugaza, said. The recovered painting, which was damaged and had been roughly patched in one corner, was of "modest artistic value", the Prado said. Its chief interest lay in the artist having been court painter to King Fernando VII.
http://news.independent.co.uk/
Nevada Indian cave looter hit with $2.5 million civil penalty
Associated Press
An Oregon man was fined $2.5 million for his role in what federal officials are calling the worst case of American Indian cave looting in Nevada history. William Hammett, an administrative law judge at the U.S. Interior Department, handed down the civil penalty to Jack Lee Harelson, 62, of Grants Pass. The penalty, the fourth largest ever assessed for archaeological theft, was imposed Dec. 6 but not announced until late Thursday by Bureau of Land Management officials. Harelson was convicted in an Oregon court in 1996 of possession of stolen property and abuse of a corpse _ charges stemming from the illegal excavation of an ancient site on the Black Rock Desert, 140 miles north of Reno. In looting Elephant Mountain Cave, Harelson destroyed what could have been one of the five most important archaeological cave sites in the Great Basin, a vast area covering most of Nevada and Utah, BLM officials said. Before it was looted over several years in the early 1980s, the cave contained a 10,000- year record of human life in northern Nevada, including that of members of the Paiute tribe. "The desecration and loss of this site to all Americans is staggering,"said Bob Abbey, Nevada state director of the BLM."While we are pleased the judge ruled completely in BLM's favor, money can't bring back what was lost." Harelson maintained his innocence and laughed when asked whether he would pay the penalty. His license as a securities agent was revoked after his conviction and he has not held a steady job since, he said. "I'm on Social Security and crippled, yeah, right,"he said."The federal government knew that I had nothing going in. They needed to slap someone.
"What's my reaction? I guess I have no reaction. You deal with the government and there are lies and that's what you have to deal with,"he said. BLM officials said there was overwhelming evidence that Harelson dug through and discarded all but the most valuable artifacts in the cave. He and his wife discovered two large baskets in the cave, one with the body of a boy and the other with the body of a girl, court records show. They removed the bodies, baskets and other artifacts, and buried the bodies in their backyard. More than 2,000 artifacts were later recovered, including 10,000-year-old sandals that possibly were the oldest footwear found on earth, said Pat Barker, a state archaeologist for BLM. "It's a devastating blow losing this information,"Barker said."This is outrageous. It's the worst case of looting we know of in Nevada and one of the worst in the West. Archaeological artifacts are useful only if they are recorded in place, he said. "The civil penalty is a strong message for other people not to do this stuff,"Barker said. In his ruling, Hammett noted the insult to American Indians from the desecration of burials at the cave far outweighs the commercial value of the artifacts, leading him to use the archaeological value rather than the commercial value to determine the civil penalty.
Harelson acknowledged digging a"test hole"and removing some artifacts, but claimed he did it only to interest Nevada archaeologists in the site. "Never once did I say those artifacts I took from the cave belonged to me,"Harelson said."They were test items. I was trying to prove a point that the cave was worthy of a controlled dig by the Nevada State Museum." The statute of limitations on the excavation had expired by the time of Harelson's arrest in 1995. He was tried and convicted under Oregon law after the ancient remains and stolen property were found there in the mid- 1990s. He was sentenced to 18 months in jail and fined $20,000.
The Oregon Supreme Court later overturned his conviction on abuse of a corpse charges after determining the statute of limitations had expired. The U.S Justice Department will determine whether Harelson has assets to pay all or part of the $2.5 million civil penalty, officials said.
