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head> ======MUSEUM SECURITY NETWORK====== http://museum-security.org
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CULTURAL PROPERTY INCIDENTS

REPORTS JULY 5/6, 1997:

- message from administrator
- Information about the World Heritage Newsletter
- Russia parliament angry over Yeltsin art rejection
- United States makes formal commitment with Peru protecting their
cultural artifacts
- Burglar was expert 'worthy of part on Antiques Roadshow'
- Security camera can find a face in crowds
- Moscow digs for Ivan's (the Terrible) secret library
- More on fake Van Gogh paintings: Review alleges dozens of Van Goghs are fake
- Auschwitz Artist Fights Museum For Her Portraits

message by administrator:
As you will have noticed by now I have made a small change in the way
the list is run. From now on there will be just one message per day
(six or seven per week) offering all reports and additional
information. Remember: all messages sent will be archived at:
http://museum-security.org/artcrime.html and
http://museum-security.org/mail.html.
The USA server where we have placed our http://museum-security.org/
site can not be reached at the moment. So do visit the European site
at: http://www.xs4all.nl/~securma/
The Museum Security Network has been on-line now for a little over
half a year and has 'collected' over 200 reports about incidents with
cultural property. This far the mailinglist is sort of a
one-man-endeavor. I do not mind offering you this service, however
contributions and feedback always are most welcome. This far the
reports are restricted to those that are found in newspapers all over
the world. Do remember that not all incidents with cultural property
reach the news agencies. Without your help our archive will only show
the top of the iceberg.
Ton Cremers
------------

Information about the World Heritage Newsletter:

I have only copied the table of contents and additional information
about the WHNewsletter. The complete newsletter can be applied for
at: owner-whnews@unesco.org
Ton Cr.

Contents
News:
* 21st SESSION OF THE BUREAU OF THE WORLD HERITAGE
COMMITTEE, 23-28 JUNE 1997
* SEMINAR IN JOYA DE CEREN (EL SALVADOR) TO BE HELD
7-11 JULY

Announcements:
* PRESERVATION SEMINAR IN BRAZIL, 27-30 JULY 1997
* ASIA & WEST PACIFIC NETWORK FOR URBAN CONSERVATION
(AWPNUC)
* ARCHAEOLOGIS, A GIS PROGRAMME IN THE MEDITERRANEAN AREA
* "BE HERE NOW" ON WORLD HERITAGE SITES IN DANGER
REVIEWED

For the latest information on World Heritage, consult the UNESCO
World Heritage Centre WWW pages at
http://www.unesco.org/whc/welcome.htm .
Mail submissions to WHNEWS to whnews@unesco.org or to the Editor,
wheditor@unesco.org. The next electronic issue of this Newsletter
will appear in two weeks, or later depending on the volume of news
submitted. The printed Newsletter is available at:
http://www.unesco.org/whc/news/index-en.htm.
Fax: +33 1 4568-5570; Mail: UNESCO World Heritage Centre, 7 place
de Fontenoy, 75352 Paris 07 SP, FRANCE.
------------

Russia parliament angry over Yeltsin art rejection
07:03 a.m. Jul 04, 1997 Eastern

MOSCOW, July 4 (Reuter) - Russia's upper house of parliament voted
unanimously on Friday to prepare an appeal to the Constitutional Court
over President Boris Yeltsin's second rejection of a bill on artworks
seized during World War Two.
Yeltsin has contended the two chambers of parliament have themselves
breached the constitution in overruling his veto of an
opposition-sponsored bill that would effectively prevent Moscow
returning the seized ``trophy art,'' mostly to Germany.
Federation Council chairman Yegor Stroyev made clear no immediate
action would be taken following the unanimous vote.
He told deputies: ``We will get back to this within a month.''
It was the latest step in a complicated constitutional and
parliamentary wrangle that has exercised many deputies who do not want
to see the artworks relinquished.
Germany, Russia's biggest trading partner and creditor, wants Moscow
to return a vast hoard including a rare Gutenberg bible, gold
artefacts supposedly from the site of ancient Troy and paintings by
Impressionists Claude Monet and Henri Matisse.
Many ordinary Russians agree with the parliamentarians, saying the
artwork should stay as compensation for Nazi Germany's destruction of
Russian cultural treasures and the sufferings of the Soviet Union,
which lost 27 million citizens in the war.
Russia initially said it gave most of the captured works to communist
East Germany. But Moscow has since said it still has some priceless
items and earlier this year put some of them, including the
Impressionists and Trojan gold, on display for the first time.
Vast quantities of paintings, books and other trophy art are still
believed to be held in stores across Russia.
Yeltsin, who values close political and economic ties with Germany
and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, has vowed to return the treasure.
In May, the Federation Council sent back the bill to the Kremlin for
signing, accusing Yeltsin of exceeding his powers in withholding his
signature and rejecting his contention that there had been procedural
irregularities.
Yeltsin then sent it back to parliament unsigned, prompting Friday's
response.
Copyright 1997 Reuters Limited.
-----

United States makes formal commitment with Peru protecting their
cultural artifacts (Art Daily)

Lima
On Monday the United States gave Peruvian cultural authorities
documents stating their new restrictions for the importation of
archeological artifacts and art work from Peru. The customs
regulations remitted by the North American ambassador Dennis Jett
cover the memorandum agreement subscribed between the two governments
on June 9 this year to reduce contraband. "The memo was the result of
a call for aid by Peru to avoid the contraband of objects that form
part of their rich cultural patrimony illegally trafficked to the
United States, which is considered the largest buying market for
artifacts taken from Peru," stated the National Cultural Institute to
the press. Materials protected include textiles and other pieces
elaborated in gold, copper, silver, wood, ceramics, and stone pieces
from the Moche culture mainly found in the royal tombs of the "Señor
del Sipán". Also guarded will be ruins from the Chavín, Paracas,
Moche, and Inca cultures. The regulations also extend protection to
some ethnological material from the Peruvian colonial period such as
paintings, sculptures and other objects utilized in the evangelization
of the indigenous populations.
-----

Burglar was expert 'worthy of part on Antiques Roadshow'
BY LIN JENKINS
Times of London

A BURGLAR with a knowledge of antiques that could have earned him a
place as an expert on Antiques Roadshow led a gang that carried out
more than 150 burglaries on country houses, a court was told
yesterday.
Nick Stock planned the burglaries, had telephone wires cut and
burglar alarms disabled, and then sent in his teams of burglars. They
stole goods worth more than Ł500,000 including silverware, paintings,
furniture, a car and a safe.
Stephen Parish, for the prosecution, told Winchester Crown Court:
"His victims included judges, knights, titled ladies, a vice-admiral
and a lady said by one of the gang to be related to the Queen. But
this was not because he was some sort of Robin Hood figure, far from
it. He was wholly indifferent to the age and status of his victims.
There was nothing romantic about him."
He said Stock was "ruthless, violent and sometimes sadistic". He was
caught when an accomplice became fearful for his own life and asked
police for protection. Stock, 33, of Fareham, Hampshire, pleaded
guilty to three charges of conspiracy to burgle and will be sentenced
at the end of the trial of nine others alleged to have been involved.
Mr Parish said Stock would reconnoitre during daylight, studying
items and dismissing them if he thought they were not genuine.
"He was an expert. He could probably star in The Antiques Road Show.
Stock did not care if people were in or out when he burgled their
homes. He got people to cut the telephone or burglar alarm wires and
waited to see if doing this alerted the local police." Sometimes he
waited until people were at home, because they did not usually switch
their burglar alarms on while inside.
Stock used threats and intimidation sometimes to get people to commit
the burglary for him, rarely entering the houses himself. He directed
his teams from near by and afterwards would tell them to hide the
goods, collecting them later.
Many times he was stopped in a car by police late at night in the
area where a burglary had been committed, Mr Parish said. "But there
was nothing in the car and nothing to connect him with the burglary
so they had to let him go. He considered himself invulnerable and
above the law, and for something like five years he was."
----------