http://www.rgj.com/news/
Buried treasures
The blitz transformed Britain's bumbling approach to war - and left its great art ready to withstand nuclear attack
Jonathan Jones Saturday December 14, 2002 The Guardian
The Elgin marbles spent the second world war in a disused tunnel Recently the Russian film director Alexander Sokurov, whose film about the Hermitage in St Petersburg opens in Britain next spring, told me how the great Russian art museum survived the 20th century. "God's will," he said, looking straight at me, unblinking. A million people died in St Petersburg during the second world war. Across Europe, art was robbed, bombed or burnt in the war. In Vienna, Gustav Klimt's paintings Medicine, Philosophy and Jurisprudence were stolen from their Jewish owners and appropriated by the state. In 1945 SS troops fleeing the allies, in a valedictory act of destruction, set fire to Schloss Immendorf in lower Austria and the paintings were incinerated. In Berlin, a significant portion of the Prussian state art collections - including works by Botticelli - was burned when a secret storage site was hit (not deliberately) by Allied bombs. Other objects, including archaeological finds in Berlin's Pergamon Museum, were transported to the Soviet Union after 1945 as war reparations. Parts of Berlin's "museum island" are still being rebuilt from wartime ruins. Other works of art survived miraculously, as if by "God's will". There is something almost unbelievable in the wartime adventure of Titian's Danaë, now in the Capodimonte Museum, Naples. It was seized by Hermann Göring - and somehow the sheer gold beauty of Titian's painting makes you think that Göring saw it as real gold to pillage. In 1945 this Nazi loot was found in a salt mine at Bad Aussee in Austria. Works of art are not people. What does it matter whether art masterpieces were lost or preserved in a war that killed 50 million people around the world? In September 1936 the Spanish Republic, under attack from the fascist forces of General Franco, appointed Pablo Picasso director of the Prado. Picasso's job was not to run the museum but to remind people around the world that contemporary Spanish art drew inspiration from a cultural history now under threat. The fascists were bombing Madrid. Picasso's anti- fascist art of this period refers directly to art in the Prado, as if he were gathering, protecting, making new its resources. Guernica is in part a modern version of Goya's Tres de Mayo. Picasso said when he was painting it that: "My whole life as an artist has been a continual struggle against reaction, and the death of art." Guernica itself survived the second world war because it went on tour abroad; it was to spend four decades in exile in New York. Picasso and the Spanish Republic resisted "the death of art", and so did the National Gallery in London. Saving Britain's Art Treasures, a determined delve into secret wartime history by NJ McCamley, documents the increasingly refined and ambitious alternative storage methods that the National Gallery in particular developed during the war to preserve its collection of paintings by Rembrandt, Botticelli, Turner and Michelangelo: treasures all.
It's a sad and disturbing story - not because the protectors of British art treasures failed; on the contrary, they were massively successful. Churches, old houses and public buildings were of course destroyed. In May 1941 the painter John Piper recorded the wreckage of the House of Commons after it was hit by an incendiary bomb, and to this day, the west side of the Tate at Millbank is scarred by wartime explosions. McCamley says that only one major painting from a London collection - Richard Wilson's 18th-century essay in the violent sublime, The Destruction of the Children of Niobe, owned by the Tate - was burned in the blitz, when a restoration workshop in the West End was hit. Certain art treasures were lucky to survive first the blitz, then the V1 and V2 attacks on London. The Elgin Marbles, which at the end of the 1930s had been repositioned in the British Museum's Duveen gallery, spent the war in a disused tunnel of Aldwych tube station. Studies after the war, when museums were planning for an atomic conflict, showed that a direct hit by a powerful conventional bomb would have wrecked this supposed shelter. The Marbles had become the subject of huge controversy just before the war. It was alleged by the sculptor Jacob Epstein, among others, that a recent cleaning of the sculptures paid for by Sir Joseph Duveen had severely damaged them - and paranoia increased when the frieze remained deep in the dark in Aldwych station until 1948, long after the war had ended. Epstein publicly wondered if the frieze would ever go on show again. Nevertheless, the treasures of the British Museum survived. So did the vast majority of British-owned art masterpieces. No, what is sad about this story is the loss of innocence, the growth of mechanisation and apocalypticism, the rapid change that took place during the early months and years of the war from an amateurish, bungling attitude to one of terrifying state efficiency. In this sense, the story of Britain's art treasures during the second world war is emblematic of other aspects of life during wartime. The first efforts to save the nation's artworks from harm were very much old school tie; paintings and artefacts were simply taken to stately homes outside London, where it was assumed they would be looked after much as in a museum. Kenneth Clark, director of the National Gallery, expressed quiet complacency about the removal of 222 paintings from his museum to the home of Lord Lee at Avening in Gloucestershire in August 1939: "Lord Lee has made the most excellent arrangements for their safekeeping. From the point of view of temperature, security and invigilation, his gallery is excellent." The rest of the National Gallery collection, except for a handful of paintings that Clark regarded as worthless copies, was sent to Wales, to the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth, to Penrhyn Castle outside Bangor in north Wales and to the University of Wales's Pritchard Jones Hall in Bangor. The reports sent by the collection's supervisors in Wales were a lot less complacent. In fact, there were persistent rumours in Bangor of Welsh Nationalist- fuelled Fifth Column activity. This sounds like English upper-class hysteria.