Security camera can find a face in crowds
By Robert Matthews, Science Correspondent
Telegraph
A REVOLUTIONARY surveillance system that can pick out a wanted
criminal or missing child from a crowd captured on security cameras is
about to undergo its first trials. Based on progress in "artificial
intelligence", the new system will transform the use of closed circuit
television, which is increasingly being used to fight crime. Such
systems have reportedly cut street crime in British cities by up to 50
per cent, but until now they have required security personnel to
monitor many television screens for hours. It has been almost
impossible to pick out an individual from the thousands who pass the
cameras. A British company has developed a system that will
continually watch CC-TV images and instantly recognise any face it is
asked to look for. Known as Mandrake, the system is the latest advance
in so-called neural network technology, in which an ordinary computer
is programmed to behave as if it were made up of a network of
simplified human brain cells. Like the brain, a neural network can be
taught to perform tasks by being shown many examples. It can also
learn from its mistakes. The Mandrake computer has been shown hundreds
of thousands of facial images so that it can recognise rapidly the key
features of faces in a CC-TV image. Software & Systems International
in Slough, which developed Mandrake, is headed by Philip Bowe and
Patricia Oldcorn. Mr Bowe said: "The computer has been trained to
concentrate on just the parts of the face between the top of the
eyebrows and the bottom of the chin, and from one temple to the other.
It ignores hairstyles, facial hair, glasses and jewellery, and turns
what it sees into a simple template that captures the essence of the
face." Once extracted from the CC-TV image, this template is then
rapidly compared to a library of face images stored on a computer,
which instantly alerts security officers if a wanted target has
appeared on a CC-TV screen. A crucial feature of Mandrake is its
human-like ability to cope with different views of the face. "It
doesn't have to be just face-on," said Mr Bowe. "The computer can
recognise the same face from different angles." Mandrake recognises
faces very quickly. Mr Bowe said: "It can compare what it sees with
what is in the image library at around 250 images every second. And it
isn't fooled by disguises. If you're wearing a beard, we'll spot you.
If you're in drag, we'll spot you." A demonstration of Mandrake's
abilities for police last week led to "keen interest", especially
among border surveillance and counter-terrorism officers. The first
live trials are planned this summer at Watford football ground, where
the crowd will be scanned for known troublemakers. "One of its most
exciting uses would be in spotting missing children," said Mr Bowe.
"If a child is known to have gone missing in a particular area,
photographs could be sent to the police, who could then ask the
computer to alert them if the child shows up on surveillance cameras."
The company expects a backlash from civil liberties groups. But Mr
Bowe said the system could just as easily give innocent people alibis
as trap the guilty.

------

Sunday Times
Moscow digs for Ivan's secret library
YURI LUZHKOV, the mayor of Moscow, has embarked on a quest to solve a
mystery that has enthralled Russian leaders through the centuries. He
has assembled a team of scientists to track down the missing library
of Ivan the Terrible, writes Mark Franchetti in Moscow. Some experts
dispute whether Ivan the Terrible ever had a library. The tsar is
remembered more for bloody deeds of infanticide and removing the
tongues of his critics than a love of learning. Others insist that a
treasure trove of books and manuscripts - some dating from the days of
the pharaohs - is buried somewhere beneath the Kremlin. Luzhkov, a
pugnacious, barrel-chested demagogue with ambitions to take over from
Boris Yeltsin as president, is undeterred by suggestions that he is
pursuing a fictitious holy grail. He has assembled a team of 20
experts and told them not to stop work until they solve the mystery.
He hopes they will triumph in time for the celebrations of Moscow's
850th anniversary later this year. Legend has it that the tsar, who
had thousands of his political enemies slaughtered, and who famously
murdered his own son, inherited the library from Sophia Paleolog, the
niece of the last emperor of Constantinople. Ivan is said to have kept
the manuscripts - believed also to include thousands of documents
dating back to ancient Greece and Rome - in three vast subterranean
vaults. The mystery came to obsess Russian leaders from Peter the
Great to Stalin. There were reports of the books going missing at some
point in the 1580s, shortly before Ivan's death, when he may have
buried the books to prevent them being stolen. The ailing tsar is then
believed to have moved the library to Alexandrova in the north of
Moscow, where it was again buried, this time under a monastery next to
his palace. "One of the versions [of the legend] which we are
exploring is that he destroyed the monastery, burying the library
under the rubble," said Vladimir Ivanovsky, a Moscow city official
co-ordinating the search. "He thought that the monastery would only be
restored under a new, enlightened Russia and that is when we would
deserve to find his hidden treasure." Clearly Luzhkov believes the
time to uncover the priceless cache of books is nigh. The mayor, who
makes no secret of his presidential ambitions, believes that finding
the library will bring him kudos. With the help of the latest computer
technology, experts hope to narrow down the number of potential hiding
places for the treasure. They have even ordered a detailed
psychological profile of the tsar to help them understand what he
might have done with his books. People claiming to possess
extrasensory powers have also been called in to help. "Nearly every
tsar and Soviet leader looked for it but we will be the ones to find
it," Ivanovsky said. "We will be heroes, and Luzhkov will be the
greatest hero of all." Luzhkov is not the sort of man to see his
ambitions frustrated. However, sceptics believe that even he may
eventually have to admit defeat. "It's absolute fantasy," said Dimitry
Likhachev, doyen of Russian philologists and historians. "I can't
believe that Luzhkov is also looking for this library. It's pure
vainglory." As Luzhkov prepares Moscow for the celebration of its
850th anniversary, however, he is putting intense pressure on his
scientists to come up with new leads in the mystery. "Luzhkov is a
world statesman," said German Sterligov, in charge of the experts
involved in the search. "He has vision and a sense of history. He will
find Ivan's library and will be the envy of the world."
-----

Review alleges dozens of Van Goghs are fake
By PAUL MYLREA
Reuters News Service

LONDON -- At least 45 and possibly up to 100 paintings and drawings
attributed to Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh may be fakes, a leading
London-based art review alleged Friday, ruffling feathers in museums
around the world. One of The Art Newspaper's alleged fakes is
Sunflowers, bought by Yasuda Fire & Marine Insurance in 1987 for $41.8
million, at the current rate of exchange. The purchase earned Yasuda a
rebuke from Japan's Finance Ministry for "an excessive demonstration
of wealth." The review said that among other alleged fakes are two of
Van Gogh's best-known works: Dr. Gachet in the Musee D'Orsay in Paris
and L'Arlesienne in New York's Metropolitan Museum. Part of the
problem, the newspaper said, is that Van Gogh failed to sell his works
before his death in 1890, so there are no contemporary sale records to
help authenticate his works. The allegations were shrugged off by
Schaar van Heugten, the curator of the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam.
He said that fakes of work by world-famous artists were nothing new,
adding it was difficult to assess the latest allegations on the basis
of the evidence presented. The review said its claims were based on
work by Jan Hulsker, a leading specialist whose new edition of his
catalog of the Dutch master's entire works came out last year, and the
opinions of other renowned scholars. Asked about a rise in the number
of Van Gogh works whose origin he casts doubt on in his new catalog,
Hulsker told the review that he questioned a total of 45 works and had
"very strong doubts about the authenticity of many more works."
Sixteen of the works questioned by Hulsker are in the Van Gogh museum.
The review said a survey it carried out showed different experts are
now questioning more than 100 works by Van Gogh, although there is
hardly any agreement between the scholars. A spokesman for the Musee
D'Orsay said the museum was aware of reports that the portrait of Dr.
Gachet might be a fake but still believed it to be a genuine Van Gogh.
Van Heugten said the Van Gogh Museum, which was steadily working on
its own catalog of the Dutch master's works, did not involve itself in
debates of this kind. Sunflowers is questioned by Ben Landais, a
Frenchman living in the Netherlands, because of its links to a dealer
alleged to have handled fake Van Gogh works. Prices for Van Gogh's
work began to soar in the 1920s. Fakers were helped by the fact Van
Gogh often gave works away or abandoned them. Frequently fakes were
based on the artist's descriptions of his work in letters or on
preparatory sketches. Fakes and false attributions are a constant
problem in the art world. Some experts say fakes are used by drug
dealers or organized crime syndicates to launder illegal income. The
Rembrandt Research Project, set up in 1980 to distinguish true works
from pieces produced by followers, has cut the size of Rembrandt's
authenticated output in half. Not everyone has been convinced by the
new allegations. David Lee, editor of the London-based Art Review
Magazine, said, "Stories of Van Gogh fakes have been coming out for
years ... The fascinating thing about this new story is that it's
alleged that Dr. Gachet, a homeopath looking after Van Gogh in the
last days of his life, has introduced a few fakes himself." Lee said
he found the Gachet allegations very hard to believe. "It wasn't in
his interest to fake paintings by Van Gogh because they weren't
actually worth anything" at the time, Lee said.
-----