It got fairly intense; reports came back to Clark and the Ministry of Works that the paintings might be in danger from a revolutionary mob. You get the impression that in the early years of the war, these English art experts confused Wales with Ireland in 1916 or Russia in 1917. In reality, it was the blue blood Lord Penrhyn, owner of Penrhyn Castle - a simulacrum of a Norman castle overlooking the Menai Straits, with a pseudo-Romanesque hall resembling a set for The Adventures of Robin Hood - who caused the bother. He was reported to be always drunk, and to be planning to billet troops there, thus increasing the risk of fire. It quickly became obvious that stately homes were not such great places to store artworks after all. It was not just that, contrary to the assumptions of 1930s planners, north Wales was quite within range of German long-range bombers (indeed, parts of it were on the flight path to heavily bombed Liverpool); it was also that the whole genteel notion of the house-museum was an antiquated fantasy. Old houses were tinderpiles. At the same time, they were gradually being appropriated for troops, who sat around smoking as they waited for action. So art went underground. In September 1940 Francis Rawlins, the National Gallery's scientific adviser, scouting for subterranean storage facilities, visited the Manod slate quarry above Blaenau Ffestiniog on the southern edge of Snowdonia. Penrhyn Castle had been built from slate industry money; now the National Gallery turned to the slate quarries themselves. Manod had vast man-made chambers 30m high linked by tunnels and drainage shafts. Five chambers, it seemed to Rawlins, which were no longer worked - as other parts of the quarry were at this time - could be isolated and converted into a secret storage shelter. This was the autumn of 1940 and the National Gallery, like the rest of Britain's institutions, had moved from genteel muddling through to a new kind of slightly frightening radical thought: the nation's art treasures were being prepared for the end of the world, or for a last stand in the Welsh mountains. It took until August 1941 to convert the slate workings into deep shelters. Purpose-designed squat brick "houses" were built inside the vast chambers to preserve the paintings in atmosphere-controlled, air-conditioned and heated safety, with space for conservation work to go on as normal and even for works to be photographed for scholarly purposes. A lot of the lessons in atmosphere control learned inside a Welsh mountain were later applied at the museum in Trafalgar Square. The paintings were brought to the quarry by truck. A bridge had to be altered so that Anthony van Dyck's 3.7m tall Equestrian Portrait of Charles I could pass underneath it. The stability of the slate chambers proved not quite perfect; there was one collapse, and a system of constant scrutiny had to be developed. As the war went on, a tradition was introduced of taking one painting a month back to London to go on public display, then returning it to the quarry.
Manod proved so successful that in the 1950s, long after the National Gallery's paintings were back on the walls in London, it was the planned destination of Britain's art treasures in the event of a third world war. Atomic bombs falling on the cities, it was reckoned, would leave Snowdonia as a final refuge. However, plans involved taking pictures there only at the very last minute so as not to cause panic. This is the troubling payoff to the story: the efficient salvational strategy evolved in wartime continued after the war, as museums - again, like the rest of Britain's institutions - planned for atomic conflict with the Soviet Union. It is amazing to think about this. In 1950, while artists such as Francis Bacon created images tortured by the cold-war world, the Tate was wondering if Aldwych or Piccadilly tube station would be any use as an art shelter in an atomic war. Manod was kept as a "prepared quarry", in the official language, ready to store art treasures against nuclear attack at any minute, into the early 1980s. That was when government plans for nuclear war radically changed, and everything not essential to the survival of the state in its barest military and governmental form was sold off. Art will not survive the next world war.
· Saving Britain's Art Treasures by NJ McCamley is published by Pen and Sword Books.
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