Auschwitz Artist Fights Museum For Her Portraits
Survivor Painted Prisoners As Ordered by Nazi Mengele

By Christine Spolar
Washington Post Foreign Service
OSWIECIM, Poland -- In a locked room in a coarse wooden barracks at
Auschwitz are four portraits of prisoners -- three Gypsy women and a
man -- who never left the Nazi death camp alive. From half a world
away, an elderly artist named Dinah Gottliebova Babbitt can describe
the watercolors with breathtaking clarity. She remembers how she
struggled, in the winter of 1944, to paint under the watchful eye of
Josef Mengele, who found that photos couldn't quite capture the
details he wanted as documentation of the prisoners. Get the skin
color just right, the young Jewish girl was told. Pull back the
prisoners' hair. The Nazi doctor's latest obsession demanded profiles.
"Mengele was interested in ears," she recalls. The artist finished a
dozen such portraits before she was sent on what was to have been a
death march. The 21-year-old Czechoslovak survived to see liberation,
find new life in Paris and California and, in 1973, begin a strange
and emotional odyssey to reclaim her art. The portraits in Room No.
11, on the second floor of a building at World War II's most notorious
concentration camp, are now at the heart of a sad duel between museum
directors and the Holocaust survivor. Gottliebova Babbitt, now a
74-year-old grandmother living near Santa Cruz, Calif., wants the
paintings and believes that she is their rightful owner. "Mengele
ordered me to do it as slave labor. But it was my work, my paintings,"
she said in a telephone interview. She plans to place the art, she
said, in museums where her two daughters and three grandchildren might
visit. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum would be an obvious home,
she said. "I was forced to part with these paintings. I feel morally,
and for sentimental reasons, I want them. My children will never go to
Auschwitz, but they could see them if they were in America," she said.
But museum officials say that the paintings were donated by another
camp survivor and are thus the museum's property. Years after the war,
they say, Ewa Krcz-Sieczka gave the museum the four disputed
paintings, plus three others by Gottliebova Babbitt, all of which were
taken out of Auschwitz by Krcz-Sieczka's foster family in the first
free days of peace. No survivor has ever asked for belongings to be
returned, they said. No one at Auschwitz, as museum director Krystyna
Oleksy said in an interview, plans "to pull them off the wall and give
them back. . . . Our duty is to keep everything about the camp,
because we think it is so important." It is a case of property rights
-- and museum rights -- that begs for a Solomon. "Who's the owner?
It's so hard to say," said Stanislaw Krajewski, co-chairman of the
Polish Council of Christians and Jews and a member of the
International Council of the Auschwitz Camp Museum. "I think the
museum feels it has a moral right, and I'm sure she feels the same
[about her own right]. It's sad . . . but it really raises a larger
issue for all museums. If every museum has to give back everything
that original owners want -- even what some countries now demand --
museums everywhere could become empty very soon." Communication
between Gottliebova Babbitt and the museum, since Auschwitz linked the
artist to the paintings in 1973, has done nothing to clear up the
dispute. After nearly a quarter-century of letter-trading, each side
is frustrated and suspicious. Auschwitz officials say they believe
Gottliebova Babbitt wants the art for private use. Gottliebova
Babbitt, who has written numerous times to the museum, said she is
surprised that museum officials don't know of her dreams of putting
the works in a different museum -- and in fact have no record of her
claim on file. Gottliebova Babbitt, a sharp wit who made a living in
Hollywood by drawing Cap'n Crunch cereal cartoons, has a facile
command of dates, places and persons from her search. No one disputes
that in 1943 Gottliebova Babbitt came to Poland with her mother from
Theresienstadt, a Nazi concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. The
teenager, who had studied art at a university, and her mother lived in
Birkenau, the vast extermination center attached to Auschwitz. She
painted murals there -- including one of Snow White and the Seven
Dwarfs -- to amuse the hundreds of children who languished in family
barracks. Mengele, a physician whose brutal experiments with prisoners
won him worldwide infamy, noticed her work. The doctor ordered her to
the camp's Gypsy section and posed a question: "Do you think you can
do portraits -- in color -- that would be true to the subject? The
camera can't get the colors right." "I can try," she said. Within
days, she was Mengele's new charge. In all, Gottliebova Babbitt said,
she painted 11 portraits for Mengele, plus one of a small boy at the
camp. She received extra white bread in return, food she said she
shared with her mother and one Gypsy woman who wept as she drew. The
woman, the artist learned, had just seen her 2-month-old baby die. In
January 1945, Gottliebova Babbitt and her mother were forced to march
from Auschwitz. At war's end, they were in a German camp and in a few
months were reunited with relatives in Paris. In 1947, Gottliebova
Babbitt married and moved to California. Gottliebova Babbitt knew
other artwork of hers survived the Holocaust, but she never dared hope
that the Gypsy portraits were intact. When Auschwitz tracked her down
in 1973, the artist, by then a divorced mother of two working as an
animator, knew without a doubt that she wanted her work back.
Gottliebova Babbitt traveled that year from Hollywood to Communist
Poland to ask for her art. She was refused. Instead museum officials,
eager to chronicle survivors' personal histories, interviewed her
about her experiences. She returned home and wrote periodically, for
the next seven years, in search of her art. In a letter dated Oct. 12,
1980, art supervisor Tadeusz Szymanski said that in his opinion
Gottliebova Babbitt had no legal claim to the paintings and that her
desire to remove them was "something shameful." In a curious twist of
reasoning, Szymanski said that it appeared only Mengele, who died in
1979, had a right. Since the fall of communism in 1989, the museum has
had new curators. Asked recently about the portraits, top museum
officials said they were unaware of Szymanski's letter, which was
mailed as a private missive. "Outrageous" is how Oleksy, museum
director since 1990, labeled Szymanski's sentiment. She said the
museum had tried to contact Gottliebova Babbitt by letter at times,
and she was puzzled why she never replied. "I'm devastated," said
Oleksy. "I've always felt badly that we wrote Mrs. Babbitt and she
never responded. . . . [The letter from Szymanski] changes my attitude
toward her. I was always told, over the years, that she was never
interested in the museum . . . that she just wanted to use us. But
that doesn't mean that Oleksy would let the portraits go. She agreed
last year that Polish law requires that Gottliebova Babbitt be granted
copyright for the portraits and be paid for use or displays of the
art. But Oleksy said she can't see a day when Auschwitz would ever
give away any piece of its past -- even art that is kept in storage.
In a May 1996 letter, in which she discussed the Gypsy portraits,
Oleksy said it would make "no sense" to take the portraits from the
museum. "People from all over the world come here to see only the
originals," she said. "We have 100,000 shoes. Should we give some to
the Holocaust Museum [in Washington] and Yad Vashem [in Jerusalem]?
The Japanese are always interested. Should we give some to them? "If
we start this way, people would line up outside for the goods of their
families. . . . You don't divide a museum. Either it's ours or it's
not."
c Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company
